Microsoft has priced Windows 7.
At retail the Home Premium version will list for $200, Professional $300 and Ultimate $320. That’s the full kit and Windows rarely sells for list.
The upgrade prices are supposed to run $120 for Home Premium, $200 for Professional and $220 for Ultimate.
Microsoft has cut the price of the Home Premium, expected to be its most popular retail product, 10% below what Vista Home Premium theoretically went for when it came out.
Considering the economy plus the hash it made of Vista, Microsoft, obviously nervous about the response to 7, evidently sees itself currying favor this way.
Folks who pre-order Windows 7 from, say, Amazon, Best Buy or Microsoft direct can theoretically get a better deal: better than 50% off either the Home Premium SKU or the Professional edition or for $50 and $100 respectively but the offer will only run until July 11 in the US and Canada and July 5 in Japan.
A similar offer will start on July 15 in the UK, France and Germany.
Europe, where Microsoft’s got this little unresolved problem with the regulators, it’s handling differently. Remember Microsoft is proposing to detach the operating system from the IE browser and package the browser separately so, it says, “we will not have a separate upgrade SKU for the packaged retail product versions of Windows 7 at GA. But we will be offering upgrade pricing on our full licenses to make sure European customers who want to upgrade have the pricing options available in the rest of the world.”
The AP points out that Apple has said that the Snow Leopard upgrades to its operating system will cost $30.
As previously reported thanks to a Best Buy leak, starting Friday June 26 most any PC sold anywhere in the world with Vista or XP on it will be eligible for a free or almost free (vendor depending) upgrade to a comparable version of Windows 7 under a global Windows 7 Upgrade Option Program that will run until January 31, 2010.
That would be after October 22, 2009 when Windows 7 is supposed to GA.
Microsoft means to have the operating system available in the top 14 languages that day and its other 21 languages on October 31. That’s at retail; OEMs will already be loading all the local editions.
With Microsoft selling two operating systems at a time it says it will defer recognizing 50% of the revenue from Windows 7 Upgrade Option Program until either the buyer claims the upgrade or the program ends, whichever comes first. That means this quarter it will defer an estimated $200 million-$300 million.
Wall Street has estimated that revenues deferred in the September quarter could run $1 billion-$1.5 billion.
Windows 7 Starter edition is only available pre-installed, Basic is only available in the Third World and Enterprise comes with big corporate volume agreements.
RNA networks, which virtualizes memory, has moved into cache, claiming it can remove the data center bottlenecks caused by contention for application memory, the data center’s scarcest resource.
When processor speed outstrips memory capacity bottlenecks are created that slow application performance and utilization rates. The performance and scalability of virtualized systems are particularly hard hit, according to the 451 Group.
RNA says that its RNAcache turns the RAM on a network into a shared pool that can be leveraged by hefty datasets for simultaneous access and processing.
As a result the cost of supporting business-critical memory-intensive applications is significantly lowered. Users won’t have to fork out for more data center equipment. Instead they can wring revenue out of their existing boxes.
The memory sharing is done strictly with software. Applications don’t have to be modified. Neither does the OS or storage. And there’s no hardware to add.
RNA says the widgetry provides line speed processing of the most memory-intensive and I/O-bound apps including predictive analytics and modeling, high-volume Internet apps and clustered environments.
One financial house beta testing the stuff reportedly got a 1,728% performance improvement running analytics on a 3TB dataset.
The company’s user cases show predictive modeling improved 20x, high-volume Internet application query speed 100x and simultaneous user capacity 5x. A high-performance cloud provider accelerated its processing rates by 30x without having to scale out its hardware, power or space footprint.
The software works in all fabric environments including gigabit Ethernet, 10 gigabit Ethernet and InfiniBand and on Linux servers. It costs $7,000-$10,000 a server node.
Cisco has taken its own approach and used chips to supplement the memory capacity of the Xeon 5500 Nehalems in its newfangled Unified Computing System.
RNA was founded in 2006, picked up a $10 million check from Menlo Ventures a year ago and came out of stealth mode in February with RNAmessenger, a latency cutter also based on its Memory Virtualization Platform, the start-up’s special sauce.
Start-up a First Mover in Memory Virtualization
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Sun Updates Studio 12
Talend Moves to Near Real-Time
Red Hat Numbers Up in Crummy Economy
Sugar on a Stick
Intel-Nokia Widgets May Take a While
Zander Named to NetSuite Board
IBM Replaces its Rustled M&A Chief
Satyam To Be Reincarnated
Oracle Loses Senior Exec
Microsoft Continues To Knock on Yahoo’s Door
Micro Focus Gets Borland After All
EMC To Collaborate with MIT Media Lab
Microsoft Worries about the Bill
Morro Beta Opened, Then Closed
Flash Comes to Android
PTO Complains of Revenue Shortfall
Acrobat.com, Adobe’s nascent, still-evolving online productivity software, moved out of public beta Monday and into its first foray into commercialization, ahead of any similar move into the cloud by Microsoft.
