But Wait, There's More

OSDL Responds to Microsoft, Sun Legal FUD

At every chance they get, the top brass at Microsoft and Sun Microsystems are attempting to retain existing customers and lure new customers to their respective Windows and Solaris platforms by suggesting that using Linux presents some legal and intellectual property issues (copyright and patent) because of the ongoing lawsuits between the SCO Group and IBM, Red Hat, and Novell. In Asia a few weeks ago, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was at it once again, suggesting that if you use Linux you risk legal problems, and at the Solaris 10 announcement at about the same time, Sun's chairman and CEO, Scott McNealy said that someone has to be able to take the "Kodak moment," referring to the $92 million lawsuit that Sun settled with Kodak concerning Java intellectual property. Basically, both Microsoft and Sun are arguing that only a vendor with deep pockets can take the hit for customers when it comes to liability and intellectual property users, and in the absence of a big vendor, users will be sued.

Open Source Development Labs, a consortium of pro-Linux vendors that steers the development of Linux and which offers some legal protection for Linux shops, is not begging, but it is differing with that assessment. Stuart Cohen, CEO at OSDL, released the following statement in response to these allegations:

"At OSDL, we have a lot of confidence in the robustness of Linux around IP, patents and copyright. Some of the world's largest vendors share our view and are willing to stand behind Linux to protect their customers, as are we. HP offers its Linux customers indemnification. So do Red Hat and Novell. Both Novell and IBM have publicly promised to use their extensive patent portfolios to protect Linux customers. And OSDL set up a $10 million legal defense fund for Linux customers. With Linux adoption growing three times faster on the server than any other operating system, customers are clearly not intimidated by FUD and are continuing to embrace Linux. Over the past 18 months a handful of companies and individuals who are threatened by Linux's success have tried to argue that Linux may infringe others' software patents. We find it interesting that none of those companies or individuals have said which patents Linux may offend. Yet patents are, by their nature, public; inventions must be disclosed in exchange for the rights granted by the PTO. Detractors of Linux on patent grounds should be asked to point to the specific patents that they claim infringe."

Survey Says: CIOs Considering Switch to Linux for Email Servers

According to a survey by Osterman Research, 55 percent of IT managers responsible for company email said that if they could ensure that a move to Linux would not interrupt end users, they would consider moving their email and groupware back-end software to a Linux-based solution over the next two years. The results are clearly encouraging for email and groupware software providers for the Linux platform, which is why Scalix, one such vendor, is touting the results of the study in a new whitepaper.

Osterman also found that 21 percent of the IT executives polled said that they would prefer Linux servers as the host platform for all of their email software if they were permitted to throw away their current infrastructure. (Obviously, there is not always budget to move on such dreams.) The consultancy also found that insufficient expertise with Linux and disruptions to end users were the biggest factors currently keeping companies from adopting Linux for their email back ends. Only 20 percent of those polled said that they planned on changing their messaging platforms in the next 24 months.

Oracle, Novell Certify Oracle Stack on SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9

Database and application software provider Oracle and commercial Linux distributor Novell announced last week that they have certified the entire Oracle software stack to run in the latest SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 operating system.

Specifically, that means that Oracle's 10g database, the related Application Server 10g middleware, the Real Application Clusters cluster extensions to the database, the Collaboration Suite groupware, and the E-Business Suite 11i version 10 ERP application suite are all certified to run out of the box on SLES 9. That current Novell Linux version is based on the Linux 2.6 kernel and scales a lot further and better than SLES 8, which was based on the Linux 2.4 kernel. The scalability of Linux 2.6, particularly as implemented by Novell, is a viable alternative to RISC/Unix boxes.

IBM Sets Up Power.org Community for Power Chips

If the open systems and open source movements have taught us anything, it is that a technology that is malleable by the organizations that use it is more widely and more quickly adopted than a technology that is held by one or few vendors. That is why IBM opened up its Power chip architecture to wider licensing in March 2004, and that is also the reason why Big Blue launched the Power.org community last week at its Power Everywhere Beijing event in the Chinese capital.

IBM, Motorola, and Apple formed the PowerPC Consortium back in 1991 to develop a set of RISC processors that would support IBM's workstation and server lines (which ran on Power and proprietary chips), Apple's workstations and laptops Intel's X86 processors as well as RISC alternatives from Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, Digital Equipment, and SGI. While Apple and Motorola have had their ups and downs with the PowerPC, IBM has turned its Power chips into a strategic differentiator.

