But Wait, There's More

Buoyed By Unix Sales, IBM Rules Server Markets in China and India

Server juggernaut IBM is bragging about how its pSeries Unix server sales and overall server sales have given it the pole position in the exploding infrastructure markets of India and China.

IBM says that in the second quarter of 2005, it had a 44.3 percent market share of total server revenue in the People's Republic of China, and that its share of the Unix server market was 48.5 percent. (This is based on market share data compiled by IDC.) IBM's Unix server revenues grew by 3 percent in the second quarter, much lower than its growth rates around the world, and something IBM did not elaborate on. In nearby India, which is not considered part of IBM's Europe, Middle East, and Africa market segment, but rather its Asia/Pacific segment, IBM's Unix server sales grew by 22 percent in the second quarter of the year, giving it 35.3 percent of the Indian Unix server market. At 33.1 percent, IBM has a smaller share of the server revenue share in India than it has in China, and indeed, IBM's share in India is only a smidgen larger than its share of the worldwide server revenue pie, which was 31.9 percent of the overall $12.2 billion in server sales in the quarter.

IBM added that its storage sales in India (including disk and tape arrays) grew by 92.3 percent in a market that grew at only 22 percent.

The Sun Grid Comes Closer to Going Retail

Early this year, Sun Microsystems made a lot of noise about its Sun Grid utility computing initiative, where it would take machines that it was burning in for sale to customers, lash them together into a grid utility, and allow customers to buy time on the grid to do their computing on the Sun Grid rather than build similar setups themselves. Sun offered the Sun Grid at $1 per CPU per hour, and made lots of noise about it--and then promptly discovered that its big banking customers had quickly consumed the 6,000 to 10,000 CPUs it has running in four data centers to support the Sun Grid. Because of this, the much-touted retail version of the Sun Grid, where anyone with a credit card can come in and buy computing capacity and use it as they see fit, has been delayed in coming to market.

But Sun is getting close, says Aisling MacRunnels, senior director of utility computing at Sun, and the company expects to roll out the retail version of the Sun Grid within a month or so. In the meantime, Sun is at the GridWorld tradeshow in Boston this week, talking about how it will build out the community of independent software vendors and resellers who will write applications and build utilities that support those applications. MacRunnels is taking the opportunity to remind everyone that Sun is not trying to displace its resellers in by doing grid utility computing, but is rather using the Sun Grid as a means of testing the hardware and software technologies that go into making and managing a grid and, now, to give ISVs a place to grid-enable their applications so they can run on anyone's grids, whether they are the Sun Grid, a reseller's compatible grid, or an in-house grid that a company makes--or a mix of all three. "We are a products and services company, and when we came out with software as a service and the Sun Grid, it kind of threw some people." Not me. My essay said clearly that Sun wanted to be the General Electric of the future utility computing era, not Commonwealth Edison. (I have subsequently said that if Sun is right, then maybe GE should buy Sun and get into the grid utility infrastructure business, much as it is a powerhouse behind electric grids and transportation networks with its train and airplane engines.)

MacRunnels said the demand by financial institutions for long-term, one- or two-year, 24x7 contracts to lock down capacity on the Sun Grid almost immediately took Sun a bit by surprise. It is these same initial customers who are pressuring Sun to get their applications to do various kinds of simulations or digital rending and what not ported to the grid. To that end, Sun is rolling out a Grid Developer Community that helps ISVs port their apps and test them on the Sun Grid and is giving away free 100 CPU-hour timeshares on the grid for those ISVs to test with. Sun also wants resellers to peddle capacity on the Sun Grid as well as build their own grids based on racks of X64 servers, the Solaris 10 operating system, the Java Enterprise System middleware stack, and the N1 provisioning and systems management software. To that end, Sun said that software vendor Prediction Company, which creates electronic trading systems, has completed a trial deployment of its software on the Sun Grid. This, said MacRunnels, will be the first among many ISVs who do the same. "If we are going to be the leading technology provider in grid computing, that means offering resources and a community for ISVs to do a port to the Sun Grid or to help new ISVs build new applications from scratch for the grid."

IBM Streamlines Product Configuration with Director 5.1

IBM this month is launching Director 5.10, a new release of its suite of systems management software that supports--and is shipped free with--the full range of eServers from Big Blue. A number of new features are available with this release, which brings support for Linux on the zSeries and pSeries systems, as well as support for IBM's new System z9 mainframe.