The base widgetry will still be free but Adobe has created two paid subscriptions meant for business users that add capacity and capabilities to the otherwise freebie software.
The software currently consists of Buzzword, the online word processor that Adobe bought; ConnectNow web conferencing; Create PDF, which turns files in other people’s formats into Adobe’s precious PDF; and Share, an online file-sharing service that lets users upload files so multiple other users can download them.
Acrobat.com, which fancies it can establish a “new way to work,” is nothing if not focused on collaboration, which Adobe estimates is a $2 billion opportunity.
To exploit that opportunity Adobe intends to add a spreadsheet-like app called Tables and another one called Presentations later this year. It also intends to offer shared team workspaces next winter and mobile access from iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia and Windows Mobile smartphones next fall.
Preview versions of Presentations and Tables, which isn’t a full-blown spreadsheet and is only tuned for data tables – accommodating stuff like task lists, schedules, contacts, budgets and sales numbers – are now in public beta at labs.acrobat.com.
Over the next year, Adobe is also planning a new interface, social media-style updates from the documents people are working on, deeper integration with desktop tools like Outlook 2007 plus import from and export to Open Office formats.
In the year since Acrobat.com launched Adobe says five million people have signed up to use the service, with over 100,000 now signing up each week.
Rick Treitman, Buzzword creator and entrepreneur-in-residence in Adobe’s Business Productivity Business Unit from whence acrobat.com comes, figures a third of them don’t use it, a third use it a lot and a third use it sometimes.
Acrobat.com, to say the least, is a very snazzy-looking environment and has let users abandon the tedious custom of e-mailing multiple versions of documents back and forth to collaborate on documents in real-time instead.
To begin to pay its way, Adobe has created two supported Premium subscription services: the $14.99-a-month/$149-a-year Premium Basic includes ConnectNow web meeting capacity for up to five participants and online conversion of 10 uploaded documents to PDF a month.
The $39-a-month/$390-a-year Premium Plus includes ConnectNow capacity for up to 20 participants and unlimited online creation of PDF files.
Both include Adobe phone and web support.
The free service will continue to offer Buzzword, ConnectNow capacity for up to three participants, and online creation of up to five PDF files.
Until July 16, Adobe is offering $15 off the Basic annual plan, and $50 off the Premium Plus annual plan. Initially, both subscriptions are only available from the Adobe.com online store in North America.
Adobe got IDC to reason that “Improved collaboration is a critical need for today’s companies that must move faster and do more with less. At the same time, business people expect to use online technology at work just like they do outside the workplace – especially the generation now entering the workforce.”
Figuring that the cloud may be the “most significant shift in technology since the outset of the Internet,” IBM is moving to ensure it gets its piece of what could be a $66 billion business in three years.
It’s taking a workload-by-workload approach.
To start, it’s targeting the enterprise – meaning big, largely Blue accounts – with offers of a virtual desktop – either a Microsoft desktop or some stand-in – and the widgetry to move test and development to the cloud.
Unlike Amazon, IBM’s not interested in the individual developer; it wants all of a major account’s test and development, which it argues absorbs 30%-50% of a company’s infrastructure though 90% of the time it’s idle.
Blue says its widgetry is based on two years of research and hundreds of client engagements. There’s no mention of interoperability with other clouds like Google or Salesforce.com; that will have to be left to third parties like Vordel.
IBM will be offering to run these cloud services from inside its own data center or to set up a private cloud using a client’s own infrastructure.
And, for those who want to go it alone, it’s got CloudBurst 1.1, a pre-integrated cloud-to-go with the hardware, storage, virtualization, networking and management needed to build a private cloud.
Users running their own clouds will be able to access IBM’s cloud for short-term additional resources.
CloudBurst will ship at the end of the week at prices starting around $200k. The entry-level configuration includes a 42U rack, a BladeCenter chassis, eight Intel cores on three blades plus an eight-core management blade, attached storage and middleware.
IBM’s public cloud will be located at its recently announced production-level “Cloud Delivery Center” in Raleigh, North Carolina, where it’s got a bunch of Intel blades, VMware virtualization and its own management widgetry.
The hardware there will come to include mainframes and IBM’s own p blades. Over time that will mean its Rationale and Eclipse tools and the Jazz platform as well as Xen and KVM virtualization.
