Having been caught out by the Internet-stoked demand for web and application servers as well as the very late arrival of Windows 2000 and Intel's Itanium chip, both have recently produced high-end servers that have outscored Sun's in benchmark tests.

ECONOMIST: Sun Microsystems

Others say more and more data is being housed on application servers accessible via the Web and that opportunities are essentially limitless - regardless of how late Novell is getting into the market.

CNN: New NetWare embraces Web apps

It uses the web application acceleration features that F5 usually deploys in front of web servers to allow faster access to those applications in a secure manner.

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