But Wait, There's More

Sun Takes on Linux With Free, Open-Source Solaris

Making a program open-source does not instantly fix all of its marketing and technical problems, but it probably is a step in the right direction. And that's why this week Sun Microsystems will announce its plans to begin offering the Solaris 10 Unix operating system free of charge and to take the software open-source. Sun wants to undercut the Linux market, specifically Red Hat, which gives its implementation of Linux away for free, provides its variant of Linux as open-source, and makes all of its money by selling maintenance and tech support services for that Linux. Sun wants to do the same thing with Solaris, and sees that, as the underdog in the open source community, it has to undercut Red Hat on price.

Sun has taken its lumps in the past three years as it went from being the server industry juggernaut to a laughing stock. But the company is nimble and smart. Solaris is arguably the best Unix platform, particularly with the enhancements that have been made in Solaris 10, and by going to an open-source, services model, Sun is making AIX and HP-UX look pretty pricey, and it is also looking modern, generous, and unafraid.

Mandrakesoft Delivers Linux 2.6 for 64-Bit Xeons, Opterons

A few weeks ago, Mandrakesoft, the Franco-American commercial Linux distributor, announced its Mandrakelinux 10.1 Official release, which is based on the Linux 2.6 kernel. The company was expected at that time to announce a version of that Linux for the 64-bit X86 processors, but it was missing from the announcement.

Last week, after we had gone to press, the company announced that Mandrakelinux 10.1 Official now supports the extended 64-bit architectures embodied in the latest Intel Xeon chips as well as the AMD Opteron processors. The X86-64 release, like the Xeon-64 and Opteron processors, can support legacy 32-bit code. The updated software also supports the NX (No Execute) security features of the Xeon processors through a feature Mandrakesoft calls Enhanced Virus Protection. Mandrakelinux 10.1 for X86-64 is based on the PowerPack implementation of its 32-bit Linux; and costs 119 euros, compared to 79.90 euros for the PowerPack edition. So if you want 64-bit support with your Linux, Mandrakesoft is charging a slight premium.

HP, BEA Post Good Benchmarks on Four-Way Itanium-Linux Boxes

As you might expect, Hewlett-Packard is the first out the door to show the performance advantages of the Madison chips with 9 MB of L3 cache. Last week, HP posted a TPC-C online transaction processing benchmark test result that showed a four-way rx4640 with four of the 1.6 GHz chips, 128 GB of main memory, and 19.2 TB of storage could crank through 161,217 transactions per minute at a cost of $3.94 per TPM. This machine ran Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 3 AS (Update 3, to be specific) and Oracle's 10g Standard Edition database. A year ago, HP tested a similar four-way server, the rx5760, running Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2000 using the 1.5 GHz/6 MB Madisons. That machine was able to crank though 121,065 TPM at a cost of $4.49 per TPM. Linux performance, if Linux has been tested on the rx5670, would have probably been in the same ballpark. However, that rx5670 was only configured with 64 GB of main memory, and the 128 GB of main memory used on the rx4640 test might have been as big a factor in the performance boost with the new Itaniums as was the minutely higher clock speed and the much larger L3 cache memory on the Madison 9 MB chips.

Middleware maker BEA Systems and HP have tested a two-node cluster running the SPECjAppServer2002 Java application server benchmark, and have attained the highest performance and best performance to date on this test. The database server behind the test was an rx4640 using the 1.5 GHz/6 MB cache Itanium 2s with 8 GB of main memory and equipped with the HP-UX 11i v2 implementation of HP's own Unix. The Java application server was a similar rx4640 machine running Red Hat Linux Enterprise 3 Update 1 and BEA's WebLogic Server 8.1. This setup was able to handle 1,575 total operations per second (TOPS) at a cost of $199 per TOPS, giving it the highest performance of a four-way machine and the lowest price, too. It is a bit of a mystery why HP and BEA didn't show off the rx4640 using the new Itanium processors, because they surely knew that the new chips were being announced. If they had done that, they could have showed as much as 30 percent better performance on a machine with the same price.

Red Hat Opens Beijing Offices

Linux distributor Red Hat announced last week that it has opened a subsidiary in China in the capital city of Beijing. China, as well all know, is very big on open source (and very likely the software piracy capital of the world), and Red Hat clearly hopes to do well there among enterprises who need tech support and are willing to pay for it.

To fire up its Chinese marketing efforts, Red Hat plans to offering Linux and open source training for free to students at Tsinghua University and Nanjing University to get the ball rolling. Seeing freebies into the university student market is perhaps the best means of advocating a new market. However, Red Hat will see plenty of competition from Red Flag Linux, the indigenous commercial Linux distributor in China. And as open source takes off, it seems likely that, given the immensity of China, there will be more than one Chinese Linux distro.

