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Sun Cuts Opteron Server Tags for February Boost

If you are looking to acquire a Sun Fire V20z or V40z Opteron-based server from Sun Microsystems, now might be a good time to go surf on the Sun site for one. Until February 15, Sun is offering the two-way V20z servers for up to 25 percent off list price, while the four-way V40z is available with a 30 percent discount.

Specifically, a Sun Fire V20z with two Opteron 244 processors (which run at 1.8 GHz), 2 GB of main memory, and one 73 GB disk drive is available for $3,195, which is a 20 percent discount. A V20z with two Opteron 250 processors (which run at 2.4 GHz), 4 GB of memory, and a single disk costs $5,245. Sun is selling a V40z with two Opteron 844 processors (which run at 1.8 GHz), 2 GB of main memory, and a single disk for $5,945. Under this promotion, a V40z with two 2.4 GHz Opteron 848 processors (which run at 2.4 GHz), 4 GB of memory, and a single disk costs $8,745. All four machines come with Solaris 9 for X86 preloaded, not the new Solaris 10. With this deal, Sun is probably doing two things: testing price elasticity and getting rid of boxes that have already had Solaris 9 burned on them. It probably costs more to reload and reburn Solaris 10 on the boxes than Sun's profit margin at the discounted prices.

Sun is also offering discounts ranging from 25 to 35 percent on its Opteron-based Java Workstations under this promotion.

IBM Gets Ready to Ship p5 575 Eight-Way Cluster Nodes

IBM is getting ready to roll out the eight-way p5 575 server for high-performance-computing workloads. IBM started talking up the p5 575 at the Supercomputing 2004 show in Pittsburgh last November, and now says that it will be ready to begin shipping 16-node clusters, with a total of 128 of IBM's 1.9 GHz Power5 processor cores, on February 18. The company says that larger 128-node clusters (with a total of 1,024 Power5 cores) will be available on April 29.

The p5 575 packs eight processor cores in a 2U form factor, giving it one of the best "flops per box" ratios in the world. The server is only being offered for HPC clusters, not for regular commercial workloads. It has 4 GB DIMMs that allow it to support up to 256 GB of main memory, plus 144 MB of L3 cache memory that is shared by all eight Power5 cores. The server has four Gigabit Ethernet ports and requires a secondary I/O drawer to support PCI-X peripherals. This drawer can support up to 20 PCI-X cards. IBM plans to support connectivity to its "Federation" High Performance Switch (HPS) sometime in the second quarter. IBM is supporting AIX 5L 5.2 and 5.3 on the p5 575 server, as well as Novell's SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 and Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 3 AS. The base p5 575 costs $4,575; the four Power5 processors cost $40,000 (that's $5,000 per core), the system rack costs $10,000, and the I/O drawer costs $32,000. A 4 GB DIMM costs $8,448, while a 16 GB DIMM costs $61,579.

IBM Subpoenas Intel in SCO Unix-Linux Lawsuit

The plot thickens. As we went to press last week, IBM had issued subpoenas to executives at Intel in the $3 billion lawsuit that The SCO Group has launched against IBM, alleging, among other things, that IBM illegally released Unix intellectual property into the Linux community.

According to the subpoena, IBM wants one or more executives who were in charge of Intel's relationships with SCO and Canopy Group, the majority shareholder in SCO, to testify in the case. IBM also wants all documents related to discussions between Intel and SCO or Canopy concerning IBM, Unix, or Linux.

What IBM is fishing for is unclear, but this could be as much a delaying tactic as a means of getting the inside dope on what all of these parties thought about the failed "Project Monterey" Unix, which was supposed to merge IBM's AIX and SCO's UnixWare, to run on X86, Itanium, and Power platforms. Monterey was stillborn in early 2000, when IBM caught Linux fever.

Financing Advantage Helps IBM Speed Up Deals For SMBs

While IBM has been offering various low-rate financing deals for its hardware, software, and services for many years, companies that fall into the small or midsized revenue brackets often have a much harder time obtaining financing on IT wares than their counterparts at large organizations.

