But Wait, There's More

Solaris 10 Hits 1.7 Million Downloads

Sun Microsystems said this week as part of the OpenSolaris roll out that it has seen a total of 1.7 million downloads of the freely distributed binary form of the Solaris 10 operating system. That's about 400,000 downloads in about five weeks, which means that the download rate has picked up a bit.

In the first week of May, when Sun was in Washington, D.C., to talk up its latest announcements and its business with the federal government and other state, local, and national governments around the world, the company said it had seen a total of 300,000 downloads between the last week of March and the first week of May. Sun exited March with a download rate of about 125,000 units per week (on average over a month), which was understandable given the newness of the product. After a dip in April and May where it was only seeing about 50,000 downloads a week, the download rate is now around 80,000 a week. Making projections of the download rate is difficult given the newness of free Solaris for Sparc and X86, but my best guess is that Sun will have at least 2.5 million downloads by the first week of January 2006. That assumes a significant drop off in the rate of downloads as the year progresses; Sun could do a lot better than this, and could see as many as 3.5 million units downloaded.

Guessing how many Solaris 10 binaries are in use is another matter entirely.

HP Virtualizes the mySAP Suite to Make It Malleable

The mySAP ERP software suite may be one of the most popular application software packages in the world, but no one would ever say that it is easy to implement and easily changed once it is running. That's why Hewlett-Packard has created the Virtualized Infrastructure Solutions for mySAP, which props up mySAP onto virtualized servers and storage such that companies can give different SAP modules the processing capacity they need without having to plan for maximum capacity on all modules at the same time.

According to Ron Eller, HP's vice president and general manager of enterprise solutions, half of SAP's customer base is running on one form of HP iron or another, so making SAP easier to use and more efficient is a natural thing for HP to do. Moreover, because of the complexities of the SAP suite, SAP customers were a little hesitant to deploy virtualization technologies, which is why HP has created a formal product set specifically for HP-UX, Linux, and Windows platforms running on HP gear. SAP is also aware its customers have been slow to adopt virtualization, and so it has created something called the Adaptive Computing Controller in its NetWeaver middleware that can dial physical and virtual server resources up and down for SAP applications. The VIS for mySAP offering is, as you might expect, heavily dependent on the HP-UX Unix platform and the virtualization environment it has when running on HP 9000 and Integrity servers. There is some degree of virtualization with Linux platforms, and none for Windows. However, customers wishing to deploy Windows-based SAP suites can make use of the Rapid Deployment Pack software that ships with ProLiant servers to create and quickly deploy new servers to run SAP modules. This is not the same thing as being virtualized, of course, but HP does not control Windows--Microsoft does--and until Microsoft's virtualization support is akin to that on HP-UX and can talk to SAP's Adaptive Computing Controller inside NetWeaver, there is not much HP can do to better support Windows. The offering not only allows a mix of operating systems in n-tier deployments, but also different SAP release levels.

In the reference example for the VIS for mySAP solution, the University of Madgeburg in Germany runs one of the largest data centers in Germany and also provides SAP training on those systems as well as IT support for some 40,000 students. On the SAP training side, any student can load any SAP module and begin playing with it at any time, which means the workload could be very large on the HP-UX servers is essentially unpredictable. The university cannot afford to plan for peak capacity, but by virtualizing the SAP environment it has been able to cut IT costs by 30 to 40 percent and use up its excess capacity to support the students running SAP training.

Sun Rebranding Campaign Stresses Participation, Community

Sun Microsystems can't brag about being the dot in dot-com, the fastest growing server maker in the world, or any of a number of things it said in old marketing campaigns. So it has had to come up with another way to present and brand itself. And the new Sun, according to its new multi-million dollar advertising and marketing campaign, can be summed up in one word: sharing.

So as Sun is rolling out OpenSolaris and reminding people that Solaris was based on BSD and that it has contributed NFS, Java, OpenOffice, Grid Engine, NetBeans, and a lot of other projects to the open source community and goes to the United Nations to talk about the "Participation Age," Sun is also rolling out new ads on billboards and in print and online media that highlight the fact that it believes in participation and sharing.

"The technology to connect communities and fuel collaboration creates economic and social growth," explained Ingrid Van den Hoogen, vice president of brand and global communications at Sun in a statement launching the new campaign. "Inventing and sharing those technologies has been the core tenet of Sun's business since its inception. This campaign demonstrates the power of sharing and delivers the clear message known by Sun's employees, customers and partners for years--sharing grows markets and market growth benefits everyone." Of course, companies exist to make money, so all that sharing has to pan out at some point. Sun did pretty well with BSD Unix and NFS and has done reasonably well creating awareness of itself as a player in software with Java. But Java has not made Sun a lot of money, and free Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris might yet not, either. We'll have to see.

SCO's Auditor, KPMG, Calls It Quits

Big Four accountancy KPMG LLP has quit its job as auditor for Unix software vendor The SCO Group. KPMG actually resigned as the independent auditor for SCO on May 27, and said that as soon as it completed its paperwork on June 2 for the quarter ended April 30. SCO did not explain the reason for the resignation, and Bert Young, SCO's chief financial officer, said it had no disagreements with KPMG. Just to quell the inevitable tongue wagging following such a departure for a controversial company, SCO issued the following statement: "In connection with the audits of the two fiscal years ended October 31, 2004, and the subsequent interim periods through June 2, 2005, there were no disagreements with KPMG on any matter of accounting principles or practices, financial statement disclosure, or auditing scope or procedure, which disagreements, if not resolved to the satisfaction of KPMG, would have caused KPMG to make reference to the subject matter of the disagreements in connection with its reports. The audit reports of KPMG on the Company's consolidated financial statements as of and for the years ended October 31, 2004 and October 31, 2003, did not contain an adverse opinion or a disclaimer of opinion and were not qualified or modified as to uncertainty, audit scope, or accounting principles."

For all anyone knows, SCO and KPMG were arguing over fees. In any event, KPMG has been replace by Tanner LC, an accounting firm from--you guessed it--Salt Lake City, Utah, which is close to where SCO is headquartered in Lindon.

Server Vendors Promote Command Line Standard for Server Management

HP, IBM Jockey for the Lead in the Tape Market

Tape technology has been around in commercial data centers for six decades, and it is not about to go away in the seventh. Vendors are still fighting over control of the prolific, if only moderately profitable, market for tape drives and tape libraries. IDC recently issued market-share report cards for the tape market, and IBM and Hewlett-Packard were the top of the class. IDC says HP had a 29 percent share of both shipments and revenues for tape drives bearing its label in 2004; IBM had only 17 percent of tape drive shipments in 2004, but because it tends to sell more expensive drives (particularly for mainframe and iSeries customers), actually raked in 33 percent of revenues. Dell and Certance (the former tape drive unit of disk maker Seagate Technology and, with IBM and HP, one of the three key developers behind the LTO tape standard) were cited as dominant tape drive sellers in 2004. If you don't think that adding the Compaq server line to the HP tape business hasn't been helpful to HP, you're wrong.

In the tape library market, HP accounted for 26 percent of shipments and 23 percent of revenue for automated tape loaders and full tape libraries. IBM also had 23 percent of revenues in this segment, but only had 22 percent of shipments--again, IBM sells bigger boxes to its bigger customers. StorageTek, which has just been eaten by Sun Microsystems for $4.1 billion, and ADIC were cited as the other dominant tape library suppliers in the IDC report.