FRAMINGHAM (03/27/2000) - Novell Inc. last week shipped an update to NetWare Cluster Services, adding support for NetWare 5.1 and for 32 nodes. The update costs $4,999 per node. More than 80 vendors will demonstrate directory-enabled applications at Brainshare in Salt Lake City this week.

Technologists at Seagate Technology Inc. in Scotts Valley, California, announced that they now can store 45 billion bits of data in a square inch of space on a storage device, the highest amount so far. Seagate and IBM Corp. are racing to increase storage density, but Seagate boasted that its latest innovation doubles its previous density record and is the third world record it has hit in a year.

Scientists from the European Media Laboratory (EML) in Heidelberg, Germany, recently demonstrated that 10GB of data can be stored on a roll of adhesive tape of Hamburg, Germany-based Beiersdorf AG's Tesa Multi-Film. EML worked with the Institute of Computer Science at the University of Mannheim in Germany.

Until a Teamsters strike ended last week, Internet auction site eBay Inc. had 158 entries for people offering to sell Twinkies, which weren't being delivered due to the strike. A few saw offers in the range of $1 or $2 per box, and one offering received 11 bids, with the top price going as high as $5,150.

The White House's $50 million Y2k monitoring center will close for good March 31. . . . SAP AG has announced it's forming SAPMarkets, a new subsidiary dedicated to its mySAP.com applications. . . . Gartner Group Inc. in Stamford, Connecticut, paid $80 million to acquire TechRepublic Inc. in Louisville, Ky., an online community for information technology professionals. . . . Pitney Bowes Inc. in Stamford, Conn., has named Gregory Buoncontri to its top IT position.