VMware Cuts GSX Server Prices

VMware, the virtual machine partitioning software maker that is a subsidiary of disk array maker EMC, announced last week that it is slashing prices on its GSX Server virtualization program.

In the first quarter of this year, VMware slashed the price on its Workstation product, which provided partitioning for PCs and workstations so they can run Windows, Linux, NetWare, and other operating systems side-by-side on a single machine, from $300 down to $189. Michael Mullaney, vice president of marketing for VMware, says that volumes picked up significantly after the price cut, and enough to convince it to take a similar approach on GSX Server.

GSX Server is the entry VMware product for virtual machine partitioning on servers. The company's flagship ESX Server is a hardware virtualization software layer that provides complete isolation of partitions from each other, and it costs more than GSX Server, which runs virtual machine partitions inside a primary Linux or Windows host operating system. GSX Server is cheaper and easier, but if that primary operating system fails, it takes down all of the partitions on a box.

That is not a big deal for many applications, and VMware reckons that the price of GSX Server has been holding back volumes. To that end, VMware is cutting the price of GSX Server from $2,500 on a two-way server down to $1,400. It is also capping the price of GSX Server on larger machines at $2,800, regardless of the number of processors in the box, from 4 to 32. Up until now, GSX Server cost $5,000 on a four-way box and $10,000 on an eight-way box. Mullaney says that the biggest boxes he typically sees running GSX Server are 16-way machines, and customers installing these boxes will obviously see a big reduction, down to $2,800 from the $20,000 VMware was charging before the price cut. The price cuts are meant not only to spur demand, but also to make GSX Server more price competitive with the new kid on the virtualization block, Microsoft's Virtual Server 2005, which supports Windows, Linux, NetWare, and OS/2 (yes, OS/2) partitions. Microsoft is charging $499 for four-way servers and $999 for servers with 8 to 32 processors for Virtual Server 2005; customers also have to buy Operations Manager for $729 and pay $539 for each MOM-managed device.

IDC Plots Steady Software Sales Through 2008

The market for packaged software products, including operating systems, middleware, and applications, is growing again after a decline last year, according to IDC. The market researcher is predicting that worldwide software sales (including perpetual software licenses as well as software rented on an annual or a monthly basis) will rise by 5.1 percent this year, to $189 billion. IDC says further that the compound annual growth rate for worldwide software sales between 2003 and 2008 will be about 6.9 percent, which suggests that the market growth will accelerate, pushing sales to about $250 billion or so.

While this seems good, it is only so by recent comparison. "Even though the software industry is recovering from its first-ever decline, the double-digit growth rates experienced in the last decade will not return in the foreseeable future," said Anthony Picardi, senior vice president of global software research at IDC, who put together the software forecast. "Issues of complexity, security, and software quality, as well as a myriad of changing macroeconomic factors, all pose continuing challenges to industry growth."

In 2003, one third of total software sales were to five vendors: Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, SAP, and Computer Associates. As for trends, IDC says that the Linux platform gave it seventh-place in the software market, well behind various Unixes, Windows, and MVS mainframe platforms. However, IDC expects that, by 2008, the Linux platform will move into the fourth position. As is the case in other parts of the IT industry, North America is and will remain the largest software market, and Asia and Central Europe are the fastest growing software markets.

Server Shipments in Eastern Europe Booming

Shipments of servers into Central and Eastern Europe exploded in 2003, with shipments up 17 percent compared with 2002, according to researchers at IDC. However, the rapid shift to low-cost X86 systems in that market, away from proprietary and Unix systems, meant that total revenues in this important region of the world's IT community were up only 1.1 percent. However, this year things look to be better for the server makers (and presumably for the customers in the region), since IDC is predicting that server shipments are expected to climb by 20 percent in 2004 and revenues are expected to climb by 15 percent. This will significantly increase profit margins among the server makers that play in Eastern and Central Europe.

The Russian IT market is the juggernaut of this region, but server sales in Poland and the Czech Republic are not too shabby, either. These three together accounted for 64 percent of server shipments in 2003. IDC added that Bulgaria, Croatia, and Romania are the fastest growing server markets in the region. IDC says Hewlett-Packard was the dominant vendor in the region in 2003 and will probably hold that position in 2004; IBM is number two, and Dell is number three. Two Russian server makers, Aquarius and Kraftway, held the fourth and fifth positions in the market. X86 machines accounted for 97.6 percent of shipments in 2003, and Windows was installed on 80 percent of the machines. Unix and NetWare sales were small and contracting, according to IDC. However, Linux server sales were up 72.2 percent in 2003.