But Wait, There's More

• If you are trying to keep up with PTFs on OS/400 and related systems programs, check out the OS/400 PTF Guides, put together by our partner DLB Associates.
  
  

• October 11
• October 4
• September 27
• September 20
• September 13

• IBM cut prices last week on two memory cards used in two specific iSeries machines. The price of a new feature 3005 card, which is a 512 MB main memory card for a Model 820 server, was reduced by 10 percent, to $3,686. Similarly, IBM cut the price of a 512 MB main memory card on the Model 810 server by 10 percent. However, the new price of the 512 MB main memory card is $1,613 on the Model 810, which means that main memory on a Model 820 is more than twice as expensive as essentially the same memory on a newer box. The stick for Model 820 customers is a lot bigger than the carrot, and vice versa for Model 810 customers. Get the message? Stay current on the iSeries or you will pay--and pay dearly.
  
  
• For the longest time, pundits and analysts in the midrange server market have wondered what would happen if the Oracle database could run on an AS/400 or iSeries platform. The question was largely moot, until Linux became available on the iSeries inside logical partitions and Oracle provided a Linux version of its database compiled for Linux on the PowerPC and Power processors. Now Oracle is looking for some iSeries shops to experiment on and to see if there is a market there for it to chase. To that end, Oracle has put out a developer's release of Oracle9i Release 2 for Linux partitions on both IBM iSeries and pSeries servers.
  
  
• For the longest time, PowerPC partners IBM and Motorola pretty much split up the chip business going to Apple Computer, which is the dominant user of server- and desktop-grade PowerPC processors. With the advent of the 64-bit PowerPC 970 from Big Blue, which is sold by Apple as the G5 processor in its very fast PowerMacs desktops and X-Serve servers, the handwriting was on the wall for Motorola, which can't seem to make money selling chips. (Truth be told, neither can IBM, until you factor in the profits from its Power servers, like the iSeries and pSeries.) In any event, last week Motorola said that it would spin out the $4.8 billion chip-making business, including the PowerPC. This could open up a whole can of worms for IBM, which should just snap it up so someone else doesn't. Can you imagine if someone had the nerve to use the Motorola chip business to create workstation and server platforms that competed directly with IBM on its own turf? Surely, more than a few people can imagine this if we can. The question is, does it make sense? Can someone make a less-costly Power platform than IBM with what Motorola knows? They would have to avoid the mistakes that Motorola has made with its 68K processors, the antecedents to the PowerPC, and the PowerPC 630, the 64-bit chip that was supposed to be in the Raven-Condor boxes that eventually were sold as AS/400 and RS/6000 servers, using the Star line of PowerPC chips created by IBM Rochester.
  
  
• According to market research by IDC, the worldwide market for paid operating systems (as opposed to those that are distributed for free, such as FreeBSD, Linux, and Solaris) shrunk a bit in 2002, and Windows and Linux increased their share of the server market. IDC says that 5.7 million new (and paid for) server operating systems were shipped in 2002, a decline of 5.1 percent over 2001. Those 5.7 million licenses raked in $7.8 billion for their suppliers. Microsoft, with 55.1 percent of the 5.7 million shipments, had the largest share, up from 50.5 percent in 2001. All the pundits agree that Microsoft's Licensing 6.0 plan, which included big price hikes and therefore encouraged many customers to buy software under the Licensing 5.0 plan in mid-2002, helped Microsoft gain share in a shrinking market. Linux accounted for 23.1 percent of server OS shipments in 2002, says IDC, up from 22.4 percent in 2001. Windows gets a lot of shipments, but only accounted for 16.7 percent of the $7.8 billion revenue pie; Linux got only six-tenths of a percent of the revenue. Unix sales declined by nearly 9 percent to 31.1 percent of server operating system sales, and NetWare got a mere 4.3 percent of revenue following another year of double-digit declines. Shipments of new operating systems for mainframes and proprietary midrange kit (such as the AS/400) were about 50,000 units worldwide, according to IDC, a decline of 58 percent compared with 2001. This is in part due to server consolidations (made possible through logical partitioning) and the adoption of Linux on these platforms.
  
  
• Intel this week ramped up the clock speed once again on its "Prestonia" Pentium 4 Xeon DP processors for entry servers. Like other recent additions to the Xeon DP line, this Prestonia chip has 1 MB of on-chip L2 cache and a 533 MHz frontside bus. The new Prestonia chip runs at 3.2 GHz and costs $851 in 1,000 unit quantities. The prior top dog in the Prestonia line ran at 3.06 GHz and cost $690 per 1,000 ordered. That extra $161 (an increase of 23 percent) only buys you a theoretical maximum of an extra 5 percent performance, and probably comes to less than that on real-world applications. While more is usually better, in this case buying the 3.2 GHz chip is probably not worth the money for most customers. It is unclear when IBM will get these faster Prestonia chips into the Integrated xSeries Server (IxS) coprocessors for the OS/400 server line. Last month, IBM announced a new IxS card using 2 GHz Prestonia chip, up from the 1.6 GHz chip it was using in the prior IxS generation. The expense of the fastest Xeon chip, compared with older and slower ones, at any given time is probably why IBM stays so far behind on the Intel chip roadmap. By lagging, IBM can keep external Wintel iron at bay, preach its iSeries consolidation, and make a few hundred bucks of profit on each IxS sale.
  
  
• Microsoft has reportedly been sued by a single user who was angered by having her identity stolen through a security breach on her Windows machine, and now the case might be snowballing into a giant class-action lawsuit. The lawyer behind the suit, which was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, is expected to try to push to get class status for the case, which hinges on California's consumer protection laws and is going after the restrictive licensing agreements that Microsoft has for its software. The plaintiff in the suit contends that Microsoft's security alerts are too hard to understand and do more to help hackers than to protect consumers. One of the California laws being brought to bear in this case concerns the protection of consumer information. It will be interesting to see if this law, which was aimed at forcing companies with insecure networks to face the consequences if they let personal information get hacked. Whether this law can be applied to operating system and application software providers is unclear, but it looks like we are about to find out. Many people are now coming to realize that the homogenization of the desktop, which is 95 percent Windows, makes Windows a big national security risk. If Linux had anything close to 25 to 50 percent penetration on desktops, it would be getting hammered by hackers, too.
  
  

Sponsored By S4I SYSTEMS

A Great Way to Clean-up with an Exciting End of Year Offer! Reclaim & reorganize disk space with S4i DASD-Plus. A cost-effective alternative to upgrading your DASD or iSeries is to get that space back and track DASD consumption. S4i offers tactical & strategic tools to automate this process & analyze your DASD with surveys & reports to communicate your biggest DASD consumers & forecast future DASD growth. Get in one more project this year and, if you mention this ad, you can purchase S4i DASD-Plus and pay nothing until January 2004! Call 800-231-5280 or Click here for a free trial! Visit www.solution400.com