Hewlett-Packard Co. recently announced a program aimed at luring Sun Microsystems Inc.’s Solaris operating system users to HP machines running Linux. The bait? US$25,000 in porting and migration services. Under the new program, Sun’s customers in the Americas will be able to obtain a free assessment of how to port as many as three Solaris applications. HP also will port one application from Solaris to Linux at no charge, and offer customers free use of a ProLiant server for 30 days and an assessment of how to improve their storage systems.
IBM pushes remote storage
IBM Corp. earlier this month introduced services that provide remote access to server computing resources. Aimed at companies that don’t want to incur the expense of buying, managing and maintaining their own servers, Virtual Server Services lets companies buy server computing power from Big Blue. Customers then pay for what they use. IBM owns and manages the services and keeps them at its data centres. Computing power is delivered remotely to clients. After charging customers a one-time setup fee, IBM bills them according to usage every month.
Candera rolls out array controller
Candera Inc. recently announced a clustered storage controller that joins multiple heterogeneous storage-area networks into a single storage area network (SAN) with a common management interface. The SCE 510 Cluster includes two hardware nodes configured in an active-active configuration to protect from failure. With 16 Fibre Channel ports per cluster, they connect to SAN devices and host. The Candera Storage Manager software, which is used to manage the cluster, is a Java-based graphical user interface that runs on Microsoft, Solaris or Linux workstations. The Candera SCE 510 Cluster is priced starting at US$120,000.