Red Hat Readies Xen Virtualization, Stateless Linux for Enterprise Linux 5

As you might have predicted, Red Hat is indeed working to support the open source Xen virtual machine hypervisor in the future Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 server, which is expected to come to market in late 2006. In a statement last week, Red Hat said that RHEL 5 would feature a "fully integrated server virtualization capability," which would be done through the Xeon community and unnamed partners. Red Hat is promising to integrate this Xen-based virtualization with its storage virtualization software, the Red Hat Global File System (GFS) and its system management service, the Red Hat Network. And because virtualized server pricing is a sticky issue, Red Hat is promising that its implementation of Xen will allow customers to run an unlimited number of virtual instances for a flat subscription fee.

What that fee is remains unclear, but the odds favor it being close to the cost of a regular Red Hat Enterprise Linux license. This way, Red Hat gets to sell one license for the server and get about as much money as it would have without virtualization. The utilization on the virtualized machine will be a lot higher, and Red Hat could try to charge a multiple based on the increased average utilization (say, from two to four times as high as one license). But if Red Hat does that, then companies will simply use the open source Xen offering and just ignore what Red Hat is doing, so the premium Red Hat can practically charge is not a lot. The odds favor Red Hat's Xen implementation being far less costly than VMware's own ESX Server virtual machine hypervisor, which costs thousand of dollars per server socket (depending on the features, it can be quite high). I think Red Hat could probably charge as much as a 1.5X to 2X multiple over the cost of a regular RHEL 5 license for the fully virtualized license, not including fees for GFS and Red Hat Network.

Red Hat also said it is working on a variant of RHEL called Stateless Linux, which would allow a Linux instance to be deployed over the network to a laptop or desktop, with all of the state information about a Linux setup being stored on the network rather than on the client device. Such an implementation of Linux will be very attractive to customers with lots of PCs and laptops--and therefore big administration headaches--and with intense security needs. On the development tool front, expect Red Hat to pump some more money and effort into Eclipse (common IDE framework), SystemTAP (an open source probe for Linux that is akin to Sun Microsystems' DTrace and IBM's dprobe tools), and Frysk (a distributed system monitoring project), and others.

Intel Begins "Paxville" Xeon MP Shipments, Adds Goodies

As expected, Intel began shipping its dual-core "Paxville" Xeon MP processors for four-way and larger servers last week. While the Paxville Xeon MPs are not as technically elegant as some of the future Xeons that the company is cooking up for next year, they give Intel's server partners something to sell against existing single-core Xeons and dual-core Opterons until those future chips become available.

The Paxville MP processors, which are technically called the Dual-Core Intel Xeon Processor 7000, come in a number of different variants. The Xeon 7040 runs at 3 GHz, has a 667 MHz front side bus, and works with the E8500 chipset. This chip costs $3,157. A version of the chip, called the Xeon 7041, runs at 3 GHz as well and has a faster 800 MHz front side bus (but won't be available until early next year); that bus is enabled by the E8501 chipset, which is a tweak of the existing E8500 chipset from Intel. (Both chipsets cost $255 a pop.) The Xeon 7030 processor has two cores running at 2.8 GHz and 1 MB of L2 cache per core, running against an 800 MHz front side bus. This chip costs $1,980, and requires the E8501 chipset. Lastly, there's the Xeon 7020, a 2.66 GHz version of the Xeon MP chip with only 1 MB of L2 cache per core, and which uses the slower 667 MHz front side bus; this chip costs $1,177.

People were expecting the 2.66 GHz and 2.8 GHz chips, but the 3 GHz versions were a pleasant surprise. Intel didn't say anything about that a few weeks ago. And it didn't say anything about the fact that the Virtualization Technology (VT), which does the work of instruction set virtualization in electronics rather than in a software layer, was cooked into the Paxville MP. (Apparently, this VT support will be activated with a BIOS command when it is available next year.) Intel didn't say anything about an 800 MHz front side bus, either, which will be available early next year using the E8501 chipset. It looks like server makers have been pressing Intel to get some more impressive things out the door.

