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Oracle beings “all or nothing” support strategy
Oracle has adopted what amounts to an “all or nothing” hardware support policy, according to a document the vendor posted on its Web site. The policy, which went into effect March 16, states that “when acquiring technical support, all hardware systems must be supported (e.g., Oracle Premier Support for Systems or Oracle Premier Support for Operating Systems) or unsupported.” Customers who don’t purchase support for hardware systems aren’t allowed to obtain “maintenance releases, patches, telephone assistance, or any other technical support services.”
Virtualization vendors behind in desktop ambitions
Leading virtualization software vendors Citrix Systems and VMware are both running behind in plans to ship so-called bare-metal hypervisors for desktop PCs. Developing all the necessary drivers needed by PC users has proven to be one major challenge. Another roadblock may be persuading PC vendors to ship and support these hypervisors with their hardware, according to research firm Gartner.
Technology sector recovering from economic downturn
Though earnings season won’t start in earnest until next month, financial reports and earnings forecasts from companies as varied as Adobe, Red Hat, Oracle and Qualcomm this week indicate that sales across a range of technology products are recovering from the economic downturn. Oracle on Thursday reported financial results for the three-month period ending Feb. 28, saying profit was dragged down by restructuring charges incurred in the wake of the company’s purchase of Sun Microsystems, which closed in January. Earnings declined by 10 percent compared to the year-earlier quarter, to US$1.2 billion.
Wikipedia suffers global outage
Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation Web sites went down for hours on Wednesday in a global outage caused by a domino effect of technical problems. The problems started when Wikimedia servers overheated in the organization’s European data center and shut themselves off automatically. Wikimedia then switched all its traffic to its server cluster in Florida, but the failover process, which involves changing servers’ DNS entries, malfunctioned, knocking the organization’s sites offline around the world.
