But Wait, There's More

Palamida Partners with SourceForce on IP, Too

On Monday of this week, Black Duck Software announced it had forged an alliance with VA Software, one of the early commercializers of Linux and the owner of SourceForge distributed, open source development community, that would allow Black Duck's protexIP tool to integrate with the SourceForge repository (see separate story in this issue). And a day later Palamida, a relative newcomer in the intellectual property right and software compliance tool market, announced it, too, had a partnership with SourceForge.

According to Mark Tolliver, the former Sun Microsystems executive who was named as Palamida's chief executive officer back in May when the company came out of stealth mode operation, Palamida actually had an alliance with VA Software that allowed the replication of the SourceForge site at Palamida's data center for the past for months, but the company has not been bragging about it.

When you sell products that are used to detect the presence of open source software in custom in-house or commercial applications, having a complete set of code snippets that provide the fingerprints for identifying the source or compiled code of a particular open source project is important. Such a software service is only as good as its snippet library, and with SourceForge housing more than 103,000 open source projects and representing the largest single repository of open source code in the world, keeping current with all the changes in SourceForge is not a trivial matter.

That is why, says Tolliver, that Palamida drove a 3 TB disk array down Highway 101 from its offices to VA Software's four months ago and made a snapshot of the SourceForge repository. (He jokingly called this "Highway 101-net," an homage to the old "sneakernet" that predated the Internet.) Since that time, Palamida and VA Software have kept these sites in lockstep remotely, so as new code is added to existing projects and new projects are added to the site, Palamida has access to all that new code, allowing it to make code snippet fingerprints that identify the open source projects and then their licensing terms. Black Duck, without knowing what Palamida was up to, set up a similar deal. "We both got with the program," explains Tolliver," and to SourceForge's credit, they have made the data available to both of us."

The amount of changed data in the SourceForge repository is, according to Tolliver, several gigabytes a day, and it sometimes hits as much as 10 GB a day. "This is not an amount of data you can crawl through from the outside using the Internet. It just isn't practical."

Having formed an alliance with SourceForge, Tolliver concedes that Palamida needs to go after other repositories--Apache.net and Collab.net are the next two obvious choices--because customers paying for Palamida's IP Amplifier and Black Duck's protexIP solutions are paying them for complete coverage. People buy antivirus software expecting for the provider of that software to keep on its toes and be current in identifying all threats; this is no different, in principle. Black Duck had a relationship with the projects on Collab.net already, and it seems logical that Palamida will go there next. "Ultimately, we'd like to do this with all code repositories," says Tolliver.

Black Duck also has a deal whereby VA Software can bundle protexIP with its SourceForge Enterprise Edition, which is the commercial version of VA Software's open source platform. Tolliver says selling IP Amplifier as a bundle with the commercial SourceForge tools is an option, but it is not something Palamida is pursuing right now.

Solaris 10 Crests Above 2 Million Downloads

As Sun Microsystems announced its fiscal year end financial results two weeks ago, it said that the cumulative downloads for the Solaris 10 operating system, which it has been giving away for free as beta code and as commercial code on servers with four or fewer processors, has crested above the 2 million mark.

Sun is not any more generous than any other IT vendor, but is instead giving away Solaris 10 as a way of blunting the perceived "freeness" of Linux and in the hopes of getting its vast installed base of Solaris customers excited about upgrading the Solaris on their existing Sparc box or moving to a new or old X86 box to run the operating system. Having seeded a very large installed base of potential Solaris 10 users--not every download ends up being a used piece of software, obviously--Sun is banking on the fact that many of those downloads will end up in production environments where customers insist on buying Sun support for the operating system.

Figure 1: Cumulative Solaris 10 Beta and Solaris 10 Shipments (Source: Sun, IT Jungle)

So far, Sun's top brass will not say what their conversion rate is on turning those free downloads into money. Both Scott McNealy, Sun's CEO and chairman, and Jonathan Schwartz, who is risking his professional neck as president and chief operating officer on Sun's new pricing strategies, say they expected that turning installed base market share into money would take time. Nonetheless, Sun will probably see some action on this front late this year and early next, since customers really only got their hands on the Solaris 10 code in February and need 6 to 9 months to test the software before they will move into production for projects. And, given the fact that the Solaris 10 for X86/X64 servers is still being built out, this may take a little longer for the two-thirds of customers who have opted for the X86/X64 version of Solaris 10 as part of those downloads.