As the company said back in March at the original Power Everywhere event in New York, the company wants to do an end-run around the X86 and take over the high-end and low-end of the IT markets. IBM knows full well that it cannot get Power chips easily onto the desktop or in volume servers. But the chips are used by the tens of millions a year in all kinds of embedded devices (such as printers, PDAs, automobiles, routers, and game consoles) as well as in midrange and high-end servers. However, developing and manufacturing the family of Power processors takes big bucks, and IBM needs to foster a community of Power chip enthusiasts who will help shoulder the burden of development and manufacturing. For instance, IBM spent $2.5 billion to create the 300mm chip factory in East Fishkill, New York, where it makes its latest Power processors, and spent $500 million to design the Power4 and Power4+ processors. The company is right now expanding that East Fishkill facility, presumably to prepare for the manufacturing of the "Cell" Power-derived processors that Sony and Toshiba have been working with IBM for more than three years to develop for future game machines and consumer devices. And they have paid for this Cell work; exactly how much is unknown, but the word on the street is that the three Cell partners have paid $400 million to create the chip, which is a variant of IBM's 64-bit Power processors with huge amounts of floating point processing power.

Earlier this year, Sony gave IBM $325 million to work out the kinks in the 65 nanometer processes that were supposed to be used to create the Cell chips, which are now going to be made in IBM's 90 nanometer processes. L-3 Communications, a defense electronics firm, said this spring that it would kick in $80 million over five years to license Power chip designs. The Global Brands Manufacture Group, a Chinese computer maker, is looking at creating a line of Power-based desktops and laptops as well as digital cameras and DVD players and has similarly licensed Power technology from IBM. Chartered Semiconductor, a chip maker based in Singapore, will be the first non-IBM fab to make Power processors using IBM's own 90 nanometer copper/SOI technologies; Infineon and Samsung also have licensing deals for custom Power chip designs and fabrication. Somewhat strangely, not all of these players are yet members of the Power.org initiative. Toshiba was noticeably absent in the Power.org lineup, as were Motorola and Apple.

The Power.org community is similar in concept to the Eclipse Consortium that IBM launched several years ago with a $40 million grant to create a set of open-source development tools with a single interface and framework. In February 2004, the Eclipse consortium was reorganized into a nonprofit corporation that is completely independent from IBM. Power.org is already independent from IBM, and is organized much like Eclipse in that it has founding members who organize themselves into working groups. IBM has not said how much seed money it has pumped into Power.org, but the company says that it is donating intellectual property. One example is the Core Connect bus interface used in embedded Power processors, which Big Blue says has 1,500 licensees already. The founding members of Power.org include IBM and Sony as well as AMCC, Bull (which rebadges IBM's Power servers), Cadence Design Systems, Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, Culturecom, Jabil Circuit, Novell, Red Hat, Shanghai Belling, Synopsys, Thales, Tundra Semiconductor, and Wistron. The idea is to allow these companies who are interested in Power chips to collaborate without having IBM necessarily in the loop.

As part of the Beijing announcements, IBM has promised to add 150 engineers to its Power Architecture Technology Center in Shanghai over the next 18 to 24 months; the Power chips used to be designed exclusively in a PowerPC facility in Austin, Texas and in IBM's labs in Rochester, Minnesota, but the political and economic realities are such that if IBM wants China to push Power, it has to give Chinese engineers jobs. IBM also is working on a deal with Shanghai Belling, China's biggest semiconductor company, for it to license Power chip technology and make chips for consumer devices. Peking University is also going to host a cluster of Power servers to allow software developers to test open source applications without having to buy their own servers.

IBM's top people in the Microelectronics Division also outlined an emerging chip technology called wet immersion lithography, which allows tweaked versions of the current class of lithography equipment used to make 300mm wafers to support thinner transistor lines. By using de-ionized water or other liquids, where light can be bent more efficiently than it can be in air and therefore smaller circuits should be possible, thereby upholding Moore's Law (the number of transistors you can pack on a chip doubles every 18 months or so). IBM has been able to build variants of the Power chips using this under water lithography, and is the first company to do so. The process has been under development for a number of years. IBM did not say its Microelectronics Division might bring it to market with commercial Power chips.

