But Wait, There's More

AMD Readies Pacifica Spec, Hires IBM System Expert

Chip maker Advanced Micro Devices held a meeting with developers in Austin, Texas, yesterday and unveiled some of the key features of the company's forthcoming "Pacifica" processor virtualization technology. The news came just as AMD announced that it has hired a veteran IBM systems designer who jumped to Opteron-based server maker Newisys when it was founded several years ago.

While AMD told the developers in attendance at its Reviewer's Day a lot about Pacifica, it has not said much publicly yet. The company is making sure that VMware and Microsoft, which sell the software-based virtualization hypervisors that most companies use today on X86 iron, have been involved in the development of Pacifica; AMD is also collaborating with the upstart, open source XenSource alternatives to VMware's GSX Server and ESX Server and Microsoft's Virtual Server 2005 products.

AMD is being very careful to pitch Pacifica, which is akin to Intel's "Vanderpool," now called Virtualization Technology or VT for short, for its Xeon and Itanium processors, as a means of extending the existing software-based hypervisors that VMware and Microsoft currently sell. But the truth of the matter is that abstracting the X86 instruction set and virtualizing it was the real value in the virtualization software that these companies sell, and both VMware and Microsoft, as well as any products that come from the XenSource community, will be relegated--and properly so--to the realm of providing management of virtualization capabilities that are propped up by the chips. This is great news for chip makers like AMD and Intel and for workstation and server customers, but it remains to be seen how virtualization software makers such as VMware, Microsoft, and XenSource will fare. VMware has about 10,000 server customers, and the limiting factors to the adoption of its products have been the relatively high cost of its software and overhead associated with its use; Microsoft has a much smaller installed base, but the same limiting factors. Pacifica and Vanderpool will eliminate much of that overhead, and VMware and Microsoft will eventually have to drop prices on their virtualization products, since they don't virtualize the hardware to the same extent and since XenSource will be offering similar capabilities across all X86 platforms for what will presumably be a very modest price. The virtualization software business will go to the higher ground of proving who has the best, easiest management tools--and we will all benefit from this substantial change. That is why VMware, Microsoft, and XenSource are getting on board. They still have an excellent chance of making real money, and because Vanderpool will be on the "Montecito" Itanium chips that come out early in 2006, they will be able to support the Itanium platform for the first time. IBM already has similar virtualization hardware and a hypervisor for its Power-based servers, the iSeries and the pSeries, but these are not compatible with VMware, Microsoft, or XenSource products.

Pacifica will be embedded in PC and server chips from AMD that are due in the first half of 2006. It will not be available in the dual-core Opterons that are expected within a matter of months.

In a related announcement, AMD said that it has hired away Rich Oehler, an IBM Fellow who worked on microprocessor and server designs at Big Blue for decades and who was most recently the chipset designer at Newisys, a subsidiary of contract PC and server manufacturer Sanmina-SCI. Oehler, you will remember, is the main designer of the forthcoming "Horus" chipset for Opterons, which Newisys announced last year and is supposed to scale to 32-socket processing in a single system image using a NUMA-like architecture based on four-way cell boards (see Newisys Readies Chipset for Big Opteron Iron for more details on Horus.) Oehler was also the lead designer on IBM's Power RSIC family of chips and servers, and was one of the key designers of the "Summit" X86 and Itanium chipsets. That AMD has hired him is a big score, but it makes one wonder about the future of the Horus chipset.

IBM Withdraws pSeries 679 and 690 Servers

With the eServer p5 Unix servers shipping in volume for many months, the time has come to send the top-end Power4-based pSeries servers to the bone yard. And to that end, IBM will withdraw these 16-way and 32-way Power4 and Power4+ servers from its product catalog on November 18. IBM will also cease selling upgrades to these servers on the same day. As usual, customers who need these machines or an upgrade to one will be able to acquire them from third parties in the IBM server channel, since customers often do push-pull upgrades or swap parts to do upgrades without going through IBM.

Nemonix Offers Dual GigE Adapter for HP AlphaServers

If you are one of the customers using one or many of the 170,000 AlphaServers installed in the United States or the approximately equal number of AlphaServer machines that are installed in the rest of world, you are probably a bit frustrated that 100 Mbit Ethernet is the fastest networking that Hewlett-Packard and its predecessors, Digital Equipment and Compaq, made available on those servers. It was cutting edge at the time, back in the late 1990s, but Gigabit Ethernet is standard now and 10 GigE is not that far from being a standard.

To help these customers out, HP has partnered with Nemonix Engineering to help that company create a two-port Gigabit Ethernet card that plugs into a single PCI-X slot in AlphaServer DS, ES, and GS servers. Nemonix is charging $899 for the card, and offers a three-year warranty on it. It is compatible with Tru64 Unix and OpenVMS. By the way, Nemonix, which is located in Northborough, Massachusetts, also sells VAX and AlphaServer hardware upgrades and repairs broken machines, too.

Neterion Xframe 10 GigE Adapters Now Support Solaris 10

Neterion, one of the pioneers in the 10 Gigabit Ethernet networking market, says that its Xframe line of networking adapters have been certified to work on Sun Fire servers from Sun Microsystems using Sparc, Opteron, and X86 processors and running the Solaris 10 Unix variant. These adapters plug into PCI-X slots, and they offer the second-generation Xframe II adapters from 12 to 16 times the throughput and up to 50 percent lower latency than Gigabit Ethernet; moreover, since certain TCP/IP algorithms can be offloaded from central processors to the Xframe card, TCP/IP overhead can be cut by as much as 40 percent. This is a big improvement for network-heavy applications.