One of the primary goals of Director is to centralize management of a range of platforms into one interface, so it's no surprise that the user interface was targeted for improvement with Director 5.10. IBM says the new interface has been streamlined for greater productivity, while lightweight agents and more customizable deployment options will make it easier to deploy. There's also a new Software Health Check feature that's designed to save administrators time by determining which systems need an update, while a new Event Action Plan Wizard provides a step-by-step guide for telling Director what to monitor and what actions to take in response to an alert. eServer shops deploying BladeCenter servers will benefit from new Director tools for managing the configuration of BladeCenter chassis and subsystems, while Wintel users will see closer integration between Director and Microsoft's Systems Management Server and Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) products. IBM Director supports i5/OS, Windows, Intel Linux, Power Linux, zSeries Linux, AIX, and System z9 across iSeries, xSeries, pSeries, zSeries, BladeCenter, and OpenPower servers.

Dataram Doubles Up Memory in UltraSparc-IV+ Servers

If you are acquiring one of those new Sun Fire V890 midrange servers from Sun Microsystems using the new dual-core "Panther" UltraSparc-IV+ processors, then Dataram has a memory module for you. The company's new Maximizer XXL memory module for the V890 servers doubles the memory capacity on the V890 from 64 GB to 128 GB. Dataram's memory module is comprised of 2 GB DIMMs, and a 128 GB memory block (64 DIMMs) costs $56,000. If you buy a Sun Fire V890 with 32 GB of main memory for $118,995 and trade-in that 32 GB of main memory in the fat Sun configuration to Dataram (with an $8,000 value), spend $56,000 for 128 GB of Dataram memory, you will spend $12,000 less than the $174,995 Sun price for the 64 GB configuration of the V890.

The 2 GB memory modules used in the V890 can also be used in the E2900 through E6900 servers that also use the new UltraSparc-IV+ processors.

Lawson Turns In a Decent Fiscal First Quarter

Times are looking up for midrange ERP software maker Lawson Software, which is inching toward the completion of its takeover of Intentia International to become one of the largest remaining software vendors in the midrange. Lawson reported its fiscal first quarter 2006 financial results last week, and said that sales for the quarter ended August 31 were $87.9 million, up 6.2 percent compared to the same quarter last year. Software license fees rose by 39.8 percent to $18.6 million in the quarter, while services revenues were flat at $69.3 million. Net income rose to $4.2 million, which compares nicely to the net loss of $417,000 a year ago. Lawson said that while it only signed 109 new contracts in the quarter, compared to 122 a year ago, 57 percent of the revenues it brought in came from new customers, which is a very nice number, indeed.

IBM Debuts Consulting Services Aimed at the Aging Workforce

Whether we like to admit it or not in the Western economies, our workforces are starting to age. If you believe the projections, as the Baby Boomers start to retire, there will be many more job openings than there are young people to fill them, which inevitably means that some older members of the workforce, who might have otherwise retired, will be drawn back into the workforce. They may, because of a lack of savings and decreased benefits from Social Security and pension plans and 401(k) retirement plans, not be able to leave the workforce. No matter the cause, it seems likely that companies of all sizes and industries are going to have to start thinking about the wants and needs of an aging workforce. And IBM's Global Services unit smells a business opportunity here.

To that end, the company announced a set of human capital management services aimed at helping companies deal with the needs of an aging workforce. The idea is to profile a company's current employee pool, figure out the age distribution, and project what needs the employees will have at different points in the future. IBM has thrown researchers, health experts, cultural anthropologists, and other brainy people at this problem. And if this doesn't exactly sound like information technology to you, well, it sort of isn't. But the problem IBM has identified absolutely relates to the already aging OS/400 community. So maybe it is time to think about the age of IT managers, programmers, and administrators out there and what this might mean five, 10, and 15 years from now.

Encrypting Data Tapes: Soon to Be All the Rage

Last week, our Big Iron mainframe newsletter reported that IBM was working on special encryption features that will allow mainframes to begin encrypting data stored on tape archives. These features for the z/OS platform use the native encryption facilities in zSeries processor complexes and their encryption keys to allow tapes to be encrypted and then decrypted at remote sites where tapes are often stored or used for data interchange. As far as I know, this is the first time such tamper-proof encryption has been delivered natively in a server, and it probably won't be too long before the iSeries has such features.

But you might have a lot of different platforms to cope with, and Iron Mountain, one of the big names in offsite data vaults with over 40,000 customers, doesn't want you to wait to get your data encrypted, and has recommended that companies buy an encryption appliance to encrypt the data they store on tape. Iron Mountain is practicing what it is preaching, and has opted for the DataFort encryption appliance from Decru, a division of NAS array maker Network Appliances, to do its internal data encryption. Don't let your data tapes be the ones making headlines on the news.