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Wednesday, November 14, 2007

SEC Announces 100 Percent Return of Funds to Defrauded Bio-Heal Investors

The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced the mailing of checks totaling more than $2.7 million to 833 investors who were victims of the fraudulent promotion and sale of illegally issued shares of Bio-Heal Laboratories, Inc. The Fair Fund distribution represents a 100 percent return of the defrauded investors' money.

In April 2005, the Commission sued Bio-Heal, a publicly-held company that claimed to develop topical natural healing products in Nicaragua, and five other corporate entities that received the illegally issued shares and sold them. When the Commission filed its complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, it obtained an emergency asset freeze against Bio-Heal and the other entities, freezing their proceeds from the sale of the illegally issued shares.

"The Commission's quick action in this case ensured this money would not be dissipated and lost to innocent investors," said David Nelson, the Commission's Regional Director in Miami. "We are particularly gratified that it has resulted in a 100 percent return of investors' losses through this Fair Fund."

In the Fair Funds provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, Congress gave the Commission increased authority to distribute ill-gotten gains and civil money penalties to harmed investors. To date, the Commission has returned more than $3 billion to investors through Fair Fund distributions.

The Commission's complaint against Bio-Heal alleged the company improperly issued 12 million shares of its stock to several entities without a restrictive legend based on a fraudulent attorney opinion letter claiming they were exempt from registration with the Commission. The complaint further alleged that two of those entities then dumped their Bio-Heal shares on the market at the same time as the stock was being fraudulently touted to investors over the Internet.

The Commission obtained a final judgment by consent against Bio-Heal, and default final judgments against the entities that received and sold the Bio-Heal shares, in April 2006, at which time the District Court also created the Fair Fund. The investors who were mailed distributions today bought Bio-Heal stock during the fraudulent touting in February, March, and April 2005.

Questions regarding the Fair Fund distribution may be directed to the Court-appointed distribution agent, Melanie E. Damian, Esq., by:

Visiting the fund Web site at http://www.biohealfund.com;

Calling toll-free 1-800-648-0755;

Writing to Melanie E. Damian, Esq. at either Damian & Valori LLP, 1000 Brickell Avenue, Suite 1020, Miami, FL, 33131 or c/o Global Risk Solutions, Inc., P.O. Box 310130, Miami, FL, 33231.

Dell and Sun Microsystems Announce Solaris 10 Distribution Agreement

Dell and Sun Microsystems have signed an OEM agreement for Dell to make the Solaris Operating System (OS) and Solaris support services available directly to customers for select Dell PowerEdge servers.


The multi-year distribution agreement was announced live from Oracle OpenWorld, where Sun President and CEO, Jonathan Schwartz and Dell Chairman and CEO, Michael Dell, are keynote speakers. With this announcement, Dell is expanding the range of enterprise-class operating systems it offers to its customers and Sun is expanding the reach of its Solaris OS.

As part of the relationship, Dell and Sun will cooperate on system certification and the development of offerings based on Solaris and Dell solutions. In addition, Dell and Sun have agreed to work together to secure support from key ISVs for Solaris on Dell PowerEdge servers. Both companies will work to ensure the combination of Dell PowerEdge servers and the Solaris OS delivers customer choice and value for applications that demand reliability, security, scalability, performance and integrated virtualization.

"Dell's offering of Solaris redefines the market opportunity for both companies," said Jonathan Schwartz, president and CEO, Sun Microsystems. "The relationship gives Dell broader reach into the global free software community with Solaris and OpenSolaris and gives Sun access to channels and customers across the volume marketplace."

"Part of our focus to simplify IT means delivering customers choice and by adding Solaris to our solutions set we are able to do that," said Michael Dell, chairman and CEO, Dell.

For more details on the agreement, visit: http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/dell or http://www.sun.com/news.

Monday, November 12, 2007

HP Advances Flexibility, Efficiency of Blades Across the Data Center

HP today announced virtualization and power management technologies that help customers streamline IT operations to realize dramatic cost savings, increased flexibility and improved energy efficiency.

