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HP Does vPars for Linux, Windows

Hewlett-Packard this week announced that it will offer sub-processor virtual machine partitioning on the Integrity and PA-RISC line of servers. IBM has thus far been the only midrange and enterprise server maker offering this capability, which ships for the first time on its pSeries and p5 Unix servers in a few weeks with AIX 5L 5.3 and its new Virtualization Engine hypervisor. Up until now, the finest granularity that was available with vPars was one partition per processor. Now, HP is offering vPars that can be as small as 1/20th of a processor and that can be as large as eight processors. IBM's granularity on the new p5 machines is 1/10th of a processor all the way up to all processors in a single machine (which currently stands at 16 processors with the p5 570 but which will be extended to 64-way processing with the p5 590, due by the end of the year).

Each vPar in HP's new Virtual Server Environment running on the Integrity machines can run a single instance of HP-UX, Linux, or Windows, and with the delivery of OpenVMS for Itanium later this year, customers will also be able to run OpenVMS inside vPars. In theory, any Itanium-based operating system can be put inside one of the new vPars, which could mean one of the open source BSDs or even Solaris if Sun ever announces it. The new vPars also have shared I/O capabilities, which means that many partitions can logically share physical I/O devices such as disk controllers, LAN cards, and so forth.

HP has also extended the Workload Manager for its HP-UX Unix platform that keeps applications from butting heads inside HP-UX to cover hundreds of machines in a network or hundreds of nPar or vPar partitions spanning one or many machines; these machines can now be running either HP-UX or Linux. This Global Workload Manager is a significant upgrade from the Workload Manager, which could only manage 20 machines or partitions. This new Global Workload Manager will ship before the end of the year, and it will eventually support Windows Server editions as well. Exactly when that will happen is unclear, but van der Zweep says that as soon as Microsoft offers APIs that are similar to the processor set APIs in Linux 2.6, which allow specific applications to be pegged to specific processors, then HP will support the management of Windows instances through Global Workload Manager

Evans Data Survey Suggests Three Quarters of Linux Servers Never Hacked

According to the summer 2004 poll of developers performed by Evans Data, 78 percent of developers working on production Linux servers say that they have never had their systems compromised by a hack attack. Some 10 percent of developers report that they have had one hack, and another 6 percent say that they have had two hacks. Only 7 percent report three or more hacks on their machines. Evans Data asks this question every six months of developers, and the answer has been more or less the same over the past three years.

IBM, Red Hat Get High Security Certification

Server maker IBM and commercial Linux distributor Red Hat say that they have jumped through the rigorous Common Criteria security certifications used by the U.S. government (and particularly the Department of Defense) to certify if a particular server and operating system stack is secure enough for deployment in sensitive situations.

The Common Criteria certification is the result of the merging of security standards from North American and European governments. It is used by governments to separate products that have demonstrated their security, as audited by expert third parties, from those products that cannot or have not attained the certification. EAL4 is the highest rating, but EAL3 is good enough for government work (so to speak) where Unix systems have sold well in the past decade.

IBM and Red Hat say that they have achieved the CAPP/EAL3+ evaluation level on the Common Criteria tests with Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 3 WS on xSeries servers (which is important since workstation Linux licenses are often used in supercomputer clusters) as well as Enterprise Linux 3 AS on IBM's full line of servers. That includes the xSeries Pentium and Xeon machines, the pSeries and iSeries Power machines, the eServer 325 Opteron machines, and the zSeries mainframes. The two companies qualified Enterprise Linux 3, Update 2 on the tests. Update 3 is around the corner, and it is unclear if this update will have to be recertified on this iron again.

In late January 2004, IBM and Novell certified SuSE Enterprise Server 8 with service pack 3 running across the eServer line (xSeries, iSeries, pSeries, zSeries, and eServer 325 Opteron-based machines) to the Common Criteria CAPP/EAL3+ level.

Dell Offers Asianux Linux with Oracle 10g in China

Server maker Dell has announced that it has certified the Asianux 1.0 variant of Linux to run on its PowerEdge servers. Asianux is a joint venture between China's Red Flag Linux and Japan's Miracle Linux to create a pan-Asian Linux. Dell had already certified Red Flag Linux for the PowerEdge machines in November 2003. The Asianux 1.0 certification was announced concurrently with support for the Oracle 10g database on Asianux 1.0. Both Dell and Oracle are putting a lot of marketing muscle behind Linux, and want to capture share in the exploding Chinese IT market. In fact, Oracle owns a 58.5 percent stake in Miracle Linux.

Siebel Says It Will Support DB2 on Linux

Customer relationship management software maker Siebel Systems says that it plans to support its Siebel 7.7 application suite on Linux servers supporting IBM's DB2 database. The announcement of support for Linux platforms comes as Siebel is working on its Siebel 8.0 suite, which is being rebuilt on top of IBM's DB2 and WebSphere software stack. Siebel 8.0 is due some time in 2005, but Siebel cannot wait that long to get on the Linux bandwagon. The immediate support of the current Siebel 7.7 is stop-gap measure until Siebel 8.0 is ready.

Micro Focus Readies 64-bit Cobol for Power-Linux Combo

Compiler software maker Micro Focus has announced that it will support its 64-bit COBOL compiler, called Micro Focus Server Express, on IBM's eServer p5 and pSeries servers running the Linux operating system either as their sole platform or within logical partitions.

Micro Focus already supports its COBOL tools on IBM's AIX Unix platform, the main operating system on the pSeries and p5 machines, in addition the other major Unixes. Micro Focus Server Express can integrate COBOL applications with Java, XML, and other Web services technologies. The company has a separate product, called Net Express, that creates a COBOL environment for Windows and integrates it with .NET. The company did not say when it will deliver COBOL support for IBM's Power Linux offering.

Pogo Linux Announces Linux Servers, Storage

Linux server and storage specialist Pogo Linux rolled out a bunch of new hardware at the latest LinuxWorld trade show in San Francisco a few weeks ago. Pogo is ironically headquartered in Redmond, Washington, also the home of Microsoft; the company is one of a handful of hardware makers that are trying to carve out a niche in the market by only selling Linux solutions.

Pogo sells a line of two-way and four-way servers based on Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron processors. The PerformanceWare servers that the company has already been shipping have just been updated to use the new 64-bit "Nocona" Xeon processors. The company also sells uniprocessor Pentium 4 and dual Xeon Web servers, which are branded WebWare. In addition to these machines, Pogo has announced a preconfigured Linux Beowulf cluster package that companies can buy with 16, 32, and 64 processor configurations, which is called the ComputeColony. A 16-processor cluster, including the head node for system management, cabinetry and networking components plus preconfigured Beowulf software costs $27,999.

Pogo also announced the StorageWare 548 storage array, which is based on its four-way PerformanceWare 3564 Opteron server, which was announced at LinuxWorld. The StorageWare 548 comes in a 5U chassis with space for 48 Seagate 250 GB SCSI disk drives, for a total of 12 TB of disk capacity. The storage array will be available at the end of August in a base configuration for $14,999. The PerformanceWare 3564 quad Opteron server itself is available now; it supports up to 64 GB of main memory and has five hot-swap SCSI drive bays and dual Gigabit Ethernet NICs. With four 1.8 GHz Opteron 842 processor, 4 GB of main memory, and two 36 GB disk drives, the PerformanceWare 3564 server costs $12,999.