New Products

Sun Releases OpenSolaris Technologies

Sun has open sourced the Solaris Operating System and launched a new open source community at opensolaris.org. According to the company, the OpenSolaris project includes source code for the core operating system, networking, system libraries, and commands. It also includes all the major innovations delivered in the Solaris 10 OS, such as Dynamic Tracing (Dtrace), Containers, Predictive Self Healing, and both SPARC and x64/x86 (it's a single source base).

Solaris 10, the latest version of Sun's tested, certified, and supported enterprise operating system, is now available free for download. Future versions of Solaris will be based on technologies from OpenSolaris. For more information, visit: http://www.opensolaris.org.

IBM Announces New Server Based on X3 Architecture

IBM is extending its eServer X3 Architecture-based family of servers with the introduction of the IBM eServer xSeries 460, designed for highly scalable, always-on environments. According to the company, the x460 entry configuration starts as a four-way server and scales up to 32-way processing in an eight-chassis configuration, allowing customers the flexibility to upgrade on demand to greater capacity as their business demands increase.

The dual-core-capable x460 features increased scalability, larger cache processor performance, expandable memory and I/O resources, systems manageability, and simultaneous support for both 32- and 64-bit applications.

The IBM eServer xSeries 460 entry price starts at $18,129 in the U.S., and typical eight-way configurations start at $72,182 in the U.S. IBM's eServer X3 architecture-based systems run new scalable 64-bit x86 operating system software from major technology vendors including Microsoft, Red Hat, and Novell. For more information, visit: http://www.ibm.com.

PerfCap Introduces PAWZ Planner

PerfCap Corporation announced PAWZ Planner, which automates the process of capacity planning by performing saturation analysis for each server on a daily basis. According to the company, the PAWZ Planner will automatically produce saturation response time, device utilization, device rate, throughput, and remaining headroom. A headroom trending graph shows how remaining capacity has been used over a period of time. It can run on demand or automatically at a prescheduled time.

PAWZ Planner uses the same analytic queuing network algorithms as in PerfCap's eCAP Planner and is out of the box software that requires no scripting. It can use pre-defined workloads or can be customized for specific workload definitions.

PAWZ Planner supports IBM-AIX, HP-UX (PA RISC, Itanium), Sun Solaris, HP-Tru64, HP OpenVMS, Windows NT/2000/2003/XP (x86, Itanium), and Linux. For more information, visit: http://www.perfcap.com.

Draconis Software Releases RSP v2.0

Draconis Software announced the release of RSP version 2.0, a fully featured server monitoring and analysis software package that focuses on collaborative problem solving among IT team members. To better coordinate efforts among team members, RSP utilizes an incident-tracking interface, allowing team members to better coordinate their efforts at solving problems, and to record their solutions. RSP stores this organizational intelligence so IT professionals can better apply past experiences to current conditions, making diagnoses and solving problems faster and easier.

RSP is now available in two versions: an Enterprise Edition for commercial organizations and a free Personal Edition, which, along with open source-licensed monitoring modules, is designed to further support the community of developers and systems administrators who use RSP. For more information, visit: http://www.dracoware.com.

Montilio Announces General Availability of RapidFile

Montilio recently announced RapidFile, a plug-in PCI-X card with the equivalent of a Fibre Channel HBA on board. According to the company, it has two gigabit Ethernet TOE ports connecting to the client network, and two 2-Gb (QLogic) Fibre Channel ports that connect to the storage subsystem. Both replace existing interfaces normally used in servers. RapidFile currently works with Linux (RH9, RHEL 3, SLES 8, and SLES 9). For more information, visit: http://www.montilio.com.

NuView Unveils StorageX 5.6

NuView, Inc. announced the availability of StorageX version 5.6 (StorageX 5.6). According to the company, StorageX is an integrated suite of applications that logically aggregates distributed file storage across heterogeneous environment and provides administrators with policies that automate data management functions. StorageX's integrated suite of applications includes: remote site data management; consolidated network data management; non-disruptive data migration and consolidation; business continuity; storage optimization; data lifecycle management; as well as data classification and reporting. StorageX provides administrators with policies that enable them to perform the above tasks from a single, unified console without causing downtime to users. For more information, visit: http://www.nuview.com/products/storagex.asp.

Expand Networks Launches ExpandView 3.0

Expand Networks announced ExpandView 3.0, the company's latest release of its centralized monitoring and management platform. According to the company, ExpandView 3.0 is the industry's first to offer a dynamic map that provides a real-time view of the wide area network (WAN) with the ability to monitor and manage Expand's WAN optimization appliances via simple click and drag operations. For more information, visit: http://www.expand.com.

Guardium Expands Enterprise-Class Security Platform to Protect Distributed Databases

Guardium, Inc. announced SQL RemoteGuard, a non-intrusive software monitoring probe that helps to protect databases in departmental and remote, distributed sites. According to the company, SQL RemoteGuard is a synergistic and seamless extension of SQL Guard, delivering unprecedented visibility, auditing, and monitoring of remote database access activities. With this new product, Guardium continues to lead the industry with the most complete suite of solutions for database access monitoring, access control, auditing, and compliance, regardless of database location. For more information, visit: http://www.guardium.com.