Based on the market-leading HP BladeSystem c-Class infrastructure – a self-contained unit of servers, storage, network, management software and power and cooling technology – the new offerings mark the next major phase of HP’s strategy to build modular, integrated, automated data centers that reduce administrative time and free resources to focus on the needs of the business.

Highlighting the announcement is the HP Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager, which improves IT processes by extending the capability of HP BladeSystem Virtual Connect technology to all blade enclosures in a data center.

Virtual Connect technology allows customers to pre-assign network and storage connections once and then add, move, replace or upgrade servers in minutes. The new Enterprise Manager enables IT administrators to manage and control these connections across 100 c-Class enclosures, or up to 1,600 blade servers, from a single console.

By dynamically moving server connections across a data center, or to remote sites, customers can more effectively and efficiently meet changing application workload and performance needs. In addition, the new software can be operated by a single administrator, which helps eliminate process steps and administration time, while providing an audit trail and limiting configuration conflicts.

“Enterprises need to dramatically simplify management on a large scale,” said Jonathan Eunice, principal IT advisor at Illuminata Inc., a research and advisory services company. ”HP Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager is important because it lays the foundation for coordinating IT infrastructure across the data center.”

HP’s advancements in virtualization, management, power and cooling have helped it secure the No. 1 position in blade server market revenue and units worldwide, according to IDC.(1) The company shipped more than 150,000 virtual connect-enabled servers in the past year; these systems can now be enhanced by the capabilities of HP Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager.

“HP Virtual Connect gave us amazing flexibility to add and recover servers very quickly, speeding up our processes and eliminating wait time in response to our organization,” said Scott Hemmerlein, systems administrator, Information Systems and Technology Management, Indiana University School of Management. “We hope to expand those same time savings beyond one blade enclosure to the rest of our data center with HP Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager.”

Managing physical and virtual environments

HP also is delivering new and enhanced offerings based on HP Insight Control that help manage physical and virtual environments:

HP Server Migration Pack Universal Edition now combines virtual and physical migrations into a single tool to speed migration time of HP ProLiant and BladeSystem servers. A new “queued migration feature” helps to automate, plan and execute multiple migrations at once, with expected support to include Citrix XenServer™, Microsoft® virtual machines, Oracle® VM and VMware.
HP Virtual Machine Management Pack 3.0, another key offering within the Insight Control management portfolio, provides central management of Citrix XenServer, Microsoft virtual machines, Oracle VM and VMware. It helps reduce downtime interruptions with a new predictive failure alert capacity that can relocate virtual machines before hardware failures occur.
HP PolyServe Software for Microsoft SQL Server consolidates large SQL environments onto a single cluster so customers can manage all instances at once, freely add and recover multiple instances, and roll out business applications more quickly while improving reliability.

“Infrastructure issues of cost, time, change and energy continue to challenge our customers, even as great technologies like virtualization help lower costs and speed the pace of making changes,” said Mark Linesch, vice president of marketing, Infrastructure Software, HP. “With these offerings, our recently acquired assets from Opsware and more products on the horizon, HP continues to drive toward an Adaptive Infrastructure inclusive of both physical and virtual resources.”

HP’s data center automation technology acquired from Opsware automates the management of IT infrastructure and assesses the impact of changes, while providing a unified view that spans all infrastructure tiers of an application. HP plans to integrate the Opsware Automation Platform with its existing management solutions, bringing together hardware and software for future data center automation capabilities across the full stack.

Providing IT and facilities with energy-aware control across the data center

The cost to cool a data center can be more than the cost of powering the IT equipment. In fact, a recent study suggests that in a majority of the world’s data centers, 60-70 percent of a data center’s power is associated with cooling the IT equipment.(2)

The new HP Power Distribution Rack controls three-phase power distribution across a row of server racks to more efficiently deliver power where and when it is needed most for significant cost and environmental benefits. The offering allows IT managers to:

Connect to power once across a row of server racks and adapt power distribution as needs change;
Prevent overloads and resolve problems fast with energy-aware, HP Thermal Logic technology; and,
Reduce cabling which lowers complexity and the chance for error with one set of input cables to the end of a row and short power drops to each rack.

