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But Wait, There's More
FreeBSD 4.11 Arrives in the Mail
One of the weeks when I was away at the several tradeshows I have gone to in the past two months, my copy of FreeBSD 4.11 arrived in the mail from FreeBSD Mall. I haven't had a chance to open it until now.
As you know, the 4.X releases of FreeBSD are in legacy mode, and the FreeBSD project has moved on with four releases of the 5.X branch. From here on out, the 4.X branch will get tweaks for keys features and security updates, but everyone using FreeBSD is encouraged to move to the 5.X branch. With the 4.11 release, this FreeBSD branch supports the KDE 3.3.2 and Gnome 2.8.2 graphical user interfaces. The userland packages for supporting Linux binaries has been upgraded to be compatible with linux_base-8, which is based on Red Hat Linux 8.0. The software also includes new drivers for gigabit Ethernet cards, IBM/Adaptec ServeRAID RAID disk controllers, and LSI Logic 2GB/sec Fibre Channel adapters. The TCP/IP stack has also been hardened against what are called "reset attacks," one of the many tricks that hackers use. Security holes in the Linux compatibility layer, in the CVS server, and other system elements have been patched in this release. The four-CD FreeBSD set has more than 11,000 applications and costs $39.95 through FreeBSD Mall. FreeBSD 4.11 is supported on X86 and Alpha platforms.
The FreeBSD project is working diligently on FreeBSD 5.4, which will have hundreds of new features, according to the project, and will be available in the next few months. You can preorder it at FreeBSD Mall for $59.95.
Sun Loses Two Execs, Promotes Two Others
Sun Microsystems announced last week that Danese Cooper, the key executive who interfaces with the open source community for Sun and one of the people behind OpenSolaris, is leaving the company for a job at Intel. As a member of the open source community, the diva of open source at Sun--who helped Sun get OpenOffice out the door after acquiring the software and who was instrumental in the creation of the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL ) for OpenSolaris--it doesn't much matter where Cooper works. Intel needs just as much help trying to figure out the open source community as Sun did.
Sun also said that Marissa Peterson, who headed up Sun's worldwide operations as well as its services unit for the past year, would step down from those positions. She will continue to work for the remainder of the year at Sun with president and chief operating officer Jonathan Schwartz on an unnamed project. Sun has appointed Don Grantham as executive vice president of Sun Services and Eugene McCabe as executive vice president of worldwide operations, splitting Peterson's jobs between them. Grantham, who worked for IBM for 17 years before joining Sun in 1999, was in charge of Sun's global customer service operation and McCabe worked for Peterson as the chief cost-cutter for Sun's operations. McCabe came from Digital Equipment in 1999, and was originally in charge of the manufacturing and supply chain operations for Sun's server line.
SAS Sets ETL Benchmark Record on Sun Fire 15K Servers
The SAS Institute is the well-established leader in the data analytics market, providing tools that sift through mountains of data in data warehouses to create a few golden nuggets of information. But the company also wants to get a piece of the data warehouse tool market, particularly the extract, transform, and load (ETL) software slice.
To that end, SAS recently ran a test on its Enterprise ETL Server software, and showed off a Sun Fire 15K server from Sun Microsystems with 72 processors (it was unclear if they were single-core UltraSparc-IIIs or dual-core UltraSparc-IVs) running Solaris 10 and attached to Sun's StoreEdge 9980 disk arrays. The SAS Enterprise ETL Server was able to pump through 2.2 TB of data in 90 minutes, delivering 21 GB/hour of throughput.
Veritas Storage Foundation Is Ready for Solaris 10
Last May, Sun Microsystems threw in the towel and stopped trying to compete against Veritas in the file system and volume manager software business and renewed its partnership nuptials with Veritas so that company would help it boost the adoption of Solaris 10 on X86 servers. And now, Veritas is holding up its end of the bargain, but delivering its software for Solaris 10.
