Novell continues Linux push
Novell Inc. furthered its Linux initiative in December by joining the Open Source Development Labs, a consortium of companies that are accelerating Linux adoption. Novell will participate in the Data Center Linux working group, which is focused on hardening Linux for use in the data centre. OSDL is the organization Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, joined in June of last year. It is the organization that will represent Torvald’s in The SCO Group Inc./IBM Corp. dispute. Members of the OSDL include Cisco Systems Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP), IBM, Intel Corp., Red Hat Inc., and Sun Microsystems Inc. among others.
CPR outsources IT
Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. said it has signed a seven-year, US$154 million outsourcing deal with IBM Canada Ltd., which will manage the Calgary-based railroad company’s IT infrastructure. About 100 IT workers at Canadian Pacific Railway are being transferred to the IBM subsidiary along with data centres in Calgary and Toronto.
Bigger than broadband
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science last month awarded the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee US$4.5 million to design a high-speed network capable of operating at 10Gbps to 40Gbps. That speed is about 200,000 to 800,000 times faster than the fastest dial-up connection of 56Kbps, according to a press release from the lab. The prototype system, dubbed Science UltraNet, would link ORNL with other research institutions that rely on supercomputers capable of trillions of calculations per second. The network would let the scientists quickly complete projects that require the transfer of large amounts of data.
NetMeeting no more
NetMeeting, once hyped as Microsoft Corp.’s answer to online conferencing, is being gradually phased out in favour of the company’s newest real-time collaboration tool, according to company officials. Microsoft already has ceased development of the software. NetMeeting, first introduced in 1996, gives way to Office Live Meeting, a browser-based conferencing service that Microsoft acquired when it bought PlaceWare earlier this year. The service, and eventually a server based on the technology that will include applications sharing and whiteboarding, will be linked into other real-time collaboration tools from Microsoft such as Live Communications Server and with client applications that are part of Office.