Earlier this month the companies that formed Verizon Wireless, including Bell Atlantic Corp., Vodafone AirTouch PLC and GTE Corp., announced the sale of overlapping wireless operations. AT&T Corp. Wireless is buying wireless networks in San Francisco, San Diego and Houston from Verizon. The assets in San Francisco come from Verizon's Vodafone AirTouch group. The assets in San Diego and Houston come from Verizon's GTE Wireless group.
Ernst & Young International has established an online security advisor service at esecurityonline. com that provides free content as well as subscriber-based online vulnerability-assessment services priced at $5,000 per year. Tony Spinelli, vice president of esecurityonline.com, says the Kansas City, Missouri, spinoff plans to seek an IPO if all goes well.
UUNET Technologies Inc. last week replaced President and CEO Mark Spagnolo with Bob Hartnett, president of global accounts at UUNET parent company WorldCom INc.. Hartnett will retain both titles going forward. Spagnolo will be working on "new projects" with MCI WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers, a UUNET spokesman said. No additional details were provided regarding Spagnolo's new position or why WorldCom decided to make a change at this time. Hartnett joined WorldCom when it acquired MCI in 1998.
Cisco Systems Inc. will announce Monday several enhancements to its technical support Web site that should make it easier for network engineers to diagnose and troubleshoot network problems online, sparing the time and cost associated with phone calls to Cisco's Technical Assistance Center (TAC). Cisco's TAC Web site now offers a Compatibility Advisor, a Web-based interactive tool that lets network engineers plug in their current networking devices and determine whether they are compatible with equipment they plan to buy.
Sprint PCS President and Chief Operating Officer Andrew Sukawaty resigned recently to "pursue a new opportunity," the company announced. Sukawaty has agreed to consult over the next month with Sprint Corp.'s Ronald LeMay, president and chief operating officer, who is temporarily taking over his position. Sukawaty joined Sprint PCS as its CEO in 1996 and was appointed president and CEO in 1998 when Sprint acquired control over its joint venture with TeleCommunications, Comcast Corp. and Cox Communications Inc.
SmartLine Inc. has released Remote Task Manager 3.0, a tool for remotely managing applications, services, devices, processes and events on Windows NT and 2000. Remote Task Manager can be used to start, stop and add new services or devices and adjust security settings on remote machines. The software has an Event Viewer and Performance Monitor, which dynamically displays a remote system's CPU and memory usage. Remote Task Manager runs on Windows NT 4.0 or 2000. Pricing starts at $25.
Formerly Banyan Systems Inc., ePresence Inc. last week unveiled its Microsoft QuickStart Deployment Program, a consulting service for enterprise network customers planning to deploy Windows 2000 and Active Directory. The program includes a review process of the existing infrastructure, as well as network design plans, a list of requirements and an analysis of a project's scope. The program includes up to 320 hours of consulting. Pricing was not announced.
We installed Trinity 2.0.3 on our six-segment, Fast Ethernet network. Each segment consisted of a Novell Inc. NetWare 5.0 or Microsoft Corp. Windows NT 4.0 file server and several Windows 95/98, Windows 2000 Professional, Macintosh System 8 and OS/2 Warp 4.0 clients. Each segment also had an SNMP-manageable switch, router, DSU/CSU and an SNMP-manageable hardware probe. In each test, we looked at Trinity's ability to discover our network nodes, monitor those nodes for availability, help troubleshoot problems and report on the network's health.
Extreme Networks Inc. has introduced Summit1I and Summit5I Gigabit Ethernet switches for carriers designed to deliver flexible bandwidth to customers. The switches connect customer sites with metropolitan fiber-optic networks. The two new boxes support guaranteed service quality to enable voice-over-IP services as well as video. They let service providers sell chunks of Ethernet bandwidth dedicated to specific applications or users. The gear supports secure metropolitan-area networks among customer sites. The switches will be available in July.
Lucent grabs optical start-up
Hewlett-Packard Co. last week announced a new tape library and backup software that will work in any HP-UX, Solaris or Windows NT environment. The HP SureStore E Tape Library 6/140 is available in Fibre Channel or SCSI drive configurations. The device uses Digital Linear Tape (DLT) 8000 technology and has native capacities of 4 to 5.6 terabytes. It can be upgraded to HP's new Ultrium format, LTO or Super DLT tape when they are released later this year. HP also rolled out HP OpenView OmniBack II backup software for Windows NT, Exchange, HP-UX for Oracle Parallel Server and SAP R/3. It integrates with HP's mirroring software, the SureStore E Business Copy XP and Veritas' NetBackup for Windows NT, HP-UX and Solaris nets. The HP SureStore E Tape Library 6/140 starts at $95,000 and is due next month. The backup software is available now. Pricing was not available.
In addition to testing the seven Windows NT-based Lightweight Directory Access Protocol servers, we also looked at the LDAP support Microsoft Corp. offers inside its new Active Directory and evaluated what the open source code option, OpenLDAP, had to offer.
All the way from Israel
IBM Corp. CEO Louis Gerstner last week let Wall Street know he thinks there is "irrational exuberance" surrounding e-marketplaces. In an address to investors and financial analysts, the tough-talking boss of Big Blue said that although e-marketplaces would be important, people shouldn't confuse them with business-to-business commerce. "There is a big difference between making a sexy announcement and exploiting the 'Net to drive real cost out of your supply chain," he said. Gerstner defended a weak first quarter for IBM, reportedly saying investors could expect high single-digit revenue growth for IBM as opposed to the double-digit growth seen in early 1999. Investors responded by driving IBM stock down about five points late last week.
This week D-Link Systems Inc. launched two stackable 10/100 G bit/sec Ethernet wire speed switches: the DES-3624I and the DES-3624. The DES-3624 is the slave unit for the DES-3624I and is sold with an integrated 2.4G bit/sec interface to link with the DES-3624I. The DES-3624 base unit has 24 10/ 100BaseTX/FX ports. The DES-3624I unit offers 22 ports of 10/ 100TX. Both devices also support quality of service (802.1p), which lets the switch prioritize specific traffic flows, and virtual LAN identification (802.1Q), which lets users direct traffic based on nonproprietary VLANs. Pricing and availability were not specified.