As you can see from the chart above, Sun is tracking closer to my initial optimistic estimates from March, when I built a model for Solaris 10 shipments. It is hard to say where this curve will go, but almost certainly it will take a bend downward at some point. It is hard to imagine 9 million cumulative Solaris 10 downloads by December 2006, which is the optimistic estimate I made back in March. But I think that the pessimistic estimate of 3 million downloads by December 2006 is turning out to be too cynical. As I said back in March, I think it likely that actual downloads will shoot the gap between these two estimates, with probably 5 million to 6 million cumulative Solaris 10 downloads by the end of 2006.

Oracle 10g, HP-UX Superdome Top TPC-H Data Warehousing Benchmark

Database maker Oracle and server maker Hewlett-Packard have tested Oracle 10g R2 on an Itanium-based Integrity server and have bested the competition on the test.

HP ran its latest TPC-H test on a 64-way Integrity server using Intel's 1.6 GHz/9 MB Itanium 2 chips. The Integrity machine was configured with 256 GB of main memory and over 40 TB of disk. This server ran HP-UX 11i v2 and the just-announced Oracle 10g R2, which is not going to be available on HP-UX until January 2006, according to the TPC report. On the 3 TB data warehouse test, this box was able to process 71,848 queries per hour (QPH) at a cost of just over $4 million, or $56 per QPH. In December 2003, HP tested a 64-way Integrity machine using 1.5 GHz/6 MB Itanium 2 chips and with 256 GB of main memory running HP-UX 11i v2 and Oracle 10g Release 1; this machine was capable of handling 45,248 QPH at a cost of $109 per QPH. That's a 59 percent improvement in performance and a 49 percent improvement in price/performance with a minor change in processor speed and no major change in operating system.

You might think that HP was able to boost performance on the most recent TPC-H test by employing a technique called "horizontal partitioning." With horizontal partitioning, you take a big database with potentially millions, hundreds of millions, or even billions of rows and possibly dozens to hundreds of columns, and you break the data up into chunks based on some relevant key--time, customer name, or whatever. To do transactions or queries, you have to steer requests to the appropriate table, which is a bit of a pain, but smaller tables are a lot easier to manipulate than larger ones, so performance can improve radically. The trouble comes when you need to run a transaction or a query that spans all of the tables, which means you need to do the mother of all joins. Such horizontal partitioning is absolutely permitted by the TPC-H benchmark, and is required on clusters of servers, in fact. Doing such partitioning on a big Superdome SMP box may seem a bit strange, but then again, HP probably did it to goose performance. To HP's credit, it did not try to hide this fact, either. If you look at the detailed report on the TPC-H test, you can see that it partitioned the database based on item number and date. Moreover, HP use database partitioning on the prior TPC-H test on the Integrity box and on an HP-9000 server it tested in August 2002 running Oracle 9i. So the performance gains this time around seem to have mostly to do with L3 cache, tuning, and performance tweaks in 10g R2.

In February, Sun Microsystems demonstrated that a Sun Fire E25K server with 72 of its dual-core UltraSparc-IV processors, running at 1.2 GHz, was able to crank through 59,436 QPH on the TPC-H test with a 3 TB data warehouse. This system was configured with 288 GB of main memory (only half of the maximum on the system, oddly enough) and over 84 TB of disk capacity. This machine cost $11.1 million, and Sun gave a 42 percent discount on the system. This yielded a price/performance of $114 per QPH after the discount (which is in the same ballpark as those given by HP on the Integrities). In March 2004, a Fujitsu Siemens PrimePower 2500 was able to handle about 34,354 QPH at a cost of $147 per QPH (that price includes a 29 percent discount). The PrimePower 2500 used Fujitsu's 1.3 GHz Sparc64 V processors, 256 GB of main memory, and 53 TB of disk. IBM has tested a cluster of its Power5-based p5 575s on the 10 TB TPC-H test, but has not tested its big p5 SMP boxes on the 3 TB test so far. In May of this year, IBM did test a cluster of 64 of its Xeon-based xSeries 346 servers running Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 and its own DB2 8.2 clustered database, and was able to do 54,466 QPH at a cost of $32 per QPH.

HP Says Over 5,000 Applications on Integrity Servers

Being the dominant platform provider based on the Itanium platform has its benefits--you get to help design the chip and you get great prices on the processors--but Itanium has had to prove itself in the application space. But Hewlett-Packard, which is clearly the biggest seller of Itanium-based servers, also has some big responsibilities, chief among them being corralling the application vendors of the world and getting them to support its Itanium-based Integrity platforms.

