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VeriSign Picks Solaris on X86 for .COM and .NET Domains
Sun Microsystems announced this week that VeriSign has decided to put a portion of the data processing related to DNS processing for the .COM and .NET domains on the Internet on Solaris-Opteron servers. VeriSign is already a big Solaris shop and is understandably secretive about exactly what iron and operating systems it has, because of security and competitive concerns. So the company is not saying what, presumably, Unix iron it is supplanting with the hundreds of Solaris-Opteron servers it plans to install. These servers will support VeriSign's Advanced Transaction Lookup and Signaling (ATLAS) system, which processes 14 billion DNS lookups for the .COM and .NET domains daily.
VeriSign says that it has run benchmarks on the Solopteron iron and can demonstrate substantially lower total-cost-of-ownership by moving away from RISC/Unix. This is something that a lot of Solaris shops are also mulling over, which is why Sun came to its senses late last year and figured out it needs to push Solaris hard on X86 iron.
Temporal Dynamics Creates High-Speed Database for Unix
While relational databases are a great invention and have brought sophisticated data processing to even the smallest of companies, they are not good at all jobs. They have limits to scalability and are not designed to support truly real-time transaction, sensory, or process control environments. That's why very smart computer scientists created in-memory database management systems, which can scale to petabytes and deliver much more peppy performance.
Temporal Dynamics, a developer of high-performance databases in Indianapolis, Indiana, that was founded a year ago, has announced its entry into this exotic portion of the database market, called Ancelus. This database, which is now available for Solaris and Linux in Ancelus Version 1.3, will be available for HP-UX and Windows in future releases and, presumably, for AIX at some time further down the road.
Ancelus 1.3 can manage datasets as large as 32 terabytes (this is a lot of main memory) and can be extended further to address 8 exabytes (that's 8 million terabytes, and, by the way, no one makes main memory that is large enough to support this, and will not for the foreseeable future). The database has native support for threaded, sequential, and time-based data sets, and allows dynamic administration of the database without having to take it offline, and also sports an online continuous incremental backup feature. You can't turn off the database behind the phone switching system or a nuclear reactor to do a backup, after all.
Being on the Road Pays Well for Sun's Schwartz
Jonathan Schwartz, who was this year appointed as president and chief operating officer of Sun Microsystems, has been the most visible executive of the company, appearing at more events and in more stories than even Sun's founder, chairman, and CEO, Scott McNealy. And according to the latest Sun proxy statement, Schwartz was paid pretty well for it.
Schwartz had a salary of $559,435, up 32 percent, and a bonus of $107,819, up from zero last year. He was also granted 1.5 million shares, which will be worth approximately $10 million if Sun's share price grows by a few percentage points a year. McNealy has only drawn a $100,000 annual salary since Sun went on the rocks in 2001, and he missed a chance for a bonus of $625,000 because Sun did not achieve three consecutive quarters of operating profitability. (In fact, Sun booked an operating loss in all four quarters of fiscal 2004.) However, McNealy has another shot at that $625,000 bonus, since the compensation committee will give it to him if Sun books year-on-year revenue growth between now and the end of fiscal 2007. McNealy was also granted 1.5 million stock options. McNealy has a total of 68.7 million Sun shares and is the largest individual shareholder in the company.
Hosted@ISC Hosts NetBSD, OpenBSD, XFree86 Projects
The Internet Systems Consortium, a nonprofit organization set up by Internet service provider eXchange@200 Paul to provide free mirrored download sites and development hosting for open source projects, announced last week that the two of the open source variants of BSD Unix, NetBSD and OpenBSD, as well as the XFree86 graphics project, have been given free hosting in the ISP's Silicon Valley hosting centers. The FreeBSD open source Unix variant, as well as kernel.org, OpenLDAP, Mozilla, and OpenDarwin, already have been on the Hosted@ISC service for quite some time. Iron Systems, a San Jose, California, X86 server maker, donated the servers to support the BSD projects. That company, by the way, is one of the few server makers that certifies all of its machines to run BSD in addition to Linux and Windows.
Microsoft Leads Integration Server Pack, Says Nucleus
Considering Microsoft's lead in Gartner's Web services and service oriented architecture (SOA) study, it really should come as no surprise that the Redmond, Washington, company also scored well in Nucleus Research's latest return on investment (ROI) study on the major integration platforms. The young Massachusetts IT analyst firm, which has popped many an ROI bubble with Ralph Nader-esque aplomb, says that integration isn't as complicated or risky as it once was, which Nucleus credits to "the current buzzword," which is--are you ready?--SOA!
Nucleus' latest ROI scorecard is on integration software, and Microsoft BizTalk Server takes the prize, followed by BEA WebLogic 8.1, IBM WebSphere 5, Sonic Software Business Integration Suite, TIBCO BusinessWorks, and webMethods Enterprise Services Platform, in that order. Microsoft scored a nearly perfect 4.8 rating across five categories (deployment, adoption, support, business impact, and vendor), while webMethods, which once led the integration broker market, along with TIBCO, brought up the rear with a 3.8 rating on the Nucleus scorecard; TIBCO was fourth, with a 4.0 rating.
Study Says American High Tech Has Lost 200,000 Jobs
The official economists for the U.S. government said that the recession ended in November 2001, but most of us think that this is a load of hogwash, at least in the IT sector, which has had perhaps more than its share of ups and downs in the past three years. According to a report from the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Chicago, which examined government statistics in the past few years, the unemployment rate for computer programmers was 6.7 percent in 2003, two years after the recession ended. It is interesting to note that, at the height of this recession, the unemployment rate for programmers was 2.5 percent.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in March 2001, when the recession officially began, there were 2.146 million employees in the IT industry in the States, and by April 2004 that number dropped to 1.743 million. In the major metro areas associated with IT--Boston, Chicago, Dallas, San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle--IT employment was absolutely hammered, down 18 to 25 percent, compared with the national average of only a 10 percent decline in IT jobs. The only major metro area where IT employment held was Washington, D.C. Obviously, the unemployment rates in these areas have spiked over that time. The downturn in IT spending and the contraction of the economy are certainly part of the cause of the loss of those 200,000 jobs nationwide since the recession was declared over, but the report also suggests that offshoring is having an impact, too. While the evidence for this assertion is thin, many IT professionals probably agree with that sentiment.
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