These Paxville MP processors are pretty much what high-end server makers have to work with until the large-cache "Tulsa" kickers to the current 64-bit, single-core "Potomac" Xeon MPs ship, but these are not due until the second half of 2006. The Tulsa Xeon MPs will be implemented in a 65 nanometer process and will have 16 MB of shared L3 cache for each four-socket board, which is new for Intel, as well as 2 MB of L2 cache per core.

The Paxville MP platforms using the E8501 chipset will be upgradeable to the Tulsa MP chips. The question is whether the Paxville MP processors launched above, and delivering anywhere from 40 to 60 percent more performance than the single-core 3.66 GHz Cranford/E8500 platforms, is enough to carry customers through to Tulsa Xeon MPs. There are some pretty impressive Opteron platforms on the horizon in 2006.

SteelEye Delivers Update for LifeKeeper Clustering for Linux

Linux high availability software maker SteelEye has put out an update release of its popular clustering software, which is called LifeKeeper for Linux V5.5.1. LifeKeeper runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and 4, Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux Server 8 and 9, Asianux Linux 1.0 and 2.0, and a little-known variant of RHEL 3 called WhiteBox Enterprise Linux 3.0, which was created by a public governmental body in Louisiana that did not want to upgrade to RHEL 4.

With LifeKeeper for Linux V5.1.1, SteelEye is adding multipathing disk array support for EMC's Clariion and Symmetrix arrays and IBM's DS and ESS arrays; the software already supported multipathing on Hewlett-Packard MSA and EVA arrays. Multipathing allows redundant data paths to disk archives from the server through networks, switches, and disk controllers back to the places where the data is stored on drives, which means a failure along any part of that line linking the server to the drive does not kill the application running on the server.

OpenLogic Hires CEO, Gets Series A Venture Funding

Having rolled out its BlueGlue 3.2 open source software stack and support product in July and received some $4 million in venture capital in March to help fuel its product launch, OpenLogic is ready to get down to business. To that end, the company announced last week that it has hired Steven Grandchamp to be its new president and CEO. Back in March, when the venture cash came in, OpenLogic named Doug Barre, a former chief operating officer at development software maker Borland to the position of chairman, and its CEO and president posts were vacant. Now Grandchamp will fill in those roles. He was one of the founders of banking software specialists Formation Technologies after being an IT manager in the banking business for many years. After Formation was sold to a larger company, Grandchamp then had a few senior management positions in the application development operations at Microsoft Consulting Services. His immediate past job was as president and CEO of a content management software company called Information Management Research, which was sold to Captaris, a competitor, in early 2005.

In addition to the new president and CEO appointment, OpenLogic also announced that Carl Ledbetter, the former senior vice president and chief technology officer at Novell and a hot-shot techie who spent time in top positions at Sun Microsystems and AT&T, has been named to OpenLogic's board of directors. OpenLogic also said that UV Partners has also kicked in an undisclosed amount of cash into its Series A venture funds. OpenLogic did not disclose how much dough UV Partners kicked in.

Sun, Microsoft Work on Java-.NET Interoperability

The love fest between rivals Sun Microsystems and Microsoft continued last week as the two companies announced they would provide substantially improved interoperability between the Java and .NET programming environments.

In April 2004, Microsoft and Sun buried the hatchet in their bitter war, which saw Sun attack Microsoft on antitrust grounds in the courts and Microsoft create a Redmond dialect of Java called .NET with which it could attack Java. By stopping the Java-.NET wars, Sun was able to get close to $2 billion, which it desperately needed, and Microsoft was able to get some interoperability agreements, which both of these companies customers (and, indeed, all Java and .NET customers) needed very badly.

