But Wait, There's More

Bull Announces Its Power5 Machines, Too

Since the mid-90s, when IBM went to French server maker Group Bull to have the company engineer its entry and midrange SMP servers using 32-bit PowerPC processors, the two companies have been partners in the Unix server business. When IBM decided to design its own line of Power servers, when it moved to 64-bit PowerPC chips, Bull rebranded IBM gear as IBM had earlier rebranded Bull gear. So it comes as no surprise that Bull this week has launched its own line of Power5-based Escala servers, which run IBM's AIX Unix variant and include some flourishes provided by Bull.

The Escala PL250R/T is equivalent to the IBM p5-520. The "R/T" means it is available in rack or tower configurations. The Escala PL450R/T is equivalent to the IBM p5-550, and the Escala PL850R and PL1650R are variants of the p5-570. IBM is offering the p5-570 as a machine that scales from two to 16 processors using 1.9 GHz Power5 processor cores, and another that scales from one to eight processors using 1.5 GHz cores (that's called the p5-570 Express). Bull's PL850R is equivalent to the p5-570 Express, while the PL1650R machine is equivalent to the plain vanilla p5-570.

As for the flourishes in the Bull Escala line, instead of selling IBM's Shark and FastT arrays for its Unix servers, Bull has partnered with EMC to supply Symmetrix DMX and Clarrion CX disk arrays to its AIX customers. Bull also announced Version 4 of its own Application Rollover Facility high availability clustering software for the Escala servers, in conjunction with its Power5 rollout. The company also announced a special bundle of two Escala PL servers, one EMC disk array, and the Application Rollover Facility clustering software in configurations using two-, four-, or eight-way Escala machines as nodes in the cluster. Bull's Power5 machines start shipping on September 1.

Sun Adds Intuit's Bennett to Board of Directors

Sun Microsystems has announced that Stephen Bennett, chief executive officer and president of personal and small business financial application software maker Intuit, has joined Sun's board of directors. Bennett took over the helm at Intuit, which uses Sun gear for its hosted applications, four years ago after spending 23 years at the General Electric conglomerate. He rose to become CEO of the GE Capital financing arm of that giant company.

Bennett joins a diverse board of directors that includes founder, CEO, and chairman Scott McNealy; James Barksdale (of the former Netscape); John Doerr (a partner at venture capitalist Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers); Robert J. Fisher (chairman of The Gap); Michael Lehman (former chief financial officer at Sun); Robert Long (an independent management consultant); Kenneth Oshman (chairman of Echelon Corporation); Naomi Seligman (senior partner at Ostriker von Simson); and Lynn Turner (professor of accounting at Colorado State University).

SCO Pushes for More IBM Docs in Lawsuit Discovery

The SCO Group and IBM continue to battle it out in the Federal District court in Utah over IBM's alleged violation of SCO's Unix license and the alleged contribution of Unix intellectual property owned by SCO to the Linux community. SCO now wants IBM to fork over more documentation related to its activities in the open source Linux market. SCO also wants IBM to identify the employees and third parties that worked with the company on Linux projects so that SCO can depose them in the course of discovery.

SCO's lawyers argued that they would love to depose Linus Torvalds and other key Linux kernel contributors, and specifically said that they wanted to depose Dan Frye, the head of IBM's Linux Technology Center; Irving Wladawksy-Berger, IBM's vice president of strategy and the guy who got a $1 billion check in 2001 to build a Linux business for Big Blue; and Sam Palmisano, the current chairman and CEO of IBM, who made the decision to push for Linux in early 2000. SCO also wants to know who within IBM had access to AIX and Dynix/ptx source code and therefore had the opportunity to let that code loose, either wholly or in a modified (but legally derivative) form, into the Linux operating system, which SCO alleges has happened. IBM has supplied a list of some 7,200 Unix developers but has not told SCO who did what with what operating system. Obviously, SCO cannot depose 7,200 people. It will be interesting to see what the court does.

Why doesn't SCO just do a code comparison and be done with it? SCO contends that there are 4 million lines of code in the Linux 2.4 kernel and about 3.4 million lines of code in Unix System V. With AIX and Dynix/ptx having similar code bases (in terms of length), SCO contends that it would take 35 man-years to go through the code and look for copying from Unix into Linux. SCO wants to depose Linux experts inside and outside of IBM to get an idea of what portions of the code to look into, just to speed up the process.

Netcraft Says 2.5 Million Web Sites Use FreeBSD

According to a recent survey of Web host domains performed by Netcraft, the growing popularity of Linux has not necessarily put a damper on the adoption of the BSD variants of Unix out there on the Internet. Netcraft's polling of Internet servers in late June suggests that there are nearly 5 million active Web sites on the Internet that are backed by FreeBSD, and that close to 2.5 million hosts are running that open source variant of the BSD Unix platform. One of the major factors that continue to drive FreeBSD is the strong use of it by very large scale service providers, like Yahoo, which has nearly 267,000 Web sites running on a giant collection of FreeBSD machines. Back in January 2002, there were around 3 million Web sites and about 1.5 million hosts running FreeBSD. Guild Companies had one such machine on the Internet back then, and even as we have since then adopted SuSE Linux for most of the systems behind our Web site, we still use FreeBSD on one of our Web servers, just to keep Linux honest.

Sun Donates $1 Million in Unix Gear to Museum

Sun Microsystems has donated $1 million in Unix gear and software to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, home to one of the finest collections of dinosaur bones outside of Montana and a brand-new planetarium. A cluster of 24 two-way Sun Fire V60x servers (which use Intel Xeon chips), three Sun Fire V1280 servers (which use Sun's Sparc chips), and a Sun Fire V880z visualization system that links into these machines is going to give the museum's researchers a rendering farm in which they can create animated shows to describe the origins of the universe to the public and to do original research in astrophysics. The planetarium already had a Sun cluster with 40 processors before getting the new gear from the company, and this will more than double its computing power.

BEA Supports Its Middleware on Solaris for X86

Middleware software and application development tool provider BEA Systems has announced that its WebLogic Platform 8.1 Web application server is now capable of running in 32-bit mode on Solaris 9 for X86 processors. The software will run on Solaris, whether it is on machines using Xeon processors from Intel or Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices. The new 64-bit versions of the Xeon chips have a 32-bit compatibility mode, and the Opteron processors can likewise run operating systems and their applications in either 32- or 64-bit mode. The odds favor BEA supporting Solaris 10 for X86, which will run in full 64-bit mode on 64-bit X86 processors when it starts shipping this fall.

Guild Companies Adds Google Search Service

In an effort to make the search capability of our Web site better, we have added a Google search engine feature to our Search page. For those of you who like the open source HT/DIG search engine we have been using until now, we have left it active. The "search" button (which is at the top of all e-mail newsletters and on all pages on the Guild Companies site) now also points to a Google search box, which can troll our site for tech tips, articles, and other material. We have implemented the Google search box so you can search the rest of the Web, if you have an inclination to do that while on our search page. All you have to do is click the radio button from "itjungle.com" to "Web" and you can search the Web from within our site. We hope you find these two search engines useful.