But Wait, There's More

Sun Restates Financials for Fiscal 2003, 2004, and 2005

Last week, the bean counters at Sun Microsystems went over the company's books for fiscal 2003, 2004, and 2005, and found some boo-boos, and have since released some adjustments to its annual 10-K report to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Specifically, the company had to reduce the benefit from income taxes in fiscal 2005 by $45 million and tweaked the provision for income taxes in all of the quarters in fiscal 2003 and 2004. The changes were a net wash for fiscal 2004, but the tax provisions were reduced by $45 million in fiscal 2003. The tweaks to the books had no effect on sales, margins, cash flow, or pre-tax income, but obviously reduced net earnings. For fiscal 2005, ended June 30, Sun's net loss increased to $107 million, which is quite a bit more than the $11 million loss it reported in July.

HP Buys Peregrine and AppIQ for Around $625 Million

Having hinted recently that it would make some acquisitions to boost its OpenView systems management portfolio, Hewlett-Packard shelled out approximately $600 million to buy Peregrine Systems for asset and service management and AppIQ for storage management. HP admitted that it had paid $425 million for publicly held Peregrine Systems--it has to say so--but did not divulge how much money it paid for privately held AppIQ. However, a report in the Wall Street Journal pegged the price of the AppIQ deal at around $200 million.

HP paid cash to merge with Peregrine Systems, which worked out to $26.08 a share. HP paid a pretty hefty for Peregrine and did so because it was convinced that Peregrine has fixed itself after having become embroiled in an accounting scandal several years ago and driven into bankruptcy. Peregrine was working on getting relisted on the NASDAQ market and forming partnerships with all the major IT players. (It is traded on the OTC exchange right now.) Peregrine's stock on the OTC tended up from $16 a share, wiggling its way up and down to hit around $23 a share in May of this year, but since then the stock fell back to around $19 a share, which means HP is paying around a 37 percent premium for Peregrine. This is somewhat surprising given the fact that Peregrine closes its last year in March with a loss of $25.4 million on sales of $191 million. HP expects to integrate Peregrine's asset and services management products into OpenView once the acquisition closes, which is expected before the end of the first quarter of 2006. Peregrine has 700 employees and 2,500 customers.

AppIQ is an up-and-coming storage management software vendor, and one that nearby EMC or perhaps IBM might have been contemplating acquiring. (Acquiring Peregrine at such a high premium might have been HP's way of beating others to the punch, too.) AppIQ has 125 employees and 250 customers, and HP says that this acquisition will take about 45 days to close.

Mainframes, Unix Still Rule the Roost in Big Databases, Says Winter

Every couple of years, IT consultancy Winter makes headlines as it ranks the top 10 data warehouses in the world. The largest data warehouses in the world have unique requirements for the scaling of performance and data, and knowing who chooses what is an interesting study in server architectures.

Winter says Yahoo has the largest database in the world, a hefty 100 terabyte behemoth that is three times as large as the biggest production database in Winter's 2003 survey. This Oracle database runs on Sun Microsystems's Solaris Unix on a cluster Fujitsu-Siemens PrimePower Sparc64 servers. Sun also hosts the second largest data warehouse, the "Daytona" call detail data store running at AT&T Research Labs and comprising 93.5 TB of data in the database and handling a table with more than 743 billion rows. According to AT&T, the Daytona platform can handle as much as 312 TB of data, with a single table of more than 1.9 trillion rows, and could handle even more but AT&T ran out of data to put into the system.

The largest OLTP database surveyed by Winter is a parallel sysplex cluster of zSeries 990 mainframes from IBM that runs at the Land Registry for England in Wales in the United Kingdom; this setup has a relatively modest amount of storage at 23.1 TB, which is provided by disk arrays from EMC and Hitachi. The highest throughput OLTP system is also a zSeries 990 mainframe cluster using IBM storage that is installed at United Postal Service. This UPS mainframe cluster runs IBM's DB2 database on the z/OS operating system and that is capable of cranking through 1.1 billion SQL statements per hour. By comparison, the largest OLTP system running on Unix (in this case Solaris) copes with 8.6 million SQL statements per hour. The mainframes at UPS have a factor of 128 more SQL scalability than the largest Unix OLTP system (which was not named).

The largest Windows-based database in the world is now a 19.5 TB database (double the size from two years ago). Linux is also getting into big databases, according to Winter, and the three largest Linux-based databases in the world are at bookseller Amazon, which has built 7.8 TB, 18.5 TB, and 24.7 TB databases on Linux.

IT Managers Fear Platform Abandonment By IT Vendors

If you are sometimes a bit paranoid about the commitment that the vendor of your primary server platform has to that platform, you are apparently not alone. Ametek Computer Services hosted a series of Webinars on computer services in August and polled attendees about general IT trends. Some 200 people responded to the poll, and one of their biggest concerns was that they were worried that IT product manufacturers would abandon perfectly viable computing platforms. Specifically, more than half of those polled said that their vendor's lack of commitment to service was their main concern.

