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BSD Creator and Sun Founder Bill Joy Joins Venture Capitalist Kleiner Perkins

After bopping around for a few years after leaving Sun Microsystems, cofounder Bill Joy, the company's chief scientist for many years, has landed just up the road at venture capitalist Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Beyers. Joy was one of the brains behind the Solaris operating system, the Sparc chip, Sun's server architecture, and the Java application programming environment while at Sun, and before that he was one of the originators of the idea of an open-source operating system, in this case the BSD Unix variant, which he and his colleagues created at the University of California at Berkeley.

Joy has a long history with Kleiner Perkins, having convinced it (with the help of Sun's three other founders) to back Sun with venture capital more than 25 years ago. Sun cofounder Vinod Khosla is currently a partner at Kleiner Perkins, and the remaining two founders, Scott McNealy and Andy Bechtolsheim, are Sun's chairman and chief scientist. Not surprisingly, Joy is joining Kleiner Perkins to help the venture capitalist analyze new opportunities in technology investing. "I will continue to help entrepreneurs advance the Internet, develop wireless innovations, and find new ways of using large piles of computers to solve difficult problems," Joy said in a statement. "I'm also particularly interested in discoveries and inventions that solve energy and resource problems, and in applying 21st century advances in physics, chemistry and the natural sciences to help create abundance." Joy is himself quite wealthy because of Sun, and is battered with investment ideas from all fronts, a situation that is exacerbated by his own broad interests and a keen business sense. He has joined Kleiner Perkins because he believes the opportunities he is seeing in the market require a formal venture capitalist organization.

HP Adds Secure HP-UX Partitions, Extends Clustering

As part of its server announcement blitz this week, Hewlett-Packard made a few minor HP-UX enhancements.

First, HP said that its Global Workload Manager, which it previewed late last year for controlling HP-UX 11i v2 and Linux 2.6 partitions and their applications on Integrity machines, has begun shipping. This cross-platform workload manager is an extension of the HP-UX workload manager, which has been embedded in that Unix environment for many years and keeps multiple applications from consuming too many resources. HP is making a trial version of the software available from its Web site.

HP has also announced more rugged partitioning for HP-UX 11i called, logically enough, Secure Resource Partitions. The basics of this offering used to be sold as an add-on to HP-UX called Virtual Vault, which was sold primarily to financial services companies that needed to have absolute isolation between partitions. Now HP is integrating the secure partitioning software into HP-UX itself. With Secure Resource Partitions, rules-based software that acts more or less like a firewall controls what processes can exit a partition or enter it from the outside. These new partitions will be available sometime in the second quarter of 2005, and will presumably be available as a patch to HP-UX 11i v2.

Finally, HP made some changes to its MC Serviceguard high-availability clustering environment. With the enhancements announced this week, metro-area clusters can be separated by 250 kilometers, up from 100 kilometers, and cross-continental clusters, which are used to offer high availability and disaster recovery for multinational corporations, can now share a backup failover server. In the past, each high-availability setup in MC Serviceguard required that a production machine have its own target backup machine; with recent tweaks, one target machine can actively back up three production boxes simultaneously. However, the target box can obviously only recover for one of those production boxes at a time. This 3:1 ratio will help big HP-UX shops save lots of money, since they will not have to fully replicate their data centers.

XOsoft Supports WANSync Server on AIX

XOsoft, a creator of wide area networking, data replication, and high availability software for Windows and Solaris environments, has expanded into the AIX market with the release of WANSynch Server for AIX.

WANSynch Server is XOsoft's disaster recovery software, which allows Windows, Solaris, and AIX servers, and their applications and data, to be replicated to remote machines over standard IP networks, so that companies can failover to backup machines in the event of a disaster. WANSynchHA is the next product up the line, and provides automatic (as opposed to manual) failover to replicated servers. Right now, WANSynchHA is only supported on the Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 server platforms, running either Oracle 8 or 9i or Microsoft SQL 2000 databases. Presumably, the high availability software will soon be extended to Solaris and AIX.

Sun Preps "Honeycomb" Storage Server

According to various reports, including The Register and InfoWorld, Sun Microsystems has created a new storage array based on its Solaris Unix variant and its Opteron-based servers. "Project Honeycomb" will allow for terabytes of data archived in various formats to be searched and combed for data. Rumors had been circulating about Honeycomb, and Sun decided to let InfoWorld in on the secret to confirm the rumors.

The current pre-beta version of Honeycomb is based on four server nodes, each with their own 400-GB ATA disk drive. Each server is based on an Opteron chip, and the total capacity of the 3U Honeycomb shelf is 1.6 terabytes. Multiple Honeycomb shelves can be daisy chained to create much larger arrays. Considering that the alpha Honeycomb products were tested at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, this has to be the goal. In fact, Sun is apparently hoping to scale up to 1,000 terabytes, or a petabyet, with the Honeycomb architecture. The hardware is not the point of Honeycomb, though; the software is. The Honeycomb array will be equipped with special software created in Sun Labs to index and retrieve information stored on the array in various formats. This is no big deal; file systems can do this now. But apparently Honeycomb will be unique in the speed at which it can seek out and retrieve files.

