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Novell Puts Open Enterprise Server in Beta Test Mode

Novell said that its hybrid Open Enterprise Server, an amalgam of both NetWare and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9, has been released into public beta testing. The software, which has been in a controlled beta since last September, was supposed to go into public beta in November 2004. That public beta only started at the end of December, however.

Open Enterprise Server is not something that Novell has cooked up since the SUSE acquisition in late 2003, but was a project that Novell had undertaken before it decided to buy SUSE and become a Linux player. So moving from a raw Linux platform to the SUSE implementation of Linux has entailed some extra work for Novell. The OES platform includes a full stack of server software that OES customers can deploy on their NetWare or SuSE Linux environments. This software is based on Novell Nterprise Linux Service, and includes file and print servers with iFolder, Novell Storage Services, and iPrint; identity management through eDirectory; high availability with Novell Clustering; a common management and administrative interface with iManager; and common installation and update services through Novell ZENworks. Novell expects to have the software ready in early 2005. The odds favor OES shipping in late March or early April, given the history of software shipment dates in the past four decades.

If you are interested in participating in the beta, you can download the code from Novell's OES beta site.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 Ready for HP Integrities

Hewlett-Packard and Novell announced that SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 has been certified on the entire line of Itanium-based Integrity servers from HP, including the enterprise-class Superdome servers.

HP had been supporting SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 on its Integrity line, and the support was only available on its two-way rx1600, two-way rx2600, and four-way rx4640 and rx5670 machines. These same machines were supported running Red Hat Advanced Server 2.1, but Red Hat had already certified its more modern Enterprise Server 3 AS edition on the entire Integrity server line, including the high-end Superdome boxes. With the Novell announcement last week, SUSE Linux is now at parity with Red Hat on HP's Integrity servers, in terms of support. Novell can one-up Red Hat, however, in that SLES 9 is running the newer Linux 2.6 kernel, while Red Hat ES 3, which shipped over a year ago, is based on a Linux 2.4 kernel with some of the Linux 2.6 features pulled back into the Linux 2.4 kernel.

Dataram Delivers Clone Memory for HP Integrities

Memory supplier Dataram announced that it has begun offering clone memory modules that work inside Hewlett-Packard's Integrity rx4640-8 servers. Dataram is supplying main memory cards that match those offered by HP in 2 GB, 4 GB, and 8 GB capacities, but it is also supplying 16 GB memory modules that allow the maximum main memory of this eight-way Itanium 2 server to be boosted from 64 GB to 128 GB. The rx4640-8 is a four-socket Itanium server that uses HP's mx2 dual Madison processor modules, which pushes it from being a four-way to an eight-way server. All Integrity machines support HP-UX, Linux, Windows, and soon OpenVMS.

Dataram's 2 GB memory module for the rx4640-8 costs $809, the 4 GB module costs $1,621, the 8 GB module costs $4,189, and the 16 GB module costs $21,050. Obviously, Dataram is charging a big premium for the fattest memory modules.

Linux-Based OpenPower 720 Tops TPC-H Data Warehousing Benchmark

IBM and Novell have announced that IBM's OpenPower 720 Linux-on-Power server has attainted the top performance ratings on the TPC-H data warehousing benchmarks for 100 GB and 300 GB data sets.

On the 100 GB test, an OpenPower 720 with four 1.65 GHz Power5 processors, 32 GB of main memory, and 1.6 TB of disk capacity could process 6,357.2 queries per hour (QPH) at a cost of $42 per QPH. This machine was running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 and DB2 UDB V8.2 for Linux. Not many vendors are using the TPC-H test these days, but for the sake of comparison, an IBM xSeries 346 with two Xeon DP processors running at 3.6 GHz and equipped with 4 GB of main memory and 678 GB of disk could handle only 1,894 QPH. It did so, however, at a cost of $14 per QPH, which is quite a bargain. But it would take a cluster of about eight of these machines to match the four-way Open Power 720, in terms of raw performance, and that would yield a bang for the buck of about $18 per QPH. A Sun Fire V440 server from Sun Microsystems was tested running Sybase Adaptive Server IQ 12.5 and Solaris 10 recently, and this machine, equipped with four 1.6 GHz UltraSparc-IIIi processors and 16 GB of main memory, was able to take on the 100 GB TPC-H workload and deliver 2,883 QPH at a cost of $19 per QPH. IBM is obviously charging a premium for the performance in the OpenPower 720s.

On the 300 GB test, a four-way OpenPower 720 with 1.65 GHz Power5 processors, 32 GB of main memory, and 2.6 TB of disk capacity was able to churn through 12,007 QPH at a cost of $40 per QPH. This server was running IBM's DB2 for Linux database as well. IBM's eight-way xSeries 445, using 3 GHz Xeon MP processors and running DB2 on Windows Server 2003, was only able to field 6,552 QPH, and did so at a cost of $66 per QPH. And while Sun's V440 Sparc/Solaris server was able to match the $40 per QPH that IBM posted on the test using 1.28 GHz UltraSparc-IIIi processors, that server did one quarter of the work of the IBM Unix box.

Lumen Debuts S2D Terminal Services for SLES 9

Lumen Software announced that its S2D Linux terminal software, which allows Linux-based server applications to be deployed over think clients, has been certified to work on Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9. The SD2 software is based on the open-source Linux Terminal Services Project, which provides terminal services akin to those offered by Microsoft and Citrix Systems on the Windows platform.

Bull Gives OSDL Open POSIX Test Suite for Linux

French server maker Bull announced that it has donated its Open POSIX Test Suite to the Linux community through the Open Source Development Labs. POSIX, short for Portable Operating System Interface, is a Unix standard from the 1990s that aimed to make it easier to develop portable applications that ran across AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Tru64, and other Unixes. When Linux was created, it adopted the POSIX standards, which is why there is such close affinity between Unix and Linux even though their kernels are very different.

By releasing its POSIX compliance tools into the open source community, Bull will be helping companies port and test their Unix applications as they are moved to various Linux implementations. The Open POSIX Test Suite is available for free through a remote server at the OSDL site and can be run on servers with up to eight processors to test code. The source code for the POSIX tools has also been released under the GNU General Public License at SourceForge.

BZ Research Says JBoss Is Most Popular Java Server, and Eclipse Most Popular Java Tool

The team of people behind the open-source JBoss Web application server are ebullient after a report from BZ Research that indicates a big surge in the use of JBoss over other Java application servers.

For the past several years, BZ Research, a sister company of Software Development Times magazine, has polled SDT readers about the application servers they use. In the November 2004 poll, 33.9 percent of the 759 respondents to the survey said they were using JBoss, compared with 26.9 percent in a November 2003 poll and 13.9 percent in November 2002. The JBoss server has just squeaked by IBM's WebSphere, which accounted for 32.9 percent of respondents (down from 40 percent in the 2004 poll). JBoss is also taking a bite out of BEA Systems, which saw its WebLogic application server in use by 35 percent of those polled in late 2003, but only 27.9 percent in 2004. Oracle's application server accounted for the bulk of the remaining middleware in use by those polled.

On the software development front, the open-source Eclipse development platform is gaining market share by leaps and bounds, jumping from 35 percent in the November 2003 poll to a stunning 55.3 percent in the November 2004 poll. Borland's JBuilder toolset was knocked from the number-one position by Eclipse and accounted for only about 23.4 percent of development platforms in use in late 2004. Sun Microsystems' open-source NetBeans alternative to Eclipse also had market share gains, rising from 13 percent to nearly 18 percent in the past year. IBM's WebSphere Studio saw its share drop by a few points to 21 percent share in the BZ Research poll.