In-Depth

News In Brief

WebSphere Business Integration suite updated; Half-off price set for new Windows Server 2003 for Web Edition; HP adds outsourced “smart cooling” service for data centers

• By Stephen Swoyer
• 03/06/2003

IBM Upgrades WBI Suite

IBM Corp. this week announced several enhancements to its WebSphere Business Integration (WBI) suite, including a new modeling software component, a retooled integration server and a new business process monitoring facility.

The new additions to Big Blue’s WBI portfolio reflect the incorporation of technologies that it acquired after picking up Crossworlds Software in October 2001 and Holosofx in September 2002. Crossworlds previously marketed a business process automation and integration platform that IBM has since rebranded IBM Business Integration Server 4.2. IBM’s new WBI modeling offerings, on the other hand, are based on the Holosofx technologies.

In addition to a bevy of enhancements to its new Business Integration Server 4.2—which include support for the Eclipse open source development platform, along with beefed up support for Web services—IBM also introduced WebSphere Business Integration Modeler and WebSphere Business Integration Monitor.

The upshot, says Doug Brown, director of marketing for WBI, is that IBM now ships a business integration suite that allows customers to model and simulate business processes; integrate people, processes and applications; connect customers and business partners; monitor end-to-end business processes; manage business effectiveness and improve performance.

Thanks to the integration of WBI Modeler and WebSphere Integration Server with the Eclipse toolset, Brown says, customers can facilitate integration without writing any Java code. “We’re making it possible to integrate business processes across multiple systems and across people without Java programming.”

Other new features include support for the AS2 protocol, a proposed standard for Internet EDI (http://esj.com/news/article.asp?EditorialsID=302).

IBM says that its new WBI products and enhancements will ship by the end of March.

Prices Same or Lower for Windows Server 2003 by Scott Bekker

(courtesy of ENT Online: http://www.entmag.com)

Most editions of Windows Server 2003 will cost the same as their Windows 2000 counterparts, while the new Web Edition, which is designed to compete with Linux, will cost less than half as much as the Standard Edition, Microsoft revealed Monday.

Windows Server 2003, Web Edition, will cost $399, which is 40 percent of the $999 price tag for Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition.The Web Edition is a stripped down version of Windows Server 2003 for ISPs and enterprise Web farms. The Web Edition is limited to support just two processors and 2 GB of RAM, and only partially supports Active Directory, PKI and VPNs. The Web server edition will not be available through all Windows Server sales channels.

The pricing is consistent with comments from Microsoft officials in recent months as the company ramps up for the April 24 launch of the server operating system family. There was a brief flap late last year when Information Week used Transaction Processing Performance Council benchmark documentation to speculate that Microsoft may be raising prices.

Read the rest of this story here http://www.entmag.com/news/article.asp?EditorialsID=5714

HP Touts Cool Datacenter

Hewlett-Packard Co. this week announced a new addition to its Utility Data Center (UDC): an outsourced “smart cooling” service for enterprise data centers that can reduce energy costs and help IT organizations save millions.

HP’s service was first created in HP labs and uses computational fluid dynamics to create a 3D model of temperature distribution throughout a data center. Based on its analysis, it can make recommendations for the placement of computing resources and air conditioning equipment to optimize energy use for cooling.

HP estimates that its service can cut the costs of cooling data centers by as much as 25 percent.

As an infrastructure for utility computing, HP’s UDC is similar to the E-business On Demand and N1 utility computing models touted by IBM Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc., respectively. HP first announced UDC in November 2001.

HP says that its smart cooling services can be used to assist with the expansion, upgrading, migration or consolidation of an organization’s existing data centers. In addition, HP suggests, smart cooling services can help to address persistent conditions of over-heating.

Customers that express an interest in smart cooling can arrange with HP services to perform an analysis of their data centers, which entails collecting data about their floor space and computational requirements—in addition to their planned or existing cooling systems—to determine whether smart cooling can reduce costs.

HP suggests that energy savings could offset the cost of the smart cooling service itself. It says that the cooling costs alone for a 30,000 square foot data center with 1,000 racks could come to $4 million annually. HP says that it believes that a smart cooling analysis could help to reduce the cost of cooling a data center of this size by $1 million.