But Wait, There's More

HP Upgrades AlphaServers with Faster CPUs

Hewlett-Packard's sales of AlphaServer servers have been plummeting in recent quarters, perhaps a lot more than HP had thought they would. The company says that it is on track with its delivery of the OpenVMS operating system on its Itanium-based Integrity line of servers sometime between now and the end of the year, but that doesn't give it much to sell AlphaServer shops running VMS or the Tru64 Unix variant today.

To try to scare up some AlphaServer business, the company has announced what will be the last of the AlphaServer chips, the EV7z, which is a deep sort through the chip bins to find parts that run a little faster than the EV7s. In the 64-way "Marvel" GS1280 AlphaServers, HP has bumped up the clock speed to 1.3 GHz, while in the four-way EV47 and eight-way GS80 servers, the clock speed on the Alpha chip has been increased to 1.15 GHz. HP had already been shipping the 1.15 GHz parts in the GS1280s. As part of the revised AlphaServer roadmap from last fall, HP had committed to offering a final speed bump on these machines of between 14 and 16 percent, and the company says that it delivers between 13 and 16 percent with these EV7z chips. HP's Tru64 v5.1B-2 Unix release, which the company says improves the reliability of the former Digital Equipment's Unix and makes installation simpler, was moved up to an August release to coincide with the new chips. OpenVMS v7.3.2 is needed in order to support the new iron, and the OpenVMS 8.2 release will run on both AlphaServer and Integrity machines. (In case you are wondering, OpenVMS 8.1 is an evaluation release for Itanium platforms.)

In conjunction with the faster clock speeds, HP says that it has dropped the price on earlier processor components and main memory by as much as 40 percent. According to HP's online configurators, a 64-way Marvel box with 1.15 GHz Alpha EV7 processors, 12 GB of main memory, some disk drives, a Tru64 license costs, and technical support costs $2.49 million, with over a million of that being support. These appear to be the old prices for this box, since the configurator does not yet include the EV7z option.

SCO to Pay Partners to Work on Unix Projects

If you are a Unix nerd, and you have some free time on your hands, The SCO Group wants you. No, it does not want you to go sifting through the Linux 2.4 and Linux 2.6 kernels looking for stolen Unix code. But under a new developer program called SCO Marketplace, which will launch by the end of the year, SCO is going to pay developers outside of the company to work on improvements to the OpenServer and UnixWare platforms. The marketplace will allow external coders to bid on work, presumably in an online auction style, like eBay (and maybe even through that or another auction site). The SCO Marketplace is the brain child of Sandy Gupta, the new vice president of engineering at SCO, who is under pressure to do things with OpenServer and UnixWare to make the vast installed base of SCO Unix customers want to upgrade, not jump to Linux or Windows. The marketplace initiative will be delivered through the SCO Developer Network. Exactly how much SCO will pay, and whether it will use a closed or open bidding process, is unclear.

Sun Holds Financing Rates Steady As Fed Raises Interest Rates

Kris Snow, vice president of the Sun Microsystems Finance unit of server maker Sun Microsystems, runs one of the largest captive leasing companies in the world, and she has decided that, unlike the other leasing arms of her competitors, it is a good strategy to hold leasing and financing rates in the United States steady even as the Federal Reserve has jacked up rates twice in the past couple of weeks. The unit has been financing its systems, storage, and software at a 3.9 percent rate for prime customers, and Snow is going to hold that rate steady to help Sun drum up some business and to give its customers a perk as they re-up their leases.

The deal is available until December 31 to customers that want to finance any of the products in Sun's portfolio. Customers with good credit can get a 3.9 percent rate and deferred payments until January 2005, for financing terms of either 24 or 36 months. Snow says that you have to be a tier-one customer and have a Moody's credit rating of B or higher in order to get this low financing. Snow says that because of the different interest rates and states of national economies around the world, the unit is just making this offer in the States, but adds that she is looking into similar deals in Europe, Asia/Pacific, and Latin America.

Three Top HP Execs Get the Ax

In the wake of Hewlett-Packard's shortfall in earnings last week, Carly Fiorina, the company's chairman and CEO, said that there would be some heads rolling, and indeed there were.

