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HP Deep Sixes Itanium Workstations

Hewlett Packard quietly withdrew its Itanium-based workstation line from marketing on September 1, and spent last Friday trying to do damage control with the IT press as the word got out.

Given the fact that the PA-8800 is either the final or penultimate PA-RISC processor in HP's roadmap, dropping the zx2000 and zx6000 workstations, which use Itanium processors, from the line and discontinuing its Itanium workstations entirely begs the question of what plans HP has long-term for its HP-UX workstation customers. And, everybody is now going to wonder if the withdrawal of Itanium workstations somehow points to a future HP where doesn't use Itanium in servers.

The statement from HP indicated that the decision to stop selling Itanium workstations was based on customer needs: "In working with and listening to our high-performance workstation partners and customers, we have become aware that the focus in this arena is being driven toward 64-bit extension technology."

Well, that is all well and good for HP's Unix workstation customers, provided that they don't mind paying a big premium to buy baby Itanium/HP-UX servers and use them as workstations, they don't mind shifting to Windows or Linux for workstations, or they know that HP is going to support HP-UX on either 64-bit Xeon or Opteron processors. There is no indication that the latter is going to happen, by the way. But stranger things have happened.

HP is obviously very keen to explain that the death of Itanium doesn't mean it is dropping its support for Itanium on servers.

"The decision to discontinue HP's Itanium workstation investment is limited to the workstation market and has no impact on HP's success with Itanium-based Integrity servers," said the company statement. "HP continues its ongoing investment in Integrity server development and the multi-OS industry-standard Integrity server ecosystem. In the server market, which has different dynamics and customer requirements, HP continues its commitment to deliver on the roadmap for Integrity servers, as part of its overall portfolio of industry-standards based servers."

The question now is whether customers will believe HP. If they don't, they may start pressuring HP to port HP-UX to Xeon-64s or Opterons. This would be a very big job.

Broadcom Supports Linux on RAID Adapters

Chip maker Broadcom, which owns the ServerWorks line of chipsets popularly used in servers these days as well as several other families of chips, announced last week that its RAIDCore BC4000 family of RAID controller cards will now support Linux operating systems in addition to thir existing support for Microsoft's Windows server variants. The BC4000s are Serial ATA RAID cards, and they offer RAID support levels 0, 1, 5, 10, 50, 1n, and 10n as well as working in a non-RAID disk cluster. These controller cards support either four or eight disk drives and plug into 64-bit, PCI-X slots. Red Hat's Red Hat 9, Fedora Core 1, and Enterprise Linux 3 are supported on these RAID cards immediately, and support for Novell's SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 is slated for the fourth quarter. The Linux support is available through downloads of drivers from the Broadcom site.

New IBM eServer 326 Ready for Dual-Core Opterons

Advanced Micro Devices has been talking up its plans for the dual-core variants of the 64-bit Opteron processors, and IBM, the first tier one vendor to stand behind the Opteron processors, wants its customers to know that it will be first out the door with support for these future chips. In the meantime, IBM modified the eServer 325 to create the eServer 326 by supporting the option of Serial ATA drives and up to 16 GB of 400 MHz PC 3200 main memory (up from 12 GB of 333 MHz PC2700 memory in the eServer325). It also made the eServer 326 ready for the dual-core Opterons when they become available next year.

While it is interesting that IBM is pushing Opterons, primarily in Linux clusters to support parallel supercomputing applications, it will be more interesting when IBM delivers a full range of uniprocessor, two-way, four-way, and eight-way machines in tower and rack configurations. IBM has not shown any inclination to offer such a line of machines, mainly because Lopteron servers (that's Linux-Opteron, just like we shorten to Lintel) will gives its own Power5-based machines a run for the money since they offer similar performance and price/performance.