IBM, Fujitsu Agree on Autonomic Computing Standards

Server makers IBM and Fujitsu said last week that they would collaborate to create a set of open standards for autonomic computing. All of the major server platform makers have been investing in hardware and software technologies that allow their systems to do predictive self-maintenance and self-healing, which enable those systems to gracefully deal with crashes. However, all of those platforms have radically different electronics, and their system microcode and higher-level software platforms (including operating systems and systems management programs) are not exactly compatible, either.

To that end, IBM and Fujitsu have agreed to work on standards surrounding the Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) event format. IBM has proposed an "event format," a way of describing a failure of a component or some other aspect of it that is important to autonomic management of a server, to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, one of the main standards consortia behind Web services standards. IBM and Fujitsu are going to collaborate on a standard set of actions that are driven by events, as well as another set of standards that govern how software is installed and activated on servers.

Disk Array Market Is Up in the Third Quarter, Too

Despite insane levels of competition, the rapid introduction of less-costly disk arrays and disk drives, and rampant discounting in the storage market, the aggregate storage industry posted its sixth consecutive quarter of revenue gains in the third quarter of 2004, according to a report from IDC.

The growth rate has cooled a bit, however, with $3.4 billion in external disk array sales in the third quarter, up 3.5 percent. The overall disk market (including internal arrays such as those used in the AS/400, iSeries, and i5s) grew by only 2.1 percent, to $5 billion, which suggests that internal array sales continue to fall as companies embrace storage area networks (SANs) and network-attached storage (NAS) arrays. Incredibly, IDC estimates that the aggregate amount of capacity sold in the third quarter was up 50.5 percent, to 310 petabytes (that's 310,000 terabytes), the highest growth in seven quarters and the most disk capacity ever sold in a quarter.

In the external disk market, EMC is the market leader, with $724 million in sales (21.2 percent of sales) and 17.4 percent revenue growth. Hewlett-Packard's external disk business has taken it on the chin in the past few quarters, and saw a 7.5 percent revenue decline, to $647 million, in the quarter, dropping from first place to second place, with 19 percent of external disk array sales for the quarter. (HP has been the number-one disk array seller since buying Compaq, more than two years ago.) IBM is a distant third, with $448 million (13.1 percent) of the external disk array pie in the third quarter of 2004, down six-tenths of a percent. Hitachi saw sales drop 2.3 percent, to $289 million (giving 8.5 percent of the pie), while Dell had 11.9 percent growth, pushing sales to $237 million (6.9 percent of the pie). The NAS array market grew by 14.3 percent, crested above $2 billion, a level it first attained in the second quarter of the year.

In the overall worldwide disk array market (external plus internal arrays), HP is still the market leader, with $1.2 billion in sales and 23.6 percent of the market; but the company lost more than two points of market share. IBM is number two, with just over $1 billion in sales and a smidgen of growth. EMC, Dell, and Hitachi are numbers three, four, and five in the market, respectively, and other vendors accounted for $1.4 billion in sales, 28.1 percent of the storage pie in the quarter.

IBM Rumored to Be Selling Its PC Business

At press time, The New York Times was reporting that IBM is trying to sell off its entire PC business (desktops, workstations, and laptops) for somewhere between $1 billion and $2 billion. IBM may not have created the PC business (the company was dragged into it, kicking and screaming, by market forces that it did not understand), but by putting its seal of approval on the idea in 1981, with the launch of the IBM PC, the PC business as we know it, a relatively open box with third party components that can be easily cloned, was born.

The reason why IBM would sell its PC business for such a paltry sum is simple: there isn't really much there. IBM outsourced the manufacturing of all of its PCs nearly three years ago to Sanmina-SCI, which last year also got a contract to make all of IBM's X86 servers, except its BladeCenter blade servers and the "Summit" xSeries 44X high-end X86 servers. In effect, what IBM has left of its PC business, with about 6 percent of quarterly market share, are some brand names and intellectual property, and a revenue stream worth about $11 billion a year that is not profitable most of the time. According to the rumor mill, Chinese PC and server manufacturer Lenovo Group, formerly known as Legend, and one of the fastest-growing PC companies in the world, is the expected buyer.