IBM’s cloud CTO Kristof Kloeckner has found that large accounts aren’t as reluctant to share cloud infrastructure if they know the guys they’re sharing it with are, say, fellow Fortune 5000s and not riffraff.
IBM estimates that the cloud can save up to 73% of the energy used to power traditional desktops and laptops and up to 40% of the support costs.
It reckons its Smart Business Test Cloud can save customers 50%-75% on capex and licensing expenses and 30%-50% on operating and labor costs while reducing defects from faulty configurations and poor modeling by 15%-30%.
IBM is also setting up a subscription public cloud version of the Desktop Cloud. It’s partnering with Desktone, Quest and Wyse.
Kloeckner said IBM would offer 99.5 SLAs on the cloudware, upgradeable to 99.9 – “infinitely better than what you get with desktops today.”
IBM Adds to its Cloud Repertoire
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Disney Brands a Netbook
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IBM Earmarks $100m for Cell Phone Research
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Novell’s Buying Debt
Oracle Buys SAP Investment
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Microsoft Bleeding from the YouTube Wars
If the mountain won’t come to Mohammed, then, by George, Mohammed’s gonna go to the mountain, which is exactly what Google’s doing.
Rather than try to get the throngs of immovable Outlook and Office users to switch to Gmail and Google Apps, it’s going after Exchange with a new Apps Sync for Outlook plug-in that lets Outlook messages, contacts and calendar appointments sync with the $50-a-seat Premier Edition of Google Apps, the stuff businesses buy. Like Outlook syncs with Exchange.
That means IT can switch out the Exchange back-end and move to Google servers without its users being any the wiser.
As Google’s web site proclaims, it removes “another key barrier to enterprise adoption of Google Apps.”
Users will be able to get their messages in both Outlook and Gmail and use Outlook rather than a browser to access Apps, a device aimed at wearing down their resistance.
At a press conference Tuesday in San Francisco David Girouard, the president of Google enterprise products, quoted Forrester Research as calculating that Google’s hosted Gmail service is $11.85 a head cheaper a month for companies than Exchange.
Girouard claimed the Apps business is profitable and doing “hundreds of millions of dollars” with around 1.75 million companies using the widgetry. However, it’s unclear whether they’re all paying for it. There are reportedly 15 million users.
The plug-in, said to be a year in the making, only works on Windows.
Besides being part of the fee-based Apps service, the widgetry will be free to education and non-profits.
Blades are passé; Trays are in
HP Wednesday took the wraps off the first new server family it’s created since the BladeSystem C-class was invented and ran away with the market.
The line is call ExSO, short for Extreme Scale-Out, and it’s purpose-built for global low-margin/maximum transaction volume cloud, Web 2.0 and HPC sites looking for a minimum of 1,000 nodes. It says 10,000-20,000 nodes would be more the norm.
Your basic YouTube, Yahoo and Snapfish, or for that matter Tata and Audi. Operations that need to make every dollar, watts and square foot count, suggesting to HP that there should be a performance per watt/dollar/square foot measurement.
HP claims the ExSO can deliver a “new magnitude of cost and resource savings,” because of a new lightweight, super-efficient modular systems architecture that it touts as the “most significant design innovation since the blade.”
It’s run the numbers and calculates that the builder of a 100,000-square-foot data center – a piece of turf that can house 88,000 nodes – can pare $152.8 million off its capex spend – budget enough for another 140,000 nodes – and another $13.7 million off its energy bill using its widgetry – capacity enough for another 115,000 nodes.
It also claims it can “dramatically” accelerate time-to-market on a massive scale in part because of the rapid installation of its three swappable “compute trays.”
The basis of the ExSO portfolio is a newfangled x86 ProLiant SL server family whose “skinless” system architecture replaces the familiar chassis and rack form factors with a lightweight rail and tray design so that a data center on the second floor of a historic building in the middle of London won’t come crashing through the ceiling.
HP exec John Gromala claims the weight of classic systems is frustrating the scale-out designs of a lot of companies. They require stronger floor support and add to the overall construction bill.
HP calculates that ExSO will save that hypothetical 100,000-square-foot data center builder 838.5 tons of server hardware, the equivalent of 4.3 747 jets.
The 31% lighter weight boxes not only cut shipping costs they also take up less space and cut acquisition costs by, say, 10% and power draw by 28%, while doubling compute density, HP says.
The design’s power efficiency is partially due to the fact that these newfangled 2U trays aren’t solid metal; they’re pierced with diamond-shaped holes that contribute to the air flow, saving an estimated $4.1 million a year.
HP says that overall the system uses 54K less megawatts a year, conserving enough energy to power 4,600 US households for a year.
The new architecture can house 672 processor cores and 10TB of capacity per 42U rack. Storage and compute components can be mixed and matched.
