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Windows & Linux Edition
Volume 2, Number 9 -- March 5, 2003

But Wait, There's More. . .

Sun Microsystems is using an X86 clone processor from Advanced Micro Devices in its new Sun Fire Blade Platform blade servers. (See "Sun Enters the Blade Server Fray" for more details on these machines.) At the announcement, Sun refused to say what chips it was using in its X86-based uniprocessor blade servers, probably because that would take attention away from the blades and make analysts and journalists question the company's commitment to its own Sparc chips. The chip in the new X86 blade is a 1.2 GHz Athlon XP processor, not a 1.2 GHz Pentium III processor from Intel (as we had heard before the announcement from several sources). The choice of an AMD chip this time around does not mean anything. The future two-way X86 blades could use Intel chips, or chips from Transmeta or VIA Technologies. But a few points make a line, and if Sun keeps picking AMD chips, that might be an indication of where Sun is heading with 32-bit, and maybe even 64-bit, X86 platforms running Linux and Solaris for entry machines and blade servers.

Intel chopped prices last week on several of its Pentium 4 Xeon processors for servers and workstations, and on the Pentium 4 desktop processors that sometimes make their way into entry servers. Intel cut prices on the "Prestonia" Xeon DP processors, used in two-way workstations and servers; prices on the "Gallatin" Xeon MP processors for four-way servers and cell boards for larger servers remain unchanged. Pricing on the fastest Xeon DPs using a 533 MHz or 400 MHz frontside bus remain unchanged as well, at $455 and $433 apiece in 1,000 unit quantities. But on the 2.66 GHz Xeon DP with a 533 MHz bus and the 2.6 GHz Xeon DP with a 400 MHz bus, prices were cut by 16 percent, to $284 and $273 respectively. Intel cut the price of the Xeon DP running at 2.4 GHz with a 533 MHz bus by 11 percent to $209, on the same chip with a 400 MHz bus by 12 percent to $198, and on a 2.2 GHz chip with a 400 MHz bus by 12 percent to $198. (Yes, that extra 200 MHz comes free.) Price cuts on the non-Xeon Pentium 4 chips (which have smaller caches and so not have SMP electronics built in) were cut by 8 to 21 percent. A 3.06 GHz Pentium 4 with a 533 MHz bus only costs $589, down 8 percent. Pricing on the 2.8 GHz/533 MHz bus version of this chip, which is good for uniprocessor servers, was also down 8 percent to $375. The least-expensive Pentium 4 processors (with either 533 or 400 MHz buses and running at 2.2 GHz ) cost only $163 after the 16 percent price cuts.
Microsoft has released the BizTalk Adapter for SQL Server for download from the Web. The adapter program allows the company's XML middleware server, called BizTalk Server 2002, to read and write information from and to an SQL Server database. The information generated by BizTalk Server is created in XML format and stored, in that format, within SQL Server.
We all call it "instant messaging," but Microsoft will, with the introduction of its Real-Time Communications Server for Windows Server 2003, probably try to get us to call it something other than the name of rival AOL Time Warner's software and service for online chatting. RTC Server, code-named "Greenwich," is a beefed-up implementation of Microsoft's Windows Messenger instant messaging, and although it was expected to be delivered with Windows 2003 on April 29, Microsoft has decided to cook it for a little longer. The first beta reportedly went out at the end of last week.
IBM last week announced that it has ramped up the production on its 1.45 GHz Power4+ RISC processors enough that it can put these chips into its entry four-way pSeries 630 Unix and Linux servers. The first generation of pSeries 630 machines used a 1 GHz implementation of the Power4 processor. In uniprocessor comparisons, the pSeries 630 using the 1.45 GHz Power4+ processor offers 41 percent more power than the 1 GHz Power4 processor in the machine. With two- and four-way configurations, performance gains from the faster chip are less, with the resulting machine gaining about 33 percent more commercial processing performance, as gauged by IBM's rPerf relative performance ratings. The new pSeries 630 is available in Linux-ready Express configurations, which have IBM's AIX Unix removed from the machine and have decent discounts because IBM can ship default, rather than custom, configurations. The new pSeries 630 also includes two more PCI-X slots and an integrated SCSI controller not available in the older pSeries 630s, and it supports 36 and 73 GB, 15K RPM disk drives. An Express Linux-ready configuration sells for $19,025 for a uniprocessor machine with two 36 GB disks and 2 GB of main memory. A four-way Linux-ready Express configuration with 8 GB of main memory sells for $48,450.
Companies looking to move their COBOL applications off IBM AS/400 and iSeries OS/400 servers have new migration options from PKS Software. The company has announced a new release of its migration software, AX/ware Version 4.03, which supports the migration of OS/400 COBOL applications in the same manner that it supports RPG and ILE RPG applications. In previous releases, AX/ware transformed OS/400 COBOL code into Micro Focus International Limited COBOL, which allowed it to run on Windows and Unix machines. With AX/ware 4.03, PKS Software now supports OS/400 COBOL applications with its integrated development environment for ongoing support of migrated applications, Visual OCC, which PKS Software announced last year. As a result of supporting OS/400 COBOL applications with Visual OCC, PKS Software is now able to compile the OS/400 COBOL applications into C or C++, just as it supports RPG and CL.