As expected, Peter Blackmore, the most senior-level executive from the former Compaq since Michael Capellas left to run MCI, got the boot, or rather, the Ferragamo. Blackmore was in charge of Compaq's well-respected services business (which it got by virtue of buying Digital Equipment in 1998) when HP acquired Compaq, in early 2002. Blackmore was soon put in charge of HP's Enterprise Systems unit, with HP's own Ann Livermore getting the top services job. This pretty much sealed Blackmore's fate. A year ago, when the server and storage unit also missed its numbers, Blackmore was in the hot seat. At the turn of the year, HP began merging its services and server units and put them under control of Livermore, giving Blackmore the top sales job within its Customer Solutions Group. Rather than making his job easier, being responsible for sales on all HP fronts only made Blackmore's life harder. Mike Winkler, who has been HP's chief marketing officer, was tapped to replace Blackmore as executive vice president in charge of Customer Solutions Group.

In addition to Blackmore's ouster, two lieutenants in the Americas and EMEA regions were replaced. Jim Milton has replaced Jack Novia as senior vice president of Customer Solutions Group's Americas region, and Bernard Meric will take over from Kasper Rorsted as the top executive in Customer Solutions Group's EMEA operations. With these moves, three more Compaq execs have been replaced by HP execs. Winkler is also from Compaq, and he ran Compaq's PC, servers, and storage units. While he was probably better suited to running the Enterprise Systems unit at HP than was Blackmore, it is safe to say that he is probably a little jumpy, given the task at hand and Blackmore's tenure at HP.

Sun to Push Opteron with 'HP Away' Competitive Deal

In July 2003, Sun Microsystems announced a competitive replacement program targeting Tru64 Unix customers running on Hewlett-Packard's AlphaServer line. In March, after converting some 80 customers from AlphaServers to Sparc/Solaris boxes, Sun decided to start chasing the HP 9000 installed base with this "HP Away" competitive replacement program. A little more than a year later, Sun has taken away 150 of HP's customers, with the vast majority of them being multimillion-dollar accounts buying Sun Fire 6800 or larger servers, according to John Fowler, executive vice president of Sun's Network Systems Group.

As of this week, Fowler is involved with the HP Away program since Sun is expanding it from Sparc/Solaris servers to Sparc/Opteron machines, which fall in his domain in Network Systems Group. While the HP Away program has thus far been focused on big Tru64 and HP-UX shops, by pushing a Solaris-Opteron alternative Sun might be able to go after the core HP Unix midrange accounts, where the bulk of HP's installed base of around 400,000 to 500,000 Unix boxes are running HP-UX or Tru64 Unix. (HP probably has another 300,000 to 400,000 VAX and AlphaServers installed running VMS or OpenVMS). With the delivery of four-way Opteron machines and Solaris 10 later this year, with container partitions and 64-bit support, a jump from HP's Unix to Solaris seems more plausible than a jump to Sparc/Solaris for at least some conservative HP Unix shops. "We think that by supporting Solaris-Opteron, we will have more opportunity to chase," says Fowler. Time will tell.

The HP Away program has various incentives to help HP Unix users to migrate to Sun servers running Solaris. On the big boxes, these incentives include a free two-day assessment to determine the cost and technical requirements for migration and a further two-week assessment service, for which Sun will consume the costs if the customer decides against the move. Sun has also been offering application porting services, finance and trade-in offers, and a 90-day deferred payment scheme to sweeten the move from HP to Sun hardware. And customers that sign up for a migration do not have to pay Sun a dime until the work is done and they are happy with the migration. On the Solaris for X86 variant of the HP Away program, Sun is offering tools and "best practices" guides to help with the move, as well as subscription-based pricing on servers and 3.9 percent financing with no interest or payments until 2005. Fowler says that the exact features and pricing of this augmented HP Away program will be detailed in a few weeks, and it looks like Sun pre-launched the program to take advantage of the bad press that HP got last week over its missed earnings.

HP Launches Baby StorageWorks EVA 3000 Disk Array

If you sell IT solutions these days, you have to create a product that can start out reasonably small and yet be upgradeable to a much larger configuration. Hewlett-Packard last week pruned back its StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array 3000 SAN arrays to create a starter unit that is less expensive than the former low-end EVA 3000, which means it has a lower entry price point and is therefore appealing to a larger number of customers. The EVA arrays are distinct from the lower-priced entry Modular Smart Array disk arrays from HP, in that they have sophisticated snap-shotting and other virtualization features.

The EVA 3000 Starter Kit, as this trimmed down machine is called, consists of a 5U chassis that has two controllers and eight 146 GB, 10K RPM Fibre Channel SCSI disk drives. On top of this, HP tosses in its OpenView Storage Opertions Manager v1.2 software and licenses to attach to two host servers (which can be HP-UX, Solaris, AIX, Linux, Windows, or NetWare machines). This starter array, including 24/7 support, which will be available September 1, will cost $42,000.

Business Ethics on the Rise, Says Trainer