BREAKING NEWS

Smith spearheaded the Federal Technology Service’s desktop outsourcing contract
for GSA, but she recently left her post to become chief operations officer for GSA’s
Anywhere Office project. She will report directly to GSA Administrator David J. Barram.

The Anywhere Office is a component of the CyberGSA plan the agency unveiled last year.
One element of CyberGSA is CyberWork, which will let employees work from any location
[GCN, Oct. 19, 1998, Page 1]. GSA’s Anywhere Office is an important element of
CyberWork, GSA officials have said.

GSA introduced the Anywhere Office concept last summer at its Products and Services
Expo in Seattle. It has posted details about the program on the Web at http://www.gsa.gov/anywhere/indexm.htm.

The Veterans Affairs Department is setting up a $500,000 telemedicine project to
deliver home care to paralyzed veterans.

The Telemedicine in Home Care project will operate out of 15 spinal cord dysfunction
centers in VA medical centers in 11 states. VA officials said they want to improve access
to and quality of care for patients after they leave veterans hospitals.

“Telemedicine is rapidly demonstrating its usefulness, because it enables the
practice of medicine independent of geographic boundaries,” said Dr. Kenneth W.
Kizer, undersecretary for health.

More information about the participating VA centers is posted on the Web at http://www.va.gov. 

The Feb. 26 release of Intel Corp.’s new 450- and 500-MHz Pentium III processors
has raised prices very little for leading-edge PCs and servers. All will have the 550-MHz
Pentium III as soon as it becomes available.

Dell Computer Corp.’s 450-MHz OptiPlex GX1 starts at $1,725 with a 17-inch
monitor, 64M of RAM, 6.4G Enhanced IDE hard drive, 14/32X CD-ROM drive, integrated audio,
10/100-Mbps Wake On LAN networking and Microsoft Windows 95.

Gateway Inc.’s 500-MHz E-4200 series starts at $1,999 with 17-inch EV700 monitor,
128M of error-correcting-code RAM, 8.4G hard drive, integrated ATI Rage Pro graphics,
10/100-Mbps networking and Win95 in a convertible chassis.

Intergraph Corp. of Huntsville, Ala., has set the same starting price of $2,499 for
either the 500-MHz TD-260 workstation or the 500-MHz InterServe 75 server.

Micron Electronics Inc. of Nampa, Idaho, prices its NetFrame 2101 server from $2,699
with 512K cache, 64M of ECC 100-MHz RAM, 9G drive, 17/32X CD-ROM drive and integrated
networking hardware and software, but without a preinstalled operating system.

At the Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line Forum in Washington last week, Rep. Rick
Boucher (D-Va.) said he will introduce an Internet policy bill to stretch bandwidth both
in the nation’s communications backbone and in the last mile to homes and businesses.

Boucher, a co-founder of the congressional Internet Caucus, said his Internet
Foundation Act would let the Bell operating companies transmit data traffic outside their
local areas. The bill also would encourage provision of digital subscriber lines by not
forcing incumbent local carriers to discount the service to competitive carriers. And it
would level the playing field between telephone and cable providers, which operate under
different regulations, he said.

This month and next, the Social Security Administration will get the remaining scanning
stations for its Paperless Office Initiative.

The project work is being done under a $23 million contract held by EDAC Systems Inc.
of Fredericksburg, Va. EDAC is setting up imaging systems at agency headquarters, the
National Computing Center, six regional operating centers and the Office of Disability and
International Operations (ODIO).

SSA receives more than 3.4 million documents a year that it must process and store.

The agency’s paperless system serves as both an electronic filing cabinet and a
workflow system, SSA officials said.

The EDAC Simplex Casual Scan Station converts paper documents into digital images that
SSA employees can view on their PCs, transmit electronically and store on magnetic media.

The Agriculture Department last month named Keith Jackson as its associate chief
information officer for telecommunications services and operations.

Jackson will set USDA’s long-range telecommunications policies, manage the
integration of the department’s telecommunications infrastructure and coordinate
support for its telecom initiatives.

Hollace Twining had been the associate CIO. He moved to the Transportation Department
to become director of its information technology operations. USDA deputy CIO Ira Hobbs had
handled Twining’s old duties until the department filled the post.

Jackson comes to USDA from the General Services Administration, where he served as
director of regional services management. At GSA, he managed the $250 million regional
telecommunications program. 

He received the GSA Administrator’s Meritorious Service Award last year and a GCN
award in 1996.

The growing use of RAID Level 5 storage arrays has sparked demand for fast solid-state
disks to balance out CPU loads and disk access times, according to Quantum Corp.
officials.

Solid-state disks consist of dynamic RAM chips rather than spinning platters and work
about 200 times faster than magnetic drives. They rival system memory or cache memory in
speed, said Sharon Ostiguy, product marketing manager for Quantum of Milpitas, Calif.

A solid-state disk can serve as a shared network drive and can be installed in a
storage bay without powering down, Ostiguy said. Such disks usually store run-time
libraries, image and directory files, authorization files, database journals or indexes.

Starting around $2,100, they range in size from 134M to 3.2G.

Contact Quantum at 408-894-4000.

Dell Computer Corp. will enter the storage area network market with the PowerVault 50F
Fibre Channel Switch, priced at $1,350 per port. The company’s OpenManage Storage
Consolidation Software can make four Dell PowerEdge servers share a central PowerVault
650F storage subsystem and PowerVault 130T digital linear tape library. The consolidation
software runs under Microsoft Windows NT.

Dell’s PowerVault 35F Fibre Channel Multiport Bridge is $5,000, and a Fibre
Channel optical host bus adapter is $1,479. Dell plans to certify five tape backup
applications for its PowerVault products. Beginning in May, the company will offer SAN
technical support services ranging from storage consolidation to storage backup and
recovery.

Contact Dell at 800-289-3355.

——Christopher J. Dorobek, Bill Murray, Susan M. Menke,William Jackson
Frank Tiboni, and Florence Olsen.