HP says the Datacenter Environmental Edge widgetry that goes along with this stuff can visually map real-time environmental variables so customers can quickly identify inefficiencies, resulting in an additional energy cost savings of up to $2.4 million a year and an ROI in 12 months.
Environmental Edge, whose price starts at $8-$10 a square foot, puts wireless sensors all over the data center to monitor temperature, humidity, air pressure and power utilization. The user’s root cause analysis eliminates excess operating costs.
The SL line consists of an industry standard chassis designed to leverage shared infrastructure like fans, power and the physical enclosure for SL servers.
There are also three G6 servers: the SL2×170z G6 with two servers in each 1U tray for high-performance computing and web front-end applications; the SL160z G6 with 18 dual in-line DIMM slots for added memory and up to two PCI slots for large memory apps, and the SL170z G6 with up to six large form-factor SATA or SAS drives for web search and database applications.
These SL6000s will be available next month at prices dependent on configuration and volume.
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Petabyte-Scale Data Analytics Moving to the Cloud
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Ozzie on Cloud Margins
EMC-NetApp-Data Domain Halo Effect
Bing Creates Mini-Surge
Microsoft Kills Money
Storage Market Bleeding
Dell Sell Microsoft Software on its Store
Talk about an Apples-to-Apples Comparison
NetApp Awaits Divine Intervention
Microsoft’s Free Anti-Virus Program Close
Satyam Squeaks Out Profit
AMD’s New York Plant Gets Go-Ahead
Lightning Strikes Cloud
Spending Cuts Deepen: Gartner
AMD Up; Intel Down
After weeks of slow-moving negotiations and due diligence, CA has bought what it describes as “certain data center automation and policy-based optimization expertise and assets from Cassatt,” the failed Bill Coleman start-up that sucked up $100 million in venture money on its way to this inglorious end.
CA isn’t saying what it paid but the 451 Group figures it’s a “low multiple.” And it thinks Cassatt did about $12 million last year, a figure that could be generous. Cassatt only had a dozen customers – and a promising pipeline according to what Coleman said a few weeks ago. He has since become telephone and email shy. CA won’t come to the phone either.
Cassatt had a problem figuring out exactly what it wanted to be during its six-year run. Since the cloud chatter started last year, it’s identified with that and that’s the way CA is playing it, as a cloud efficiency expert.
CA was Cassatt’s last shot at anything that resembled a dignified exit. The start-up, which liked to think of itself as being ahead of its time and too disruptive, as a company whose failure lay in vastly underestimating the social and cultural challenges its policy-based data center automation presented to the customer’s entrenched staff, had tried peddling itself to all the brand names and couldn’t cut a deal.
Maybe that’s because a 30-second elevator description of Cassatt would have taken 20 minutes. Explaining what it did was never Cassatt’s strong suite and that was apparently because it didn’t know itself and couldn’t get backing for what might have been in demand like HPC or disaster recovery. It can after all fail over and restart an entire data center in 45 minutes without any human intervention.
The software it started with from Unlimited Scale reportedly didn’t work and Cassatt never settled on a fallback position, effectively becoming an industrial chameleon taking its coloration from the latest buzzword.
Anyway, a continent away from Cassatt’s Silicon Valley digs, CA says it’s picking up Cassatt’s engineering team and adding its widgetry to its infrastructure management solutions.
Cassatt CTO and EVP of product development Rob Gingell and Cassatt chief scientist and co-founder Steve Oberlin, two of the many stars and prima donnas to have passed through the company’s portal during its lifetime, have joined CA, along with their team of developers, engineers and other key employees. A few weeks ago that was around 50 people.
Coleman, who started BEA and was its first CEO, isn’t going along.
CA says it has also picked up “several” Cassatt patents and patent applications, as well as other IP, which sounds like all of it.
What CA winds up doing with Cassatt remains to be seen. Cassatt’s next-generation product, code named Skynet after the fictional self-aware AI computer system in the Arnold Schwarzewnegger movie “The Terminator,” was supposed to blur the lines between data centers, which probably meant delivering images to both private and public clouds like Amazon’s.
In a canned statement, CA’s chief architect Donald Ferguson said, “Cassatt invented an elegant and innovative architecture and algorithms for data center performance optimization. Incorporating Cassatt’s analysis and optimization capabilities into CA’s world-class business-driven automation solution will enable cloud-style computing to reliably drive efficiencies in both on-premises, private data centers and off-premises, utility data centers. We believe the result will be a uniquely comprehensive infrastructure management approach, spanning monitoring, analysis, planning, optimization and execution.” We’ll see. Maybe a big company will have more luck than an unknown.