IBM, of course, has said time and again that it will keep the OS/400 platform alive for a long, long time, and it has positioned the iSeries and the pSeries to share the same iron to prolong the economic as well as the technical life of the OS/400 platform. (I would say that the OS/400 platform's vast profits have been subsidizing IBM's Unix ambitions for a decade, and that those profits would have been better spent improving the standing of OS/400 in the IT community, but that is another story.) Ametek, which has been providing third-party service for Hewlett-Packard's HP 3000 platform for 25 years, reminded everyone that HP ported the proprietary MPE platform (which had an integrated database) to the PA-RISC Unix platform in the mid-1990s, but when HP jumped from PA-RISC to Itanium, MPE didn't make the cut.

Sun Commits to Aggressive Storage Drive After StorageTek Acquisition Closes

Having just closed its $4.8 billion acquisition of StorageTek a few weeks ago, Sun Microsystems is busily integrating the tape subsystem, tape silo, and ILM software vendor into its storage organization. Or, more precisely, Sun is adapting its storage lines into the much larger product development and sales organization of the former StorageTek. The new unit that handles storage is now called the Data Management Group, and it will be headed up by Mark Canepa, the executive vice president of Sun's storage unit and the main engineer of the StorageTek deal. Pat Martin, StorageTek's CEO, has rode off into the Colorado sunset, as was expected. Kathleen Holmgren of Sun will manage Sun's disk products, while StorageTek executives will have responsibility for all of the other units within the Data Management Group. Specifically, Nigel Dessau will manage tape products, Brenda Zawatski will manage the ILM software products, Michael McLay will run an integrated Sun-STK sales force with well over 1,000 people, and Eula Adams will run an integrated Sun-STK services operation.

During the NCQ305 announcement fiesta last week, Sun also announced the StorEdge 5310 NAS Appliance Gateway, which is an uber-controller for networks of StorEdge 5310 NAS arrays that are lashed together into a giant, virtual NAS. The NAS Appliance Gateway can also interface with Sun's StorEdge 6920 midrange disk arrays, and eventually it will also be able to front-end the StorEdge 9985 and 9990 high-end arrays. (All three of these arrays are made by Hitachi and tweaked by Sun.) A single-controller version of the NAS Gateway costs $54,000, while a dual-controller model costs $81,000. Sun also announced a low-end StorEdge 3320 SCSI Ultra320 disk array. The StorEdge 3320 is a 2U rack-mounted unit that supports up to a dozen 73 GB, 146 GB, or 300 GB SCSI disks. Pricing for the StorEdge 3320 was not available at press time.

External Disk Market Continues to Grow, According to IDC

Moore's Law has not slowed down the server disk market, not even a little, according to research by IDC. In the second quarter of this year, IDC believes that companies sold $3.8 billion in external disk arrays, up 8.6 percent even after aggressive increases in drive and array capacity and vicious price cutting. Total disk revenue (including internal arrays shipped with servers) grew by 9.9 percent to $5.6 billion, the highest growth rate in the past two years. A whopping 457 petabytes of capacity shipping in the second quarter, up 59.3 percent from this time last year.

Across all types of storage, Hewlett-Packard was the dominant vendor of disk arrays, with $1.313 billion in sales, up 13.9 percent and giving it a 23.5 percent share of the $5.596 billion market. IBM was close behind HP, with $1.146 billion in sales, up 13.2 percent and giving Big Blue a 20.5 percent share. EMC came in third, with $807 million in sales, up 9.6 percent, followed by Dell with $463 million in sales (up 26.7 percent) and Sun Microsystems with $339 million in sales, down 10.4 percent. Other vendors accounted for $1.529 billion in sales, which was up 5.8 percent over last year's second quarter and which accounted for 27.3 percent of all array sales in the quarter.

Exabyte Says VXA and LTO Are the Fastest-Growing Products in Its History

Exabyte is one of the pioneers in tape storage technology for midrange servers, and got its start as the first company to bring 8mm tape technology developed by Sony to IT-related tape drives. Like many storage companies, Exabyte is located in Boulder, Colorado, which has been a hotbed for storage technology (pun intended) for years. Exabyte is one of the big backers of VXA and LTO tape technologies, and it was bragging recently about how well these two have been doing in the market, particularly in the SMB customer base where Exabyte has always been a key supplier of raw tape decks.

Exabyte also wants to sell autoloaders for these two tape technologies, and that is why it wanted to make sure that everyone knows that LTO shipments in the midrange market are expected to be up 35 percent in 2005, compared to 2 percent shipment growth for the overall market, according to forecasts made by IDC. And while low-end tape drive shipments contracted by 7 percent, VXA shipments are expected to grow by 86 percent this year. It is no surprise, then, that Exabyte's Magnum 1x7 LTO Autoloader and VXA PacketLoader 1x10 automated tape loaders are among the most popular products in Exabyte's 20-year history.