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Azul Adds Unix Support, Other Gizmos to Java Appliances

Azul Systems, the creator of Java acceleration appliances that burst on the scene a year ago, announced this week that is has now added support for its network-attached processor Java engines for the HP-UX and AIX Unix variants from Hewlett-Packard and IBM, respectively. The Azul Compute Appliances were launched with support for Sun Microsystems' Solaris Unix as well as Linuxes from Red Hat and Novell.

The Azul Compute Appliances have 16 of Azul's homegrown 24-core chips, which are designed specifically to run Java Virtual Machines very efficiently, and a maximum of 256 GB of main memory, all in a single SMP image and crammed into an 11U rack form factor. JVM workloads that would be running at the application server layer in enterprise applications are offloaded to these appliances, which cost a lot less than a full-blown server.

According to Shahin Khan, chief marketing officer at Azul, the latest release of software updates for the appliances also includes support for Java Standard Edition 5.0 and for an open source automation tool called Radius, which will give the Azul appliance role-based permission and access control. The software in the appliance has also been equipped with software that provides application detail records that are analogous to the call detail records that phone companies created decades ago to figure out how much of the phone network you use and what to charge you on your phone bill. The idea is to allow customers to aggregate their Java VMs, but then keep track of who application servers are making use of the appliances and then charging back the appropriate departments. There is no way most companies will aggregate computing power of any kind unless they can bill the users proportionally to their use. The software has been tweaked to provide what Azul is calling transactional quality of service. The typical online transaction involving Java takes about two seconds, but the Azul appliance can see where a loading might be high on a transaction and then allocate resources to that transaction within 10 milliseconds. The effect is to smooth out the response times on transactions even if the density of the Java code changes from transaction to transaction.

Khan also said that Azul is spearheading its drive into the Europe by opening up an office in England--in Slough, Berkshire, to be specific, outside of London. Khan says that Azul will be expanding through Europe in 2006. The contract that Azul negotiated for IBM's Global Services unit to provide tech support for the Azul Compute Appliances in North America in May has now been extended to EMEA. Khan was a little coy about how sales are going so far for these interesting machines. "I would say that we are more or less where we planned to be around now," he said, saying that the appliances only started shipping in June and it has "double digit" engagements. "We are still going after the earlier adopters who have the biggest pain points." To find out more about the Azul appliances, see Azul's Network-Attached Processing to Shake Up Server Market.

IBM Launches New Tape Drive and Tape Library

If you have a hankering for some new storage for your Unix server, IBM has some new products for you.

Last week, Big Blue announced the TS1120 E05 tape drive, which is a variant of the 3592 tape drive it has been selling for some time. This one has a native data transfer rate of 100 MB/sec, which is 2.5 times faster than the 3592 J1A tape drive, and at 500 GB per tape, can house 16 times as much data. The TS1120 E05 has a two-port Fibre Channel attachment to servers; it is supported with AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, and Linux as well as Windows 2000 and 2003, OS/400, and z/OS, z/VM, and VSE/ESA. The tape drive costs $6,000 or $7,500, depending on features; a 4 Gb/sec Fibre Channel switch costs $16,350.

IBM also announced the TS3310 tape library models L5B and E9U, the former being a 5U tape library for LTO 3 drives and the latter being a 9U extension unit for that library