Product previews

BEA builds out WebLogic 9.0 with enterprise enhancements BEA last week unveiled WebLogic 9.0 with updates to the kernel, support for multiple programming models, and a honed focus on operations, administration, and management. The new version has side-by-side upgrade capabilities for migrating users to new applications, and hot upgrade functionality that gives administrators the ability to upgrade servers in a cluster without disrupting users. BEA also added support for the Spring Framework and Apache Beehive programming models, in addition to J2EE, which it already supported. Moreover, in the operations, administration, and management realm, WebLogic 9.0 comes with the WebLogic Diagnostic Framework, so administrators can monitor applications as they are running. The latest version also features a My Yahoo-like UI and the WebLogic Scripting tool for automating scripting jobs. WebLogic 9.0, BEA Systems

IBM unwraps Grid pack Big Blue last week detailed Grid and Grow, a starter pack for companies that want to move to grid computing. The bundle is based on IBM’s eServer BladeCenter hardware. The base configuration includes IBM’s Director systems management software; pieces of Tivoli, such as dynamic server provisioning, license tracking, and grid-storage management; a choice of scheduling software from four vendors; the option of four OSes; and services for grid scheduling, tuning, testing, and training. Grid and Grow IBM

Salient minds the enterprise Salient will reveal on Monday Margin Minder Max 3.0 to manage the enterprise with “super granular” accounting of profit and loss, growth, and efficiency. Margin Minder Max digs up data from business transactions to analyze pricing decisions and customer-buying patterns. Version 3.0 includes a feature to compare growth and sales between current and new accounts by week, month, as well as other measures of time. Pricing starts at $200,000 per server and is available immediately. Margin Minder Max 3.0, Salient

Splunk crawls for datacenter data Startup Splunk last week unveiled a search engine specifically for log files, message queues, and binary data generated by datacenter applications. Splunk Personal Server, available for free download immediately, lets IT examine live and archived files and index the information. Those results are then searchable from a Web interface. The company also said that later this year it will release the commercial Splunk Server, which will be more scalable and secure than Personal Server. Personal Server, Splunk