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.
  
  

• November 15
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• November 1
• October 25
• October 18

• IBM ran a full-page ad for the iSeries in the Wall Street Journal last Friday. The ad read "trick or treat," in big, bold, brown letters, and gave a sales pitch for the iSeries to HP 3000 customers. This iSeries-specific advertisement is something that the installed base of loyal OS/400 customers is always clamoring for. Here's the text of the ad, if you missed it: "On October 31st, HP stopped selling their HP e3000 line of servers. Some users may be left high and dry. Not to worry, IBM offers a broad portfolio of strategic line of business applications available on iSeries servers that can help deliver incredible flexibility for your business. With more than 20,000 solutions spanning Enterprise Application Solutions (EAS), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Business Intelligence (BI), e-business, e-mail and Collaboration, iSeries servers have a solution that can help meet your business needs. Visit our solutions portal to find leading replacement applications for HP 3000 applications or search the iSeries server solution catalog."
  
  
• Gartner, the big IT consultancy, held its Tech Investor Summit in New York last week, and Al Lill, a group vice president at the company, told Wall Street that a recovery in the technology sector is underway. "There is a key combination of technology advances, architectural changes, market forces, and best practices in place to lead a good recovery for IT in the near future and culminating in very strong growth in the longer term." He said that IT spending levels had bottomed out in 2003, and that 2004 and 2005 will see a minimum of strong single-digit spending growth rates across all IT technology sectors compared with 2003. That's a pretty bold statement. He warned that some sectors will see even higher growth, which means others definitely will not. He also said that a huge skills shift, affecting millions of IT workers, will be part of this recovery, and that broadband and wireless networking, Linux operating systems, content management, real-time analytics, data mining, security, middleware, business intelligence, and knowledge management would be the hot areas in the recovery. Getting trained and certified in these areas is also going to be hot. Perhaps more shocking is that Garter is estimating that a massive vendor consolidation cycle is going to accelerate further through 2005, with more than half of the current IT vendors being eliminated from the market. The shrinking competition will, Gartner predicts, give vendors more control over pricing for their products and services.
  
  
• If you are a typical OS/400 shop, you have one or more Windows servers, and the Windows boxes cause you more headaches than any other machine in your shop because of viruses, worms, and other security threats. Microsoft did something interesting last week that might actually make your life better in the long run: It put a bounty on the heads of hackers who get a kick out of creating worms and viruses to attack Windows. With viruses like SoBig and MSBlast causing much irritation to hundreds of millions of users, and billions of dollars of direct economic damage and lost productivity worldwide, the software giant is taking a new tack in fighting hackers, who tend to target its Windows platform. Microsoft announced it will give $250,000 each to the person who rats out the hackers behind SoBig and MSBlast. The company has also created a $5 million bounty kitty to chase down the hackers of future viruses. Some doubt that this will be enough money, but it's a start. Maybe Microsoft should just spend some of its $50 billion danegeld to pay hackers to not hack? It might cause less damage in the long run. (Yes, that was a joke.)
  
  
• IBM this week announced a new 16-way server, dubbed the xSeries 455, that will put it head-to-head with big midrange and entry enterprise servers based on the "Madison" Itanium 2 processors from Intel. Unisys, NEC, and Hewlett-Packard are the dominant suppliers of big Itanium 2 boxes so far, and IBM doesn't want to miss out on deals in which companies pick Itanium 2 to run big databases and applications. The xSeries 455 is based on the "Summit-II" generation of Intel chipsets that IBM has created for its own line of NUMA-like symmetric multiprocessing servers. The original Summit chipset debuted in the xSeries 440 server, which scaled to eight Xeon MP processors and for a brief time was available in partitioned 16-way configurations. The xSeries 445, also based on a variant of the Summit-II chipset, scaled up to 16 Xeon MP processors in a single-system image and began shipping this summer. IBM launched a four-way Itanium box, the xSeries 450, based on the Summit-II chipset, in May. To find out more about this server, see the full story in our Windows and Linux platform newsletter. One other thing: These new Itanium machines will probably share a lot of architecture (if not components) and packaging with the future Power5 iSeries and pSeries midrange product line.
  
