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But Wait, There's More
Solaris 10 to Include Massive Dynamic File System
Another month has gone by, so it must be time for Sun Microsystems to release another feature of the future Solaris 10 operating system into the Software Express beta program.
This time around, Sun is talking up the new Dynamic File Service, which Sun is billing as a self-healing, self-managing file system that can span a 128-bit storage space. That is apparently 16 billion billion times more capacity than 64-bit file systems, and it is, according to Graham Lovell, senior director of operating system marketing at Sun, a "zetabyte" file system.
But size isn't everything. Performance and ease of use matter, too, and that is where DFS will come in handy. In addition to being a large file space, DFS implements storage volumes as a single virtual pool that file systems can take slices out of as they need capacity. This virtualized DFS pool does not require a volume manager, but it can coexist with QFS, NFS, UFS, and Solaris Volume Manager. With DFS on Solaris 10, Lovell says it can take about 10 seconds and five commands to allocate a chunk of storage to a file system compared to disk allocation using Solaris 8, which would take 28 commands and about 40 minutes. This is obviously a big savings, and that is probably why Sun is not sure if it is going to give it away for free or charge for it when it rolls out Solaris 10 this fall.
Sun Announces Ruggedized Netra 440 Server
As part of the festivities this week at the NCQ204 event in Shanghai, Sun Microsystems announced that it has tweaked the four-way Sun Fire V440 to make it NEBS certified and outfitted the machine with DC power, both of which are requirements for ruggedized applications in the military and telecommunications markets.
The Netra 440 slides in the line between the Netra 240, a two-way UltraSparc-IIIi box, and the Netra 1280, a 12-way UltraSparc-III box. Kirk Lozier, product line manager for the Netra product line, says that Hewlett-Packard is just about the only real competition that Sun has in this market, which is a key driver of its Unix server business. He says that the Netra 440 offers four times better price/performance than the prior Netra 1400 servers it replaces in the Sun product line and offers 43 percent better bang for the buck than the equivalent HP rx Series four-way iron using Itanium processors. He also said that Sun has no plans to add an eight-way Netra server or to launch a Netra product line based on Solaris on X86 or Linux on X86. The base Netra 440 costs $13,995, and crams four processors into a 5U, half-depth rack server. Sun says this machine costs a little more than half the price of HP's Itanium boxes and about one-quarter of the price on its PA-RISC boxes in the same four-way class.
IBM Chases HP-UX Servers with the i5
While IBM has been touting the use of Linux on its zSeries mainframe and iSeries midrange servers as boosting revenue, it may turn out that the Unix market is a real salvation for the new eServer i5 server, a Power5-based box that will support OS/400, AIX, and Linux concurrently. IBM booked around $100 million in Linux-related iSeries server sales in 2003, a factor of six larger than Linux sales on the box in 2002. This may not sound like a lot, but with that growth rate it will become a very large factor in 2004. IBM is hoping that AIX support does the same thing. As it turns out, nearly 40,000 OS/400 customers also have Unix servers in their shops, of which the vast majority are running HP-UX applications. Getting even a percentage of these customers to port their HP-UX applications to AIX and move them onto the i5 supporting both their OS/400 and AIX workloads will go a long way toward boosting overall iSeries sales.
Big Hack Attacks Doubled At Financial Services Firms in 2004
If you think your IT job is tough, try working in the IT departments of the world's financial services companies. According to a survey performed by accountancy Deloitte & Touche, hack attacks against financial services companies more than doubled this year, compared with a study done this time last year. The company's "2004 Global Security Survey" indicates that 83 percent of the financial institutions that responded have had their IT systems compromised in the past 12 months, compared with 39 percent this time last year. Some 40 percent of those who were hit said that they sustained financial losses due to the attacks.
Ironically (unless you read Dilbert), of the 100 big financial firms polled, more than a quarter said they were not spending any more on IT security in 2004 than they did in 2003, and 10 percent of the companies actually cut their security budgets. Even more shocking was the finding that only 87 percent of respondents claim to have fully capable antivirus countermeasures, down from 96 percent in 2003. Not a winning strategy, clearly. But, hey, it's your money they are playing with, right?
IBM, SSA Global Ally to Attack the Midrange
IBM and SSA Global have renewed their allegiances and made a commitment to attack the midrange together. As has happened in other IBM alliances, SSA has agreed to standardize on IBM's middleware stack, including the WebSphere Application Server, the WebSphere Portal, and the DB2 database, in exchange for assistance from IBM as it tries to sell its software on iSeries, pSeries, xSeries, and zSeries machines. IBM Global Services and SSA Global plan to offer joint implementation and consulting services. By standardizing on IBM middleware, SSA Global can help to meld together many of the disparate applications the company has acquired over the past two years.
IDC Expects Software Subscriptions to Grow Steadily
Software analysts at IDC have just released a forecast for the market for subscription-based software licensing, which many vendors believe is going to be their salvation from the horrors of constantly trying to upgrade their installed bases. According to the IDC report, the company expects software subscriptions to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 16.6 percent from 2003 to 2008, reaching $43 billion worldwide by 2008. Perpetual software licenses will shrink modestly at a rate of 0.3 percent annually over the same timeframe, according to the report.
But IDC may be underestimating how big the seismic shift will be away from perpetual licensing and toward subscription licensing. People are sick of managing their licenses and upgrading their software, and vendors are sick of selling their products this way. If vendors come up with the right mechanisms and pricing to properly do subscription-based software licensing, the shifts could be a lot larger than IDC expects. There are plenty of software upstarts that are going to try to make this happen, and they may fail, just as most companies that tried to sell software under the application service provider model in the late 1990s and early 2000s did. This time around, they may just get it right.
Gartner Says Database Market Rebounded in 2003
The fiercely competitive database market has not gotten any easier to be in, but the market did, according to Gartner, manage to grow a smidgen in 2003. Gartner says that the overall relational database market grew by 5.1 percent in 2003, to $7.1 billion, which is a big improvement over the 6 percent decline database makers suffered through in 2002, when they only sold $6.7 billion in new licenses. (These figures do not include services and support revenues or sales of flat file database management systems that are still sold by IBM, Computer Associates, and a few other companies.)
Gartner pegged IBM as the number-one relational database supplier of new license sales, which includes a lot of mainframe shops that pay for software on a monthly basis; they effectively book a new sale every month, to Gartner's thinking. IBM had $2.5 billion in database sales, up 4.9 percent. Rival Oracle, which dominates the Unix database market and has a healthy share of the Windows and Linux markets, had new license sales of $2.3 billion, according to Gartner, up 2.4 percent. Microsoft booked $1.3 billion in relational database sales in 2003, up 11.1 percent, and giving it 47 percent of the Windows database market, which was up 3.8 percent, to $2.8 billion. Sales of databases on Unix platforms declined by 5.9 percent, to $2.34 billion; Oracle had 57.4 percent of this market. Linux database sales were up 158 percent, to $299 million, and Oracle nearly quadrupled its sales (thanks to Oracle 9i Real Application Clusters, no doubt) and got 69.1 percent of the Linux database market.
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