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FreeBSD 6.0 Beta 2 Is Released

FreeBSD 6.0 has moved a little bit closer to production release, with the second beta of the code shipping on August 5 for the tier one supported platforms--that's X86, X64 (Xeon-64 and Opteron), Alpha, Itanium, PC-98, and Sparc boxes. Beta 1 shipped on July 15, and Beta 3 was expected on August 22 (but does not appear to be out yet), and the final package build, which was expected to be completed on August 15, was pushed out to August 28. When the first release candidate for FreeBSD 6.0 will be out is still in the "to be determined" phase, and will obviously depend on how the beta testing goes. Late September seems a good estimate of when to expect FreeBSD 6.0.

The jump from FreeBSD 4 to FreeBSD 5 was pretty dramatic, but the jump from FreeBSD 5 to FreeBSD 6 is not going to be that big. In fact, most of the work in version 6.0 is, according to the developers behind the project, about polishing and refining the features that are embodied in FreeBSD 5.4. But there will be some enhancements in the areas of SMP support on workstations and servers, ACPI power management, ATA disk support, and improved support of 32-bit X86 applications running on 32-bit Opteron and Athlon processors. FreeBSD 6.0 will also include an experimental support for PowerPC chips inside Macintosh G3 and G4 servers. The new version of the software is also expected to have much-improved support for wireless cards and WiFi security protocols.

Oracle and Sun Bundle Databases and Servers for Resellers

Database maker Oracle and server maker Sun Microsystems worked out a partnership that would see Oracle port its 10g database to Solaris 10 running on Opteron servers earlier this year, and now the two have gone one step further and are building bundles for their respective reseller channels to make the sale of a Unix-based database server a whole lot easier.

The two companies this week said that they would create packages of Sun Fire Opteron-based servers, StorEdge 3310 disk arrays, the Solaris 10 operating system, and the Oracle 10g databases. The two will also peddle Oracle databases on Linux operating systems on these Sun Fire servers as well, if reseller channel customers find customers who want Linux instead of Solaris. The bundles include an entry database server using 10g Standard Edition One, a heavier configuration based on 10g Standard Edition, and a clustered configuration that includes 10g Standard Edition and the Real Application Clusters (RAC) extensions. Sun is also throwing in its N1 Service Provisioning System for provisioning the servers in the cluster.

Unix Shops Get First Crack at Lawson 8.1.0 ERP Suite

While ERP software vendor Lawson Software delivered its Lawson 8.1.0 software suite earlier this year on Unix and Windows platforms, it is the Unix crowd who appear to be early adopters of the company's new suite. The Lawson 8.1.0 release for IBM's AIX and Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX variants was delivered this week, and two Unix shops, Friendly Ice Cream, the restaurant chain, and netASPx, an application service provider, were early adopters of the updated ERP suite. This release of the software runs the Lawson applications on Java-based application servers, and also includes policy- and role-based security features based on the LDAP protocol, which allows users to work through a Web portal but still have Unix host-class security on the apps.

Spanish Digital Film Company Ditches Windows for Solaris

Spanish digital animation film company Dygra Films has decided to ditch its X86 servers based on Intel chips, Microsoft Windows, and .NET technology and move its render farm to a cluster of 31 Sun Fire V20z Opteron servers and four Sun Fire V240 UltraSparc servers, all running Solaris 10. Dygra Films is the creator of "The Living Forest," the first feature-length, 3D animated film created in Europe, and the Sun gear is being used to create its next film, called "Midsummer Dream." To store the data for the films, the company is using Sun's StorEdge 3510 Fibre Channel disk arrays and its StorEdge L100 tape libraries.

Dygra Films says that it was able to remove bottlenecks in its cluster by moving to the Sun solution, and was able to speed up production by 50 percent. Of course, neither Sun nor Dygra Films would say how big the prior Wintel cluster was, so it is hard to attribute the improvements to architecture choices alone. The film company is also jumping from .NET to Java technologies as part of the jump to the new render farm.

Innovation Data Processing Adds Unix, Linux Support for Upstream Reservoir Backup Server

Storage software maker Innovation Data Processing said this week it has added support for IBM's AIX Unix variant as well as Sun Microsystems' Solaris Unix variant to its Upstream Reservoir backup server. The company also announced it is adding support for Linux running on X86/X64 platforms, as well as on IBM's zSeries mainframes.

Up until now, Upstream Reservoir required that customers use a Microsoft Windows box as the host storage backup server. Innovation Data has long since been able to backup and restore data on a multitude of platforms, using agents on server machines. Specifically, backup agents can run on Windows NT, 2000, XP, and Server 2003 variants, Novell's NetWare, IBM's OS/2 and AIX, Sun's Solaris, and Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX and Tru64 Unixes. The company also has plug-ins to archive and restore files for Oracle's eponymous databases as well as IBM's DB2 UDB and Microsoft's SQL Server, and has created plug-ins for the three most popular enterprise groupware platforms, IBM's Notes/Domino, Microsoft's Exchange Server, and Novell's GroupWise. Upstream Reservoir supports a wide variety of tape technologies--including StorageTek's 9840, IBM's Magstar, and the ubiquitous DLT, LTO, and AIT tape drives. The software also offers straight backup to tape as well as disk-to-disk (D2D) and staged from disk to tape (D2D2T) archiving.

IDC Projects IT Spending to Grow 5.9 Percent Through 2009

The prognosticators at IDC have taken a stab at predicting where the worldwide market for IT goods and services will be in 2009, and according to its most recent models, IT spending will hit $1.3 trillion by the end of that year. The growth represents a compound annual growth rate of 5.9 percent, compounded over the five years from 2004 through 2009. While this in not the high growth we saw in the dot-com era, it is better than a sharp kick in the teeth, which is what the decline in IT spending was like in 2001 and 2002.

As is always the case in the IT market, there are hot and cold spots when it comes to spending. Anne Songtao Lu, the IDC analyst in charge of monitoring worldwide vertical markets, said in a report that spending will be highest in government, manufacturing and banking, but the highest growth in spending will be in the healthcare and the communications/media industry. In the latter vertical market, for instance, IDC reckons that IT spending will grow from $95 billion in 2005 to $128 billion by 2009, driven by heavy investment in networking gear, new PCs, peripherals, and storage.

IDC is projecting that consumer spending on IT services, peripherals, and PCs will grow in the double digits over this term, obviously pulling up the averages for spending among corporations if the two together are only hitting a compound growth rate of just under 6 percent. Because of changing regulations and compliance issues, the banking and financing industry is expected to spend big bucks, too, but IDC didn't elaborate on growth rates. The analysts also expect the telecommunications industry to upgrade their IT infrastructure as they roll out more so-called 3G (third generation) services for their telecom customers.