That is why IBM's Global Financing unit has launched a new worldwide program called Financing Advantage. The company may not want to take unwarranted risks in lending to SMBs, which do not always have steady sales or squeaky-clean credit, but this is the fastest growing sector of the IT market, and everyone selling IT product is figuring out how to go after it.

One of the things that IBM has learned is that SMB companies that may want to come to IBM for financing often want to finance non-IBM gear, so the Financing Advantage program, which went live last week in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia, and Japan, allows for this. IBM says that the Financing Advantage program offers competitive rates and a credit approval process that can within one hour give the thumbs up or thumbs down to SMBs that try to finance as much as $300,000 in gear. IBM is providing the financing through a rapid online financing tool, and some 1,200 of its resellers have been certified to use it. Both IBM and its resellers want to not only do more business in the SMB space but also do it more quickly, which helps drive up customer satisfaction and retention.

Financing Advantage is available immediately in France, Germany, and the UK, and will be rolled out in other geographies throughout the year.

IBM Offers New Hardware Management Console for i5, p5

IBM has announced a new Hardware Management Console for the eServer i5 and p5 servers. The HMC, which has been a bone of contention with the i5 crowd since the "Squadron" Power5-based servers and their OS/400-derived hypervisor were in beta testing, is used to control the logical partitions and hardware connections to those partitions in the i5s and p5s. The Model 7310 HMC is a modified desktop PC that runs its own microcode for controlling the i5 and p5 configurations; it has support for a 5250 OS/400 operations console and can even link into the Cluster Systems Management clustering software used in AIX and Linux clusters. The new HMC will be available on February 18 and costs $1,830.

This seems a bit pricey for a desktop PC; moreover, IBM would significantly improve relations with its i5 and p5 customers if it just gave away the HMC with an i5 or a p5 acquisition. IBM needs that goodwill more than it needs to sell a PC with a pumped-up price. That price for the HMC, even if it's lower than for the original HMCs that came out with the Power5 servers last summer, is ridiculous considering that IBM is selling its ThinkCentre desktop PCs for $550 to $750, including a Windows operating system and other features.

Sun Launches Compliance and Content Management Gear

Sun Microsystems has created a special amalgam of servers and storage arrays with partner AXS-One as a turnkey compliance server. The offering, which has the unwieldy name of the Sun Compliance and Content Management Solution, is based on Sun Fire servers running the Solaris 10 operating system and Sun's SAM-FS file system plus AXS-One's Compliance Platform software. Sun has discontinued its own Infinite Mailbox offering, which archived emails The AXS-One solution is widely recognized as a better offering, since it has hooks into ERP systems and can manage other kinds of documents in addition to email. This is why Sun has shifted to it.

Gartner Points Out 'Gotchas' for Business Intelligence

Gartner hosted its Business Intelligence Summit last week in London, a week after the "real" business intelligence summit, the World Economic Forum, was being held in Davos, Switzerland. (The former is focused on data warehousing and such within IT departments; the latter is about running the world.)

In any event, at the Gartner summit, the IT analyst revealed that it had conducted a survey of 1,300 chief information officers in 30 countries, and on average they expect to increase spending on business intelligence projects by 6 percent in 2005. This is more or less consistent with the expected increase in IT spending from the various consultancies that make such projections. But the issues that companies face as they implement business intelligence projects are about more than spending money. Gartner says that too many companies have the "field of dreams" syndrome, believing that if they build a data warehouse, their companies will benefit from it. However, says Gartner, too many IT departments build data warehouses and related analytics without involving business managers, and therefore they end up gathering and modeling the wrong data sets. Moreover, managers who are well used to manipulating their own spreadsheets to win their arguments are not about to let the data warehouse do their talking for them. Gartner also warns that, within the next few years, about half of the data warehouses built will either fail or have limited acceptance within their organizations, because the IT and line of business managers will not cop to the fact that some of the data they keep in their warehouses is garbage.