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HP Shows Improving Financials in First Quarter

To the relief of the company, its customers, and its shareholders, Hewlett-Packard posted better-than--expected financial results for its fiscal 2005 first quarter ending January 31. Worldwide sales were $21.5 billion, up 10 percent from the same quarter last year, and net earnings were just under $1.2 billion, not counting a $116 million settlement that HP paid to end a long-running lawsuit with former workstation maker Intergraph. With the cost of that settlement, investment losses, and taxes taken out, HP's earnings came to 32 cents per share, up from 30 cents per share a year ago.

The troubled Enterprise Servers and Storage group had sales of just over $4 billion, up 9 percent; it posted an operating profit of $71 million, which was diminished by a $33 million charge related to restructurings. Sales in the Industry Standard Servers unit, which sells X86-based servers, were up 19 percent, to $2.35 billion; unit shipments grew 23 percent in the quarter. HP believes its X86 server market share during the first fiscal quarter is the highest it has posted in any quarter in three years. Sales of Itanium-based Integrity servers doubled compared with last year and made up 18 percent of sales in the Business Critical Server unit, which had sales of $890 million in the quarter overall, a decline of 2 percent compared with last year. That means Itanium server sales were about the same as last quarter, about $160 million. The company said HP-UX servers were up 3 percent, but NonStop servers were down 19 percent and AlphaServers continued to decline. HP did not say by how much.

Aurema, Novell Make ARMTech Workload Management Work with SUSE Linux

Systems management software maker Aurema announced at LinuxWorld last week that it has partnered with Novell to weave Aurema's ARMTech workload management software into SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9.

Aurema, which is based in Cupertino, California, has workload management software that supports Windows and Solaris servers, and is adding SLES 9 as its first Linux platform. The company also has hooks into VMware virtual machine partitions, Citrix Metaframe, and Microsoft SQL Server databases. Aurema has been working with the Linux community for the past two years to add workload management hooks into the Linux kernel, and has even open sourced an Entitlement Based Scheduler for Linux on SourceForge. This is a modification of the Linux O(1) CPU scheduler. While this program is currently in beta at SourceForge, Aurema says it will have a commercialized product for SLES 8 and SLES 9 available in April.

SGI Introduces ProPack Extensions for SUSE Linux

When Silicon Graphics announced its HPC-centric Altix 3000 series of Linux-Itanium servers two years ago, the company grabbed the Red Hat Linux Advanced Server 2.1 distribution of the time and made some tweaks to it that would allow Linux to better use the shared memory space of the Altix NUMA cluster. This special variant of Linux was known as the SGI ProPack, and it provided other optimizations, such as improved math libraries and algorithms for performing calculations, as well. While the Altix servers can run Red Hat or Novell SUSE Linux without the ProPack feature, to get the most out of the Altix machines, you really need the ProPack extensions (which are not, by the way, available as open source).

Last week at LinuxWorld, SGI and Novell announced that ProPack 4 is now fully supported on Novell's SLES 9 Linux variant, and does not require the special version of Red Hat Advanced Server created by SGI years ago.

In a related announcement, SGI and Novell said the Altix 3000 can now scale a single Linux instance to 512 processors under that shared NUMA memory. SGI also said that from here on out, it would bundle the Itanium version of SLES 9 on its Altix machines. When the Altix machines were first announced, they were remarkable in that they pushed Linux to 64 processors in a single shared memory space.

Arkeia Bundles Network Backup on SGI Altix 350s

Linux backup specialist Arkeia and Linux server maker Silicon Graphics announced last week a special bundling deal for Arkeia's Network Backup archiving software on SGI's Altix 350 servers as a turnkey solution.

Under the bundling deal, customers buy a single Altix 350 server that they are going to use as a backup server. (The Altix 350 is a two-way Itanium server that can be extended through SGI's NUMAflex clustering technology up to 32 processors and 384 GB of shared memory for running technical applications. You would probably only buy a two-way Altix 350 to run backups.) On top of this, you load Linux and Arkeia's Network Backup archiving software. The license that Arkeia is bundling on the Altix 350s can back up as many as 10 server nodes using SGI's now open source XFS file system, and it includes the Arkeia Data Encryption and Arkeia Tape Archive modules, which are must-haves for the security-sensitive places where supercomputers do their work. AGI is leasing the Altix 350 used for backups for $370 a month for a 36-month term, and Arkeia is selling the software for the server for $1,919 for a limited time. That's an 80 percent discount off list price for the Network Backup license, by the way, which is pretty hefty.

Cybernet's SlashSupport Offers Dirt Cheap Linux Support

Cybernet Software Systems, a San Jose-based custom computing and systems integration specialist, has announced a new subsidiary called SlashSupport that is offering cut-throat priced technical support for the various Linux distributions.

Specifically, SlashSupport will offer support for Red Hat, Novell, Mandrakesoft, Turbolinux, Slackware, Debian, and other older Linuxes. The company is doing so from its tech support centers in India and is working with IBM India to provide the support. IBM seems to be providing backup to SlashSupport in the deal.

SlashSupport did not provide support pricing, but its telephone support will be available through toll free numbers in India and the United States and will include an online knowledge base as well. As it ramps up the business, SlashSupport is giving away support for a single desktop and a single server for a three-month term, with up to five support calls each. Support pricing is based on a mix of a base charge per machine plus per-incident pricing. The company is also offering service-level agreements for support, and porting services for companies that need help getting applications onto Linux.

MySQL Provides IP Indemnification for Open Source Database

Open-source database developer MySQL announced yesterday it will begin providing its customers with intellectual property indemnification to protect them from any patent, trade secret, or copyright infringement lawsuits in the future. IP indemnification is part of the new "MySQL Network" support packages that MySQL announced at the LinuxWorld show in Boston. In addition to IP indemnification, the MySQL Network packages offer enhanced support, certification with applications, access to the MySQL knowledge base, access to Update Advisor (a new service that alerts users to updated MySQL software), and Technical Alert Advisor, which notifies users of issues related to their specific computing environment before they cause problems. MySQL Network is available now for 11 major platforms, including Unix, Linux, and Windows Server 2003, and costs from $595 to $4,995 for an annual subscription.

Rackable Systems to Raise $85 Million in IPO

X86 server maker Rackable Systems has announced it has filed an initial public offering that it hopes will help it raise $85 million. Rackable, which is based in Milpitas, California, boasts Microsoft and Yahoo as its biggest customers. The company has another 98 customers of its rack-based servers, which support both Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron processors. Microsoft and Yahoo accounted for nearly 60 percent of its $86.8 million in sales for the first nine months of 2004. That's a pretty tight concentration for sales, and investors might be equally jumpy because Rackable lost $34.9 million during that time. Rackable is banking on its expertise in Linux and Windows, in remote systems management, and in DC power supplies and other power-saving optimizations to give it a leg-up on much bigger players in the server market and some interest on the part of potential investors.

Lehman Brothers is leading off the investors in the IPO, and cautions that the amount of the IPO is just an estimate for calculating banker fees. The IPO apparently is being floated mainly to buy out Parthenon Capital, which has a 60 percent stake in the company, for $21 million, and to distribute some $743,000 to the company's CEO and CFO and another $1.5 million to the company's founders. The remaining dough will be used for working capital and general expenses. The company has 119 employees.