Sun is expected to beta-test Honeycomb for another six months or so, and then roll it out as a commercial product.

Winchester Debuts Mixed SATA, Fibre Channel Disk Array

Winchester Systems has announced it is now shipping a new disk array that can combine Fibre Channel and Serial ATA disk drives in the same chassis and fronted by shared RAID disk controllers. The FlashDisk FC-3400 array has four external Fibre Channel ports for linking to host servers (up to 32 unique hosts are supported in a SAN), and can be equipped with one or two RAID disk controllers. The base FC-3400 comes with space for 16 Fibre Channel disk drives, for a total of 4.8 terabytes of capacity. But to expand beyond that, companies can use an expansion chassis with either Fibre Channel or Serial ATA disks, the latter being less reliable and slower but also less costly. Each expansion unit can hold 16 of the Fibre Channel or Serial ATA drives. Winchester is selling 10K-RPM Serial ATA drives in 74 GB capacities, and 7200-RPM Serial ATA disks in 250 GB and 400 GB capacities. A single array can be daisy chained with six expansion units for a maximum of 43 TB of storage.

The FC-3400 is available immediately, and supports Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Irix, and Mac OS X Unixes, as well as Windows and Linux. A base unit with a single RAID controller costs $17,500.

IBM Wins Patent Contest for 12th Year in a Row

IBM is once again the king of the patent holders. The Patent and Trademark Office says IBM was issued the largest number of new patents by the U.S. government for the 12th year in a row. IBM was issued 3,248 patents in 2004, and now has a portfolio of over 40,000 patents. Matsushita Electric Industrial Company, which makes products under the Panasonic brand name, rose to the number-two position in 2004, with 1,934 patents issued. Canon was number three on the list, and Hewlett-Packard was number four on the list, with 1,775 patents issued. Memory maker Micron Technology was issued 1,760 patents, followed by Samsung with 1,604 and Intel with 1,601. Industrial conglomerate Hitachi, which has a respectable IT business, particularly in disk arrays, and which bought IBM's disk drive business last year, dropped from the number-three position on the list in 2003 to the number-eight position in 2004, with 1,514 patents. Toshiba had 1,310 patents, with Sony coming in at number 10 on the list, with 1,305 patents. As an aside, the Patent Office said that the U.S. government itself was issued 829 patents last year from its vast arsenal of research organizations in academia and the military.

"American innovation and discoveries are the foundation of our technological strength worldwide," said Jon Dudas, Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property, in a statement accompanying the numbers. "Increasingly, patents have become an essential ingredient of our economic vitality, paving the way for investment in commerce and in research and development, and creating jobs for millions of Americans." While this is true, there certainly are a lot of patents from Japanese and Korean companies on the list as well. It would be interesting to see a complete list of patents by the geographic region from whence the patents come. That might be a better indicator of innovation by geography than not. There could be a lot more--or less--innovation in American and Europe than shows up in this top-ten list.

As we reported elsewhere in this issue, IBM has granted the open source community the right to use 500 of its patents, free of charge, in their software projects--the first time any company has done this. This could be the first step in establishing a patent trust for open source projects.

Oracle Closes PeopleSoft Deal, Lays Off 5,000 Employees

Having completed its acquisition of PeopleSoft, Oracle has laid off 5,000 employees from the merged company, which has approximately 55,000 employees. The layoffs were made public this week as Oracle formally announced its integration plans for the former PeopleSoft. The scuttlebutt on the street was that Oracle could let go as many as 6,000 employees from the PeopleSoft ranks, which were at over 12,000 employees before the hostile takeover.

This is a stunning number of cuts, and while it is hard to believe that this number is correct, it is. Having paid $10.3 billion for PeopleSoft, Oracle needs to get that money back, and plans to do so by cutting costs and getting the maintenance and license revenue streams from the PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards ERP suites. The deeper Oracle cuts, the more quickly it gets a return on its investment--provided it does not cut so deeply that it leaves customers disgruntled.

Even before it closed the acquisition, Oracle was moving executives in anticipation of the takeover. Just before the Christmas holidays, Dave Duffield, PeopleSoft's founder, resigned as chairman and CEO. Oracle fired four of PeopleSoft's executives, including co-presidents Phillip Wilmington and Kevin Parker, general counsel James Shaughnessy, and chief marketing officer Nanci Caldwell, on December 28, and put its own executives in charge of those posts, which they also hold at Oracle. Ronald Wohl, who heads development of the Oracle Applications unit, and Michael Rocha, who heads Oracle's support operations, have also been asked to step down.