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But Wait, There's More
IDC Says IT Recovery in U.S. Is Starting in the West
IT spending is starting to pick up in the western part of the United States, according to research from IDC. IDC reckons that IT spending in California was $37.9 billion in 2003 and that it will grow by 5 percent this year. The company suggests that growth will be good in other western states, too. However, IDC says that IT spending in the manufacturing areas of the Midwest and the South will not pick up as quickly, particularly in Missouri, Kansas, and South Carolina. IDC says that the Northeast is a volatile region and that financial and banking institutions, which are the economic pillars of this region, will lead IT spending growth. IDC is projecting that the U.S. economy, as measured by gross domestic product, will grow by 4.6 percent in 2004 and that IT spending in the United States will nearly match it, with 4.7 percent growth. During the boom years of the late 1990s, IT spending growth was typically double that of GDP growth.
Gentoo Updates Its Linux Distribution
A few weeks ago, the Gentoo project announced its latest implementation of Linux, the Gentoo 2004.0 release. Gentoo, if you are unfamiliar with it (as we were), is unique among the various Linux distributions in that it includes a sophisticated software distribution system called Portage that allows end users to set up a highly customized Linux stack and then keep it up to date using Portage. As such, installing Gentoo is a bit different from grabbing a set of Red Hat or SuSE CDs and just installing it. Gentoo requires a bit more knowledge about the guts of the system and it is not for the faint of heart. We paid our ten bucks to get it and had difficulties setting it up on a baby Mini-ITX system. Our IT guy, Justin Ward, knows Linux cold, and when he found an "undeclared identifier" error during our install, he said there must be a bug in the headers or code as it relates to the X86 distribution we tried to install. It could be that there is an issue with the C3 X86 processors, which are not supported by all Linux distributors.
Gentoo says that it supports X86, PowerPC, UltraSparc, Alpha, and MIPS processors with Gentoo 2004.0, and has made a LiveCD installation available for X86, PowerPC, UltraSparc, and Alpha machines. Gentoo 2004.0 includes the latest stable releases of the KDE and Gnome graphical user environments, supports ReiserFS, XFS, ext3, EVMS, and LVM file systems, and over 6,000 Linux applications. Despite out initial problems, it is still worth the $10 to see what Portage is and see if it can make supporting and administering Linux machines easier.
Dell Launches PowerVault 745N Network Storage for Linux Servers
Server and storage maker Dell announced this week a new network-attached storage (NAS) server aimed at SMB customers. The PowerVault 745N is based on a 1U server chassis that can be equipped with a 2.4 GHz/128 KB Celeron, 2.8 GHz/1 MB Pentium 4, and 3.2 GHz 512 KB Pentium 4 processor, up to 4 GB of main memory that is implemented as cache for the disks in the unit, and two Gigabit Ethernet ports for linking to servers. The PowerVault 745N runs the trimmed down Windows Storage Server 2003 variant of Microsoft's operating system and can be equipped with up to four Serial ATA IDE disk drives with a total capacity of between 160 GB to 1 TB of capacity. Servers running Linux, Unix, Windows, Mac OS, and NetWare operating systems can store data on this NAS device; the Unix-alike operating systems are supported through Microsoft's Services for Unix extensions. With a Celeron processor, 512 MB of cache memory, an unspecified RAID controller, and four 40 GB disks costs $2,332. Machines that implement RAID algorithms in the Windows software instead of in hardware cost $1,803.
FlashMob Experimental Linux Supercomputer to Debut April 3
If you happen to be on the University of San Francisco campus this Friday morning and are carrying your laptop, you might want to lend your computing capacity to an experimental, massively parallel supercomputer cluster called FlashMob I, which will be created on that day from all of the computing capacity that the nerds running the project can scrounge from users who are donating their computers to the cause.
In a move that parallels the antics of the Guinness Book of World Records, the students at USF will be running around like crazy, dispensing a special bootable CD drive that will run a modified Linux kernel and the Linpack Fortran benchmark suite. In the gymnasium, USF students, who said they could do this as a joke to professor Paul Miller, who also works as a computer scientist at nearby Lawrence Livermore National Labs (where some of the heaviest iron in the world is crunching numbers), are going to set up a 10 Gigabit Ethernet and plug into between 1,000 and 1,200 machines. They will configure machines from 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., and for the next four hours they will run the set of Linpack benchmark tests, hoping to create, however ephemerally, a machine that ranks among the Top 500 supercomputer rankings.
If you want to participate, you have to have a machine with at least a 1.3 GHz Pentium, Celeron, or Athlon processor, 256 MB of main memory, a 100 Mbit LAN port, and a CD-ROM drive. The FlashMob CD will not install anything on the machines in the cluster, but rather will boot right from the CD into memory and run the benchmark in memory.
