But Wait, There's More

IBM Readies 64-Way Squadron Boxes for Impending Launch

As everybody in the Unix market knows (at least judging by the number of emails from competitors I got this week asking me questions), the launch of IBM's Power5-based, 64-way "Squadron" servers is imminent. These boxes, which IBM has been talking about vaguely for more than a year, are expected to feature a huge amount of aggregate processing capacity (arguably the most that has ever been brought to bear in a single SMP) plus the sophisticated virtualization technologies that have already been launched with the p5 520, 550, and 570 servers in July. IBM looks to be able to take the performance lead for at least a year with these 64-way Squadron boxes, at least until Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu-Siemens launch their APL product line in 2006. The question now is what will IBM charge for these big, bad boxes?

Whatever IBM does, and whenever it does it, we will cover it. Of this you can be certain.

Big Blue Launches Power-Based Disk Arrays

IBM is not just being aggressive in the server market these days, but is also rolling out aggressive products in the storage area to rivals EMC and Hiatchi, the latter which sells high-end arrays into IBM shops directly itself and as rebadged equipment through Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard.

IBM this week launched two disk arrays, a beefed up version of its "Silvertip" high-end Shark array, now called the TotalStorage DS8000, as well as a new midrange array, called the DS6000. The DS8000's controllers are based on IBM's new p5 and i5 Power5 server line, and now run logical partitions. This means it can run algorithms in storage microcode in one slice of the server and add in other software--perhaps to do data backups--in another partition. It will also be able to be partitioned into many virtual disk arrays using this partitioning capability. The DS8000 scales up to 192 TB of maximum capacity. The DS6000 starts at 580 GB and scales up to 67 TB; it is unclear what controller technology it uses. Both arrays won't be available until December 3, which means IBM is trying to pre-book orders now rather than lose sales in the next two months to competitors. Next week, we will cover these arrays in greater detail.

HP, Oracle Top TPC-H Query Benchmark with Unix Box

Hewlett-Packard and Oracle announced this week that they have taken the top spot on the 10 TB implementation of the TPC-H ad hoc query benchmark test. HP tested two 64-way Integrity Superdome servers using 1.5 GHz Itanium processors and running HP-UX 11i and Oracle's 10g clustered database. The two servers were clustered with InfiniBand switching equipment from Topspin Communications. The resulting server cluster was able to chew through 86,283 queries per hour at a cost of $161 per query per hour (QPH). In January, a single Superdome box with 64 processors running the same software was able to do 49,105 QPH at a cost of $118 per QPH, which means the running of the cluster software and latencies between nodes ate about 12 percent of the aggregate computing power in the box. This is very good overhead for clusters, which can consume 20 to 30 percent of aggregate capacity.

The only other machines tested to date on the 10 TB TPC-H test is a cluster of five pSeries 690s running AIX 5.2 and DB2 UDB 8.1, which dates from early 2003. That cluster could support 62,215 QPH using 1.3 GHz Power4 processors at a cost of $243 per QPH. IBM can probably meet or beat HP on the TPC-H test with two 64-way Power5 Squadron boxes. But we will have to wait and see if this happens.

Sun Posts Decent Benchmarks with Opteron Boxes

What Sun has not done yet is publish TPC-C online transaction processing performance tests on the V20z and V40z, which seems a bit mystifying in that they offer price/performance that rivals IBM's Power5 servers and Hewlett-Packard's rx Series of Itanium 2 boxes. Sun, what exactly are you afraid of? Success? Time's a-wasting.

Interactive Ports Broadband Provisioning Software to HP-UX

Interactive Enterprise, a Dublin, Ireland, software company that specializes in applications software used by broadband network providers, announced this week that it is porting its Conexon suite of software to the HP-UX Unix environment. The company's software was developed on Solaris and has adapters to make it link into Windows servers. As part of the alliance to port Conexon to HP-UX, HP's Singapore subsidiary announced it would offer broadband service activation and provisioning to its telecom and service provider outsourcing customers in Singapore and South East Asia.

CentricStor Virtual Tape Library Gains Support for Cheaper ATA Disk

Fujitsu Siemens has announced a new release of CentricStor, a virtual tape library system that speeds backups by first writing data to disk instead of tape. With the new CentricStor 3.0, the devices gain support for ATA disks, which are considerably less expensive than the Fibre Channel disks that CentricStor previously required. The new release also offers double the throughput of previous versions, the company says, and offers support for the mainframe FICON storage protocol and the backup and recovery software from Computer Associates and EMC's Legato division. CentricStor is distributed in the United States by Colorado-based PeakData.

Offshore Outsourcing Growing At 20% Per Year, META Says

The offshore outsourcing market is currently a $10 billion business and will grow at a rate of 20 percent per year through 2008, according to META Group, which held an outsourcing conference last week in San Francisco. The growth figure, which means it will reach about $21 billion by 2008, backs up another recent accounting of the growth of offshore outsourcing done by the Government Accountability Office, which found that, from 1997 to 2002, the offshoring of business, professional, and technical services (of which IT is only a part) grew from a $21.2 billion business to $37.5 billion, a 77 percent increase. Eventually, META says, the average enterprise will use offshore resources for 60 percent of its work related to developing and maintaining applications. Application development and maintenance currently accounts for about 30 percent of the outsourcing work sent offshore, which saves organizations about 30 percent, the group says. But the potential savings are much greater. For other types of IT work, which META did not specify, offshore labor can be anywhere from three to five times cheaper, the group says. The current political and public backlash against offshore outsourcing is just one more "item to be managed in the process of moving offshore," META says.