To help show the momentum behind Itanium--and to goose it a little--HP has been keeping track of how quickly application vendors roll out support for the Integrity boxes. Rich Marcello, the general manager of HP's Business Critical Server unit, which controls the Integrity platform as well as HP's HP-UX, OpenVMS, and NonStop operating systems and the use of Windows and Linux platforms on those boxes, said in his blog this week that the application count has risen above 5,000 on the Integrity machines. HP had set a goal of 4,500 applications by the end of 2005.

In April 2003, HP said there were over 300 applications on the Integrity machines and the company had hopes of getting 1,000 applications on the boxes within the following 6 to 9 months. The Itanium ecosystem beat that number a bit, hitting around 1,500 applications by the end of 2003, and then went on to double to 3,000 applications by early 2005. This is when HP set the goal of 4,500 Itanium applications by the end of 2005, and at that time it seemed logical that another 1,500 applications could be brought to bear. I also said that it was also possible that the base could do better and could double again to 6,000 applications. At the current rate, the Itanium ecosystem--which has been boosted by the addition of the OpenVMS and NonStop platforms--should have around 5,600 applications by year end.

Nano-Technology Comes to Tape Cartridges

Companies utilizing the IBM 3592 Total Storage Enterprise Tape Drive System can dial up the performance and capacity with the availability of the Fujifilm 3592 WORM (write-once, read-many) Tape Cartridge, which Fujifilm is touting for its use of NANOCUBIC coating technology. The company says it is the first to deliver data storage media based on nano-technology. NANOCUBIC technology is used to create an ultra-thin coating of nano-scale particles that, Fujifilm says, produce higher resolution for recording digital data with low noise and high signal-to-noise ratios, which are ideal for magneto-resistive heads. Fujifilm claims its enterprise media will reach capacities of 300GB to 900GB (compressed) with native transfer rates of up to 110MB per second (compressed), and an archival life of 30 years. It includes embedded security features such as memory-modules and a "tamper-evident" cartridge designed to prevent undetected physical access, alteration, or deletion of data. It is also available in a 60GB "Fast-Access" format for applications requiring fast retrieval response times for individual data sets. NANOCUBIC media, according to Fujifilm, combines a new binder for more stable chemical performance and a super-fine magnetic particle for more stable physical performance. Both are said to enhance archival and reliability performance. The cartridges are expected to be popular as a backup for archival libraries, disaster recovery solutions, and regulatory compliance systems for data-intensive and archiving-sensitive industries.

Kaspersky Lab Launches Security Products for Unix, Linux in the U.S.

Kaspersky Lab, a relative newcomer to the antivirus and security business, is trying to carve a niche for itself in the Linux and Unix market, and to that end, the Russian company, which is based in Moscow, has established a beachhead in the U.S. market by setting up an American unit in Woburn, Mass., and is now peddling its products to users of Red Hat and Novell Linuxes as well as for the FreeBSD and OpenBSD variants of the open source Unix platform. This week, Kaspersky is launching Anti-Virus 5.5 for these three platforms in the States, after already launching them in Europe; the software can be used to protect Linux and Unix workstations, file servers, and email servers. With Anti-Virus 5.5, Kaspersky is offering a new feature called Kavmonitor, which does real-time system scanning for viruses. Kaspersky sells a line of Windows antivirus solutions as well.

The new software is packaged as Kaspersky Anti-Virus Business Optimal, with workstation, file server, and mail server variants. The workstation version costs $46.95, while each mail or file server costs $359. This is the same pricing as for Windows workstations and servers.

IBM Buys PureEdge Solutions for Electronic Forms Software

IBM bolstered its Lotus Workplace electronic forms strategy last week with the acquisition of PureEdge Solutions, a privately held software developer based in Victoria, British Columbia. PureEdge has developed a Java- and XML-based suite of software called PureEdge 8X that enables companies to migrate from paper-based processes to electronic forms. The components include the PureEdge 8x Designer, a WYSIWYG environment for creating electronic forms and mapping them to back-end ERP systems; the PureEdge 8X Viewer, which is used to open, fill-in, submit, and route electronic forms, in either a thick-client or Web-based environment; and the PureEdge 8X Server and WebForm Server, which run on Windows, Linux, Solaris, and AIX operating systems. IBM, which plans to integrate the PureEdge software into its Lotus Workplace, WebSphere, and Content Manager offerings, says PureEdge's adherence to open standards--in particular the XForms specification, which was ratified as a W3C Recommendation in 2003--gives it an advantage. "We believe this integration with IBM's Workplace family of collaborative products will not only accelerate our ability to deliver business value to customers but will also ensure that open standards are widely adopted and developed in this critical market," says PureEdge chief executive Mark Upson. Details of the acquisition, including purchase price, were not disclosed.