  
• Hewlett-Packard last week pierced the stratospheric 1 million transactions per minute (TPM) mark on the TPC-C online transaction processing benchmark, becoming the first vendor ever to hit that performance level with a database server running a single-system image. HP has been striving to put as much water as possible between its 64-way Superdome Integrity line of HP-UX, Windows, and Linux servers and the RISC/Unix servers of its rivals IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Fujitsu-Siemens and the Itanium servers from Unisys and NEC. The latest HP benchmark test on the Superdome machines was, like other Integrity servers, using the "Madison" variant of the 64-bit Itanium processors from Intel. HP did a few things to squeeze the performance out of the machine used in its most recent test. First, it used HP-UX instead of Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition. HP-UX should always give a substantial performance boost over Windows on HP's own architected systems because of its intimate knowledge of those systems. Tuning is surely part of the story, but so is boosting the main memory on the Superdome from 512 GB to 1 TB. Given that HP has almost doubled the performance of a 64-way Itanium 2 machine using the same 1.5 GHz Madison processors in the past several months, some people are beginning to question if the TPC-C test, which simulates order entry and supply chain applications, is as relevant as it used to be. Last week, the same machine running HP-UX 11i and Oracle 10g Enterprise Edition was able to chew through 1,008,145 TPM at a cost of $8.33 per TPM after a staggering 48 percent discount on hardware, software, and maintenance. The Superdome server cost $7.1 million, with the 1 TB of main memory accounting for $5 million of the cost. HP-UX and Oracle 10g cost $1.4 million, and 38.3 TB of disk storage cost $5 million. Application server hardware and software made up the remaining $17.9 million of the cost of the Superdome set up tested. That tested configuration, by the way, will not be available until April 2004, probably when HP will support the larger memory. IBM is readying a 2GHz Power4+ pSeries box that could support 1TB of main memory and also break through the 1 million TPM barrier. That means iSeries customers can, through the RPQ process.
  
  
• Seeking to halt all the murmuring about its future Power-based blade servers, IBM last week announced the product and set a shipment date of March 5, 2004, for the blades. The new blades, which will plug into the BladeCenter chassis, are the first non-Intel blade servers that IBM will put on the market. The new JS20 Power blade is based on the 1.6 GHz variant of the PowerPC 970 processor that Apple is using in its latest G5 Macs. The blade is based on an IBM Power chipset, which is very likely a derivative of the chipsets it has for its pSeries Unix server line. The PowerPC 970 chip is itself a derivative of the Power4 processor, except that it is a single-core implementation with all of the interconnection technology and other electronics necessary for a big SMP server removed. While the PowerPC 970 scales up to 2 GHz, IBM is coming out the door with slower chips in the JS20 blade server. On infrastructure workloads or jobs that have a big numerical component, even the slower PowerPC 970 should be able to give a Xeon DP processor a run for the money. Why IBM has decided that it can charge $2,699 for the JS20 Power blade (with only a single processor) is a mystery. That's less performance than a Xeon DP blade, for more money, which doesn't make a lot of sense. The JS20s running AIX or Linux will be able to sit side-by-side with HS20s running Windows or Linux in the same BladeCenter chassis. However, don't get too excited about AIX support just yet. While the blade will be out in March, IBM says that it will not have AIX ready for the JS20 blade until the third quarter of 2004. Why will it take so long, you ask? IBM had probably not planned to support AIX on the PowerPC 970 as it was creating it for Apple, and only the advent of the blade server market has made it rethink the idea and actually commit to launching a product. The JS20s will be able to support Linuxes from SuSE and Turbolinux, in March 2004, and will presumably support Red Hat's Linux at some point in the future.
  
  
• According to a new study commissioned by network equipment provider Cisco and performed by NOP World Technology, wireless LANs are becoming more prevalent in the workplace and are contributing to greater worker productivity (or exploitation, however you want to look at it). Two years ago, Cisco and NOP studied the use of WLANs in businesses, and this week they have updated the original study. Cisco, which now owns the Linksys router business, has a vested interest in promoting WLAN usage. NOP surveyed 400 midsized and large businesses that use WLANs and found that, on average, users were able to be connected an extra 3.5 more hours per day because they had access to wireless networks; in 2001, WLANs gave users an extra 1.75 hours of connectivity. Users say they are an average of 27 percent more productive than they would have been if they didn't have the wireless links. Of course, this makes sense. It just means that our work (for the millions of us who work from a computer each day) can literally follow us anywhere. The Cisco study says that WLANs allow people to work when it is convenient for them, but the reality is that most people are working more just to get paid the same. We aren't doing this by choice, but by necessity. Cisco and NOP say that, among the companies surveyed, 25 percent of users have access to systems through WLANs, up from 16 percent in 2001. These companies say that half of their employees will have access within the next two years. No surprises there: Now not having access to the network is not an excuse to avoid work, and managers are probably very keen on keeping employees in the loop and at work as much as they can.
  
  

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