HP Says It Has Converted 200 Sun Shops in 18 Months

Trying to steal a little thunder as its rival, Sun Microsystems, was hogging all the headlines this week, Hewlett-Packard released a statement reminding everyone that it has converted some 200 of Sun's customers to the HP fold in the past 18 months under its Sun Eclipse competitive replacement program, and 40 of them have been in the financial services sector that Sun wants to own. Rubbing salt into the wound, HP added that, in the past three months, the migration rate from Sun to HP shops has increased by 50 percent.

While Sun and HP have been in a PR contest to prove who is raiding whose base best, the fact is that only a very small percentage of customers are pure shops, and only a small portion of the remaining customers are in play at all. That said, converting large customers can bring in millions of dollars a pop, so competitive replacements are not just good PR, but good business--when you can get it.

Iran Considering Dumping Windows for Linux

You will not find the Islamic Republic of Iran on Microsoft's short list of governments it wants to release source code to as part of its Government Security Program anytime soon, as nearly all of the estimated 7 to 9 million PCs in the country use pirated copies of Windows and Microsoft applications. Government officials openly admit this fact because, in Iran, there are no laws against the illegal copying of intellectual property--software or otherwise. However, Iran is now trying to gain entry into the World Trade Organization, according to a report in the South African Business Report, and, to do so, it must comply with international intellectual property laws. Just the same, the Iranian government is now considering moving its 1 million PCs to the Linux operating system. The government is doing this, according to the Business Report story, not only because it would be prohibitively expensive to properly license the software but also because Microsoft's software is hopelessly ridden with security holes and back doors, which could conceivably provide an avenue for its enemies, such as the United States, to compromise its digital sanctity. And you thought Ahmad Chalabi had problems.

Study Says American High Tech Has Lost 200,000 Jobs

The official economists for the U.S. government said that the recession ended in November 2001, but most of us think that this is a load of hogwash--at least in the IT sector, which has had perhaps more than its share of ups and downs in the past three years. According to a report from the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Chicago, which examined government statistics in the past few years, the unemployment rate for computer programmers was 6.7 percent in 2003, two years after the recession ended. It is interesting to note that, at the height of this recession, the unemployment rate for programmers was 2.5 percent.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in March 2001, when the recession officially began, there were 2.146 million employees in the IT industry in the States, and by April 2004 that number dropped to 1.743 million. In the major metro areas associated with IT--Boston, Chicago, Dallas, San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle--IT employment was absolutely hammered, down 18 to 25 percent, compared with the national average of only a 10 percent decline in IT jobs. The only major metro area where IT employment held was Washington, D.C. Obviously, the unemployment rates in these areas have spiked over that time. The downturn in IT spending and the contraction of the economy are certainly part of the cause of the loss of those 200,000 jobs nationwide since the recession was declared over, but the report also suggests that offshoring is having an impact, too. While the evidence for this assertion is thin, many IT professionals probably agree with that sentiment.

Meta Says Passwords Aren't Effective

Passwords have failed as an effective identity management tool, according to a new report from the META Group. Before saying to yourself, "Well, duh," and slinking off to read more "obvious" news reports on www.fark.com, consider this: the problem with passwords is not the sheer number of passwords you must memorize, as your experience may have led you to (mistakenly) believe. No, the problem is actually due to a lack of respect for the sheer level of access and authority that passwords afford, META says. Or, as Earl Perkins, vice president with META's security and risk strategies advisory service, puts it: "The issue with password protection isn't just a number issue. Rather, from a cultural standpoint, many individuals do not believe the value of the password reflects the value of the assets it protects."

So how best to resolve this password conundrum? Whatever it is, it ain't single sign-on, which, META says, will just "inject new problems regarding the balance between authentication and authorization." Instead, META says, the "ultimate solution" (which we understand has not yet been finalized) to this password problem will be based on these three facts: that people want to know their identity is secure, they want to identify themselves easily, and want to know the value of what they're accessing, based on how they access it. After running this through our cultural translation device, the answer is actually quite simple: biometric brain implants! And just think of how easy it will be to check out at Wal-Mart. Okay, you can go back to www.fark.com now.