In brief: IBM offers mobile starter kit

Plus: FIA rolls out new NAS appliance; Fujitsu and Red Hat plan marketing alliance.

A new package of software and services from IBM will help customers support the use of wireless mobile devices. Called Mobile Office Entry Jumpstart, the new program is targeted at companies that want to get started with mobile computing.

For $100,000, companies will get new versions of IBM’s WebSphere Everyplace Access and Everyplace Connection Manager software, 50 Palm Tungsten PDAs and cards that let the devices connect to wireless networks, IBM says. For small and midsize businesses, packages containing fewer clients also are available, although no pricing information is available below the 50-client level. A feature has been added to the Access product called Intelligent Notification Services, which can forward information from e-mail, supply chain or other legacy systems to a preferred mobile device, IBM says.

FIA is rolling out a new network-attached storage appliance that has as much as 2 terabytes capacity in a 2U-high enclosure. The POPnetserver 8000 is based on FreeBSD and works with data from Windows, Linux, Unix, NetWare v3.x and Macintosh networks. It has dual processors, Gigabit Ethernet adapters, redundant fans and power supplies.

The POPnetserver ships with snapshot back-up and replication software. It starts at $8,000 for a single-processor version.

Fujitsu and Red Hat say they plan to strengthen their ties with an extensive partnership in sales, marketing, support and engineering. The goal is to enhance how their products work together, how they sell and support each other’s products, and how Red Hat’s software performs in data centers, which require hardware and software of the highest reliability, availability and scalability. Red Hat has similar partnerships with Dell, HP and IBM.

Fujitsu doesn’t have a similar partnership with other vendors of Linux enterprise operating systems but has sold Primergy servers with Red Hat operating systems since March 2001.