According to Joe Keller, vice president of marketing for integration platforms at Sun, last week's Java-.NET interoperability announcement is the third phase in the commitment that the two companies made to not just stop fighting, but to start cooperating. In May, Sun and Microsoft delivered single sign-on capabilities for Windows and Solaris platforms, and then a few months later they committed to support the WS* specification relating to systems management, which is called the WS-Management spec. With this support, Windows servers can access systems management data and features in Solaris operating systems, and Solaris can access similar features in Windows. This allows Solaris administrators working with Sun's N1 systems management tools to seek out, monitor, and control Windows servers and Windows administrators working in the Microsoft Management Console to reach into Solaris servers and do the same.

The WS* specifications include some 13 different specifications on how to create a Web service. Sun has committed to implement more WS* specifications, including those relating to SOAP-based messaging, metadata, security, and quality of service in the Java platform, and Microsoft has committed to do the same in the .NET platform. Microsoft will be implementing these specs in the Windows Communication Foundation, formerly known as the "Indigo" project, while Sun will be implementing those specs first in project "Glassfish," the open source version of its Java Enterprise System application server. WCF is one of the nifty features coming out in the future "Longhorn" Vista Server. The commercial implementation of Sun's J2EE application server with this interoperability embedded in it is expected at the JavaOne show in May 2006. Sun is also putting the support into its Java Web Services Developer Pack development tools. Sun will be up in Redmond testing the interoperability this week, in fact, using early editions of this code. IBM, as a strong Java and Web services proponent, is expected to eventually equip its tools and application servers with similar features, and it won't be long before Linux gets them, too.

Keller says that while the WS-I spec and the SOAP protocol allowed Java and .NET to talk to each other, this interoperability is more robust. Now, you can be sure that services built in .NET or Java can talk to each other securely, predictably, and reliably. "This allows you to build truly enterprise-class service-oriented applications," explains Keller. "And as funny as this might sound, you don't have to care if the services are built in Java or .NET. They are just exposed as services on a network, and programmers just don't have to care."

Oracle Ships Free Database for Linux and Windows

Oracle's new free database, officially named Oracle 10g Express Edition, became available for beta testing yesterday. Oracle says the database, which it also calls Oracle Database XE, is aimed at providing students, developers, and database administrators with a starter database for developing and deploying their applications. The database is also being positioned for embedding into other applications by hardware vendors and third-party ISVs. Oracle Database XE is available for 32-bit Linux and Windows operating systems, and is limited to running on a computer with a single CPU (it can be a dual-core processor) and 1 GB of memory. Only one instance can be loaded on a single computer, and it's limited to 4 GB of data.

IBM Launches New Tape Drive and Tape Library

If you have a hankering for some new storage for your Unix server, IBM has some new products for you.

Big Blue recently announced the TS1120 E05 tape drive, which is a variant of the 3592 tape drive it has been selling for some time. This one has a native data transfer rate of 100 MB/sec, which is 2.5 times faster than the 3592 J1A tape drive, and at 500 GB per tape, can house 16 times as much data. The TS1120 E05 has a two-port Fibre Channel attachment to servers; it is supported with Linux, AIX, Solaris, and HP-UX as well as Windows 2000 and 2003, OS/400, and z/OS, z/VM, and VSE/ESA. The tape drive costs $6,000 or $7,500, depending on features; a 4 Gb/sec Fibre Channel switch costs $16,350.

IBM also announced the TS3310 tape library models L5B and E9U, the former being a 5U tape library for LTO 3 drives and the latter being a 9U extension unit for that library so it can hold more drives and tapes. LTO 2 drives are not supported in the library. The L5B library has 30 tape slots of storage, 6 slots of storage near the drives, and up to two LTO 3 drives. The LTO 3 tapes support 400 GB of native capacity (twice that with compression on) and can move uncompressed data at 80 MB/sec. The library is supported on systems running Linux, AIX, Solaris, and HP-UX as well as Windows 2000 and 2003 and OS/400. The base L5B unit, which costs $14,000, holds about 12 TB uncompressed, and the E9U expansion unit, which costs $11,000, holds another 36.8 TB uncompressed. These prices do not include the cost of the LTO 3 drives, which cost $12,500 for a SCSI-connected unit and $14,500 for a Fibre Channel-connected unit.