The new HP Rackmountable Parallel 3 Phase UPS provides the highest level of power protection from HP and dissipates less than half as much heat into a data center compared to the nearest competitor offering.(3) It enables attached servers to save all work in progress and initiate a shutdown in the event of power loss, and restores it with Thermal Logic power policies to ensure business picks up where it left off.

When compared to competing, less efficient offerings, HP’s new 3 Phase UPS can save more than $1,000 a year in power and cooling costs in the 12-kilowatt rack-mount model and more than $6,000 for the 60-kilowatt row-level configuration.(3)

More information about HP’s solutions for the Adaptive Infrastructure is available at www.hp.com/go/adaptiveinfrastructure.

(1) IDC, Q207 Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, August 2007.

(2) HP, Christopher Malone, PhD, Christian Belady, P.E.: “Metrics to Characterize Data Center & IT Equipment Energy Use,” Digital Power Forum, Richardson, Texas, September 2006.

(3) Based on internal HP studies.

Sun Teams With Oracle To Deliver Pre-Configured Data Warehouses

Oracle and Sun Microsystems, Inc., (Nasdaq: JAVA) today announced the availability of the Oracle Optimized Warehouse for Sun. The Oracle Optimized Warehouse for Sun is a complete, out-of-the-box, high-performance data warehouse solution built upon the world's leading database and Sun's leading hardware and operating systems.


The solution, which will be sold by Sun, consists of Oracle Database Enterprise Edition, Oracle Real Application Clusters and Oracle Partitioning on a Sun Fire E20K server, the Sun open source Solaris operating system (OS) and Sun StorageTek 6540 arrays. With all hardware and software components pre-installed, configured, optimized, and ready to run, the Oracle Optimized Warehouse for Sun is the fastest, simplest and lowest-risk way to buy and implement a data warehouse on Oracle and Sun technology.

The Oracle Optimized Warehouse for Sun announced today is sized for data warehouses containing 10TB of raw data. Future validated Oracle Optimized Warehouse configurations are planned to provide larger solutions through the use of modular building blocks. This packaging delivers simplicity and speed of implementation along with the flexibility and power of the world's leading database platform. Oracle's advanced analytic and management capabilities combined with the power and reliability of Sun hardware make the Oracle Optimized Warehouse for Sun a compelling offering.

"The appeal of this pre-configured solution is simple: customers can have a fully functioning, optimized, scalable data warehouse up and running very quickly," said Juan Carlos Soto. "And when that pre-configured solution includes Oracle Database and Sun's open source Solaris operating system, customers know they are getting a reliable, secure, powerhouse computing environment."

"With the Oracle Optimized Warehouse for Sun, it is easier than ever to purchase a world-class data warehouse platform," said Ray Roccaforte, vice president of Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence Platform, Oracle. "Sun and Oracle's joint engineering efforts in testing and optimizing this data warehouse will help reduce costs and implementation times for our customers, while delivering a solution capable of the most demanding workloads and the most complex business analytics."

Based upon years of combined Sun and Oracle engineering expertise in large-scale data warehouses, the Oracle Optimized Warehouse for Sun delivers the ideal database, server, and storage configuration to match customers' business analytic requirements and enables decreased data warehouse implementation time without limiting future growth and analytic agility. Learn more about the Oracle Optimized Warehouse for Sun at: http://www.oracle.com/solutions/business_intelligence/sun.html

Product Availability

The Oracle Optimized Warehouse for Sun is generally available from Sun today. For additional information on the Oracle Optimized Warehouse for Sun, go to: http://www.sun.com/oracle. More details on the Oracle Optimized Warehouse Initiative is available at: http://www.oracle.com/solutions/business_intelligence/optimized-warehouse-initiative.html.