Neterion, which is based in Cupertino, California, and used to be known as S2io, has raised $42 million in three rounds of venture funding. The Xframe products support the IPv4 and IPv6 protocols, and already support Solaris 9, AIX, HP-UX, Irix, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), and Windows (2000 and 2003). The company also has a FreeBSD driver with limited support.

In a related announcement, Sun and Neterion plan to deliver support for Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) between networked servers through the iWARP specification that was established nearly four years ago. RDMA allows network cards to figure out where in server main memory an application wants a piece of data that it is calling from another server or a storage array and then place it directly there instead of having the application work up through the operating system stack to ask for it. The RDMA capability is expected to be available this year.

Oracle Grows Sales in Q1, But Profits Hit By PeopleSoft Charges

Having eaten PeopleSoft in December and prevailed in its desire to buy retail software specialist Retek after a brief bidding war with SAP, Oracle is delivering on its promise that the PeopleSoft acquisition would deliver growth for the company. For the fiscal third quarter that ended February 28, Oracle said software license sales were up 12 percent to $947 million (with Oracle properly merging PeopleSoft's financials into its own for both this year's and last year's fiscal third quarters). Support and update sales were up 18 percent to just under $1.4 billion and services sales were up 26 percent to $614 million. All told, sales were up 18 percent to $2.95 billion. However, amortization of intangibles, acquisition related charges, and restructuring charges as Oracle laid off thousands of workers in the wake of the PeopleSoft acquisition took hundreds of millions of dollars off profits for the quarter, which dropped 15 percent to $540 million. Ignoring these charges, Oracle's net income would have been $814 million, up 25 percent.

Altiris, BMC Bolster Management Wares with Acquisitions

Systems and application management software vendor Altiris has acquired Pedestal Software for $65 million in cash. By doing so, Altiris can now offer security management software on top of the substantial portfolio of systems management tools it offers directly and resells through Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and others. And right after that, BMC Software last week acquired OpenNetwork.

Only a few weeks ago, Altiris said it would be looking to make acquisitions to position itself as a more complete player in the enterprise space. Lindon, Utah-based Altiris is one of the many companies founded by The Canopy Group, the venture capital company created in late 1994 by Novell founder Ray Noorda. The addition of Pedestal Software comes on the heels of Altiris buying Tonic Software in January, Bridgewater Technologies in September 2004, and Wise Solutions in December 2003. While many of Altiris' rivals have been snapped up by BMC Software (which bought Marimba), Symantec (which bought On Technology), and HP (which bought Novadigm), Altiris has a market capitalization of around $670 million and would probably fetch more than $1 billion if someone tried to buy it. (Uh, HP. Now might be a good time, especially before Dell or IBM buys it.)

Altiris expects to close the acquisition by the end of March and will start integrating the Pedestal Software security products into its own line. Altiris said that the Pedestal security products would bring in between $17 million and $18 million in fiscal 2005 and would start adding to profits by the third fiscal quarter; the company added that the line would be profitable for the entire fiscal 2005 year, which suggests that Pedestal was on its way to hitting the mainstream. This would be why Altiris would pay more than 3.5 times sales to acquire the Pedestal. Altiris had $166.5 million in sales in 2004 and a net income of $16.7 million.

Right on the heels of the Altiris-Pedestal deal, systems management software maker BMC Software bought OpenNetwork, a vendor of single sign-on software that integrates Microsoft's Identity Management Server for the Windows platform with similar security systems on AIX, Solaris, OS/400, and mainframe platforms. (It is unclear what OpenNetwork's plans were for the Linux platform, but it is probably working on it.)

BMC, which sells various PATROL system management utilities for many platforms, paid $18 million in cash for OpenNetwork. The company's products will be merged into BMC's Identity Management business unit, which will also pick up 40 of OpenNetwork's employees under the deal. BMC has a whole set of Unix system tools that have been ported over to Linux, and now it will probably be working on a native Linux identity management solution. That's a guess, not back channel communication from BMC or OpenNetwork. But it is a very good guess.

IBM Announces New Identity-based Spam Filter, While Spam Counts Drop

IBM last week took the curious steps of introducing new weapons to fight the ongoing war against spam, while simultaneously announcing that it is seeing the volume of spam drop off. The new anti-spam weapon, called FairUCE (or Fair use of Unsolicited Commercial Email), takes a different approach to fighting spam than most tools on the market. Instead of filtering content, FairUCE looks at the identity of the e-mail sender to determine if the e-mail is spam or not. If the e-mail domain, e-mail address, and the IP address of the computer from which it was sent don't match up, then FairUCE assumes it was sent by a spammer trying to hide their identity using a zombie computer or bot device, and blocks the spam from going through. The software runs only on Linux, and is currently available worldwide (except for Germany) at www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/fairuce.

IBM also announced it saw a 7 percent reduction in the amount of spam from January to February. According to IBM's February Global Business Security Index, spam decreased from 83.11 percent in January to 76.3 percent in February, which mirrors similar declines other organizations have witnessed recently. Lest it rationalize its way out of a potential market for spam-fighting tools, IBM said, "Despite the decrease, spam continues to be a major headache and tax on IT staffs worldwide." And we all know that to be true.