But Wait, There's More

Server Makers Back Globus Consortium for Grids

Server makers Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Sun Microsystems and chip supplier Intel have ganged up to form the Globus Consortium, a nonprofit corporation that they hope will promote the commercial use of the open-source Globus Toolkit for grid computing.

While the Global Grid Forum has been the main standards body for defining grid computing, the Globus Consortium seems to be aimed at creating the specifications and roadmaps for future Globus releases, including code created by consortium members. How the Globus Consortium will mesh or overlap with the existing Globus Alliance is not clear. Many of the same top grid scientists and companies are in both organizations.

Free Solaris 10 Binaries Are Downloadable

Sun Microsystems did indeed put out the compiled version of its new Solaris 10 Unix operating system as a free program on January 31, as promised. These binaries are, of course, distinct from the forthcoming OpenSolaris, which is an open source version of Solaris 10 that has been scrubbed of some software that does not belong to Sun and that is available for other people to compile for their own uses on any platform they want to try to make it work on.

If you want to download Solaris, you can do so on Sun's Solaris site. The image will fit on a single DVD--or on multiple CDs, if you don't have a DVD burner. The use of the software, by the way, requires that you tell Sun what machines you are registering it on, and Sun sends you an official registration document through snail mail. Sun may want to give Solaris away for free, but it wants to keep very close track of where it is going. If you don't get this document, which has a software key associated with it, your Solaris 10 instance will only work for 90 days. So do your paperwork properly if you plan to use the free Solaris 10 in production.

Sun Tops TPC-H Data Warehousing Test with E25K Server

Now that Solaris 10 is out the door, Sun Microsystems is trying to stir up some benchmark noise on its Sun Fire servers running the platform. To that end, Sun has put Solaris 10 and Oracle's 10g database through their paces on the TPC-H data warehousing benchmark test.

Sun demonstrated that a Sun Fire E25K server with 72 of its dual-core UltraSparc-IV processors, running at 1.2 GHz, was able to crank through 59,436 queries per hour (QPH) on the TPC-H test with a 3,000 GB data warehouse. This system was configured with 288 GB of main memory (only half of the maximum on the system, oddly enough) and over 84 TB of disk capacity. This machine cost $11.1 million, and Sun gave a 42 percent discount on the system. This yielded a price/performance of $114 per QPH. Nearly two years ago, when Sun was cranking out the single-core UltraSparc-III chips at the same clock speed (1.2 GHz), a Sun Fire E15K server with the same memory, and running Solaris 9 and Oracle 9i Release 2, was able to 28,948 QPH at a cost of $184 per QPH. That E15K cost just over $8 million at list, and had a 33 percent discount. Sun's big improvement in bang for the buck on this test comes from deeper discounting as well as nearly doubling the performance.

More important, on the 3,000 GB TPC-H test, a multithreaded environment that the Sun box (with 144 threads) just loves, the E25K is besting competitive iron from Hewlett-Packard and Fujitsu Siemens. Last March, HP was showing off a 64-way Superdome server running HP-UX 11i and Oracle 10g, which was able to do 45,248 QPH at a cost of $109. That Superdome, configured with 1.5 GHz Itaniums, 256 GB of memory, and 77 TB of disk, had a whopping 51 percent discount to achieve that bang for the buck. A Fujitsu Siemens PrimePower 2500, tested at around the same time, was able to handle about 34,354 QPH at a cost of $147 per QPH (that price includes a 29 percent discount). The PrimePower 2500 used Fujitsu's 1.3 GHz Sparc64 V processors, 256 GB of main memory, and 53 TB of disk.

XM Satellite Radio Picks Sun as Sole Unix Server Provider

It was a match made in outer space, presumably. XM Satellite radio has decided that the Solaris Unix operating system and the Sun Fire lines of RISC and X86 servers are the platform of choice for their back-end systems. With shock jock Howard Stern soon to be headlining rival Sirius Satellite's radio, there is a balance of sorts in the universe that Sun Microsystems Chairman and CEO Scott McNealy, shock jock of the IT business, was able to get an exclusive deal to supply XM Satellite with all of its back-end systems. XM Satellite has been working with Sun since before it started up in 2001 on back-end systems, and now the company has a Sun Fire E25K server with StorEdge 9900 arrays, wrapped with V440 and E2900 application and infrastructure servers.

Cray Steals HP Executive for Japanese Unit

Unix and Linux supercomputer maker Cray has hired away one of the top high-performance computing executives in Japan from Hewlett-Packard. Mamoru Nakano, who has been in charge of supercomputing units in Japan for Digital, then Compaq, and then HP, is now president of Cray Japan. Nakano reports to Peter Ungaro, senior vice president of sales at Cray and formerly the top supercomputer executive from IBM. Both Nakano and Ungaro are hooked into the government agencies that drive supercomputing technology and often end up funding basic research in the area. The fact that Cray can attract such talent shows the scale of its ambition and its improving prospects as it seeks to become the dominant player in the supercomputer business, as it was two decades ago.

IDC Closes the Book on 2004 IT Spending, Projects to 2008

The analysts at IDC have churned through their models of the world's economies and IT spending patterns, and have come to the conclusion that the worldwide IT market accounted for $965 billion in 2004, and will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 6 percent to hit $1.2 billion by 2008. While this is not dot-com-boom growth, it is pretty healthy growth, and hits right smack in the middle of most of the other estimates made so far.

IDC did not say how 2005 would look on a worldwide basis (you have to pay to get that information), but, as a teaser, it said that IT spending in the United States will be up 5.8 percent over 2004 levels, hitting $416 billion. The company expects spending growth in the United States between 2004 and 2008 to compound to an average of 5.9 percent. This year, worldwide software spending is expected to hit $213 billion, up 7 percent, and services are expected to grow 5.7 percent, to $423.8 billion.

IBM Gives Data Centers What They Really Need: SOMA

Sometimes, you just have to laugh at the ridiculous acronyms in the computer business. IBM Global Services last week announced a perfectly reasonable new offering with the unfortunate name of Service Oriented Modeling and Architecture, or SOMA. Everybody is interested in designing and implementing more flexible information technology and applications that reside on top of it, and that is what SOMA is all about. Unfortunately, that is also the name of the drug that people blissed out on in Aldous Huxley's sci-fi classic, Brave New World. Oops. But sometimes it's hard to stop the IBM marketing machine once it gets in motion in Somers, New York (not to be confused with Soma, New York, where all IBM marketing focuses on the iSeries). IBM is clearly excited about services-oriented architectures (SOAs), and for all we know the SOMA name is absolutely appropriate, since it is supposed to systematically analyze and reorganize all business processes, tweak them for improvements, and get IT aligned with these changes in such a way that future refinements are more easily implemented.

Sounds like a drug to us.