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Open Source Community Weaves Geronimo Java App Server Under Apache Project

IBM's WebSphere and BEA Systems' WebLogic J2EE-compliant application servers were served notice from the open source development community last week as the Apache Software Foundation announced the Geronimo Java application server. Apache Geronimo, started in August 2003, is now an official Apache project, and the foundation of open source developers hopes to have Geronimo certified as an official J2EE application server by the end of the third quarter this year.

Geronimo is a lot of different programs woven together to make a single server, including Apache Tomcat and Apache Axis; OpenEJB and ActiveMQ from Codehaus; JOTM and ASM from ObjectWeb; CGLIB and MX4J from SourceForge; and Jetty from Mortbay. Geronimo will compete with commercial application servers from IBM, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and BEA Systems. Customers will get to choose a Web application server based on its merits, which is what a competitive market is all about. Find out more on the Apache Geronimo Web site.

Linux Patch to Support NX Security Released

Ingo Molnar, one of the open source coders working on the Linux kernel while at his day job at Red Hat, has released a patch for the No Execute, or NX, security feature that Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, Transmeta, and VIA Technologies are adding to their X86 desktop and server processors. NX was first developed in AMD's Opteron processors. As the name suggests, the NX feature uses a special extra bit in the memory page tables of X86 processors to designate an area of memory as executable or not for a specific program. If implemented properly, NX should stop rogue viruses and worms from exploiting stack overflows and buffer overflows that allow them to put rogue programs into unmapped areas of memory and then execute them.

The NX feature support for Linux was based on work already done by Intel's engineers, according to Molnar. You can get the patch from the Linux-Kernel archive. It is unclear when NX will be delivered in commercial hardware and software. It is expected to be available for Windows with Windows XP Service Pack 2 in the fall. Linux support should be roughly on par with this timeframe, but for now Red Hat is only making it available in its Fedora Core 2 prototype version of Linux.

Sun Not Planning Linux-Based Netra-Ruggedized Servers

As part of the festivities last week at the NCQ204 event in Shanghai, Sun Microsystems announced that it has tweaked the four-way Sun Fire V440 Unix server to make it NEBS-certified, and it outfitted the machine with DC power, both of which are requirements for ruggedized applications in the military and telecommunications markets. Sun has a big business selling Sparc/Solaris servers to such customers, and the advent of the Carrier-Grade Linux project and cheap X86-based blade servers to run it have given Linux vendors a very lucrative market to chase. And they have. Knowing this, you might think Sun would fight fire with fire and launch its own NEBS-certified Linux/X86 machines. You'd be wrong, at least for now.

Kirk Lozier, product line manager for the Netra product line, says that Hewlett-Packard (which sells Itanium and PA-RISC ruggedized servers) is just about the only real competition that Sun has in this market. Lozier says that Sun has no plans to launch a Netra product line based on Solaris on X86 or Linux on X86.

MandrakeSoft Supports Opteron with Mandrakelinux 10 Official Release

European Linux distributor MandrakeSoft has announced that Mandrakelinux 10.0 Official release now supports the 64-bit Opteron workstation and server and AMD64 desktop processors from Advanced Micro Devices. While the general X86 version of Mandrakelinux 10.0 Official will run in 32-bit mode on the AMD chips, MandrakeSoft says that, by moving to full 64-bit support on the chips, customers can see an improvement in application performance of about 20 percent. The four-CD set of the software is available for $130 through the company's online store, and given that high-performance-computing customers like workstation versions of code to run their clusters (mainly because it is cheaper than buying full server versions), MandrakeSoft stands a good chance of getting in on some cluster deals.

Lawrence Livermore Lab Turns on World's Biggest Linux Cluster

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has turned on the 20 teraflops "Thunder" Linux cluster, making it one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. Thunder was completed in about nine months. And although Livermore had expected the installation to take only five months' time, it's still one of the fastest large-scale cluster installations on record. Thunder was originally described by Intel as using 1,002 of its own "Tiger4" four-way, white-box Itanium 2 servers. But Livermore now says it is using four-way servers from Intel—the CD 6440 servers to be specific. Each node in the Thunder cluster runs Red Hat Linux, and the nodes are linked to one another through Quadrics interconnection switches. For economic reasons, Livermore is using the 1.4 GHz "Madison" Itanium 2 processors. The 20 teraflops cluster costs only $20 million to build, which is why anyone with big number-crunching jobs is looking at Linux clusters using Itaniums. Livermore says it is seeing the applications that used to run on its 32-bit Xeon cluster run anywhere from 50 to 400 percent faster on Thunder.

IDC Expects Software Subscriptions to Grow Steadily

Software analysts at IDC have just released a forecast for the market for subscription-based software licensing, which many vendors believe is going to be their salvation from the horrors of constantly trying to upgrade their installed bases. Software subscriptions are expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 16.6 percent from 2003 to 2008, reaching $43 billion worldwide by 2008, according to the IDC report. Perpetual software licenses will shrink modestly at a rate of 0.3 percent annually over the same timeframe, according to the report.

But IDC may be underestimating how big the seismic shift will be away from perpetual licensing and toward subscription licensing. People are sick of managing their licenses and upgrading their software, and vendors are sick of selling their products this way. If vendors come up with the right mechanisms and pricing to properly do subscription-based software licensing, the shifts could be a lot larger than what IDC expects. There are plenty of software upstarts that are going to try to make this happen, and they may fail, just as most companies that tried to sell software under the application service provider model in the late 1990s and early 2000s did. This time around, they may just get it right.