Veritas made a commitment to get its Storage Foundation, Cluster Server, and Volume Replicator software on Solaris 10 within 90 days of the general availability of that operating system, and it looks like it will be able to do so when it ships this software in April. Storage Foundation 4.1 can hook into all the new Solaris 10 features, including containers, DTrace, process rights management, and secure execution. Cluster Server 4.1 can cluster applications running in Solaris containers or a whole server running many Solaris containers. Base pricing for these products is as follows: $1,495 per server for Storage Foundation 4.1, $2,995 per server for Cluster Server, and $4,495 per server for Volume Replicator.
Merrill Lynch Says Server Market Could Slow in 2005 and 2006
Steven Milunovich, the head IT analyst at brokerage house Merrill Lynch, thinks the server market may be heading for a slowdown. In the late 1990s, the server market was bolstered by two killer app problems--the Y2K millennium bug and the dot-com boom. Since that time, he said server shipments have been increasingly driven by an upgrade cycle whereby companies are replacing aging equipment with newer gear.
According to statistics compiled by Milunovich, the four-quarter rolling average of server ages in the worldwide installed base is declining after rising pretty steadily between the fourth quarter of 1999 and the fourth quarter of 2002, rising from an average of 1.8 years to 2.05 years. The average server age (again, his data plots the four-quarter rolling average of server ages, so this math has a tendency to flatten out bumpy data and you have to be careful using it) held steady for the next year, and started to decline at the end of 2003. As 2004 came to a close, the average age of the server installed base was 1.95, and appeared to be heading south. The decline in average server age corresponded to diminishing server shipment growth, and the increasing server age in 2002 and 2003 helped get the server market growing again.
Milunovich reckons the uptick in server sales and shipments, which has been remarkable in the past four quarters, is really just an "echo" of the Y2K and dot-com buildouts. He believes server revenue growth could shift from the 6 percent growth the industry booked in 2004 (according to figures from IDC) down to zero in the 2005 to 2006 timeframe. And in terms of server shipment growth, Milunovich thinks it could shift from the 20 percent growth we saw at the end of 2004 to the low teens--and do so despite the growing use of Wintel and Lintel iron by companies large and small around the world. He also expects Windows growth on servers will all but stop by the end of 2007 and Linux growth will cool as well, dropping from 44 percent growth in 2004 to about 15 percent growth by 2008. Significantly, by 2008, Linux will be the only server platform showing revenue growth, according to Merrill Lynch's models, which are based on IDC and proprietary data.
Etnus Delivers TotalView Debugger for MacOS X
Natick, Massachusetts-based Etnus has announced that its TotalView debugger for Linux and Unix platforms has been ported to the BSD-based Mac OS X operating system from Apple. Etnus will have the debugger available for beta testing in May and hopes to have it shipping by June. The company says that is it making its software available on Mac OS X primarily because of the inroads that Apple's Xserve servers have been getting in the high performance computing (HPC) space in the past year. Over the past few months, Etnus announced that TotalView has been ported to IBM's Linux-Power servers as well as the Blue Gene/L supercomputer, and Cray has anointed TotalView as the debugger of choice for its Linux-Opteron XT3 "Red Storm" parallel supercomputers. TotalView has been supported on Solaris and AIX for years and was ported to HP-UX in November 2003.
NCR, Sun Face Off in Data Warehousing TCO Study
Ventana Research has released a report that claims that Unix servers from Sun Microsystems can beat out Unix servers from NCR's Teradata unit in total cost of ownership comparisons for data warehouses built on the two platforms.
According to the study, which you can read by clicking here, data warehouses built using Sun's E6900, E20K, and E25K servers and supporting data warehouses in 2 TB, 4 TB, and 10 TB capacities cost considerably less to acquire and set up than similar Teradata machines. Ventana said that the Sun Solaris boxes running Oracle databases cost from $2.3 million to $12.2 million less than similar-sized NCR machines. However, the one thing that the Ventana study did not do--and it really should have--is factor in data warehouse performance. To make any real comparisons, you need that data, too.
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HEWLETT-PACKARD