While many institutions and companies have built parallel Unix and Linux clusters using cheap PCs or servers, this, according to USF, is the first truly ad hoc supercomputer that is coming together to run a specific job and nothing more. The students behind the experiment envision a day when researchers who need lots of computing power will put out a call for a flash mob event, distribute their code in a flashable image, so it can be put onto CDs, and then get the coffee and doughnuts together to make it all a social gathering.
The group of USF students are already planning FlashMob II and FlashMob III, and given the open and experimental nature of the Unix and Linux communities, the odds favor that students at other universities will start competing for the biggest flash mob record. Finally, the nerds will have something that rivals Big Ten football or the NCAA basketball tournament.
VIA Debuts Tiny C3-Based Nano-ITX System Boards
After months of rumors among the Mini-ITX subculture, Taiwanese X86 chip, chipset, and motherboard maker VIA Technologies has announced yet a smaller form factor system board called the Nano-ITX, which includes all of the major system components needed for a media PC or embedded server--all crammed into a square board that is only 12 centimeters (4.7 inches) on a side.
The Mini-ITX form factor, which is based on a square system board that measures 17 centimeters (6.7 inches) on a side, has caught on among tinkerers in the PC market because it is based on the low-power line of C3 and Eden processors that VIA Technologies obtained through its acquisition of chipmaker Cyrix from National Semiconductor in September 1999. National Semiconductor bought Cyrix to try to foster the entry PC market (specifically, sub-$1,000 PCs with dreams of the sub-$500 PC), but it gave up on the business after owning Cyrix for only two years. Here it is, five years later, and reasonably powerful Mini-ITX boards are so inexpensive that people are building their own baby servers and putting PCs inside cigar boxes, lunch boxes, and other weird places. The speed of C3 processors ranges from 600 MHz to 1 GHz, but they consume very little power and generate very little heat, which means they can run fanless or with very small fans that are nearly silent. The Mini-ITX and Nano-ITX boards have built-in serial, parallel, LAN, and other ports that a modern PC and server has. Some variants that VIA Technologies makes have dual LAN ports; others have video outputs, CardBus, and flash slots. And while the boards have only one 33-MHz PCI slot, which limits their expandability, they include an on-board floppy controller and a dual-port IDE controller. When equipped with one or two disk drives designed for laptops and a low profile floppy, CD, and SDRAM, the resulting machine is ludicrously small: about the size of a hardcover book. And you can build a complete machine for under $500. We know this because we just put a Mini-ITX server running FreeBSD Unix in production as one of our Web servers here at Guild Companies.
The Nano-ITX board uses the new Eden-N fanless processor, which runs from 533 MHz to 1 GHz. This processor is just 225 square millimeters in size (think pinky nail) and only consumes 2.5 watts running at 533 MHz. The chip is based on a clone X86 instruction set that is roughly analogous to a Pentium 4. And while there have been some issues for programs that have been compiled very tightly to Intel X86 chips for the absolutely highest performance tuning when they try to run on the C3 chips, the rumor is that VIA Technologies has worked with platform providers to fix this. (Commercial Linux distributor SuSE, for instance, did not support the C3 chips.) The Nano-ITX board's CN400 chipset supports Serial ATA, Parallel ATA, USB 2.0, and includes a RAID 0 mirroring and RAID 1 striping algorithm. The board also supports up to 8 GB of DDR400 main memory, up from the 2 GB maximum main memory of the Mini-ITX board. And because the ITX boards are aimed at the entry PC market, the CN400 chipset includes pretty decent on-board graphics controllers. The frontside bus on the Eden-N processor used in the Nano-ITX board is 50 percent faster than on the Eden processors used in the Mini-ITX boards, and the links between the I/O and processor is four times as fast. The new board also has sophisticated TV, HDTV, and audio capabilities, and the Eden-N processor has a built-in encryption engine that can crunch the AES algorithm and transmit at 12.5 gigabits per second running at 1 GHz.
VIA Technologies did not provide pricing on the Eden-N chips or the Nano-ITX system boards, but it did say that the both would be available in the second quarter, through its distribution channel. All you need to make a Mini-ITX or Nano-ITX machine is a power supply, a case, a hard drive, a CD-ROM, and a memory stick. Everything else is integrated into the system board.
EU Slaps Microsoft with Fine, Sanctions
When you have over $50 billion in the bank, like Microsoft does, the record-breaking $613 million fine that the European Commission's antitrust authority just imposed on the company last week, after finally deciding to sue Microsoft for antitrust violations following a five-year review, does not really register. And the stiff sanctions that European antitrust commissioner Mario Monti is asking for may all come to nothing, if the experience of the U.S. court system is any measure.
To read about the EU fine and sanctions and get our initial thoughts on this case, see our new Windows platform newsletter. As for most AS/400 and iSeries shops, Windows is a part of their lives, both on the desktop and in the data center. But this lawsuit, like many others, is more about curbing Microsoft's behavior and Microsoft usurping its rights than it is about technology. This case will drag on for years, and while it is interesting, because of the issues it raises, the day-to-day IT operations at most IT shops are not going to change dramatically for many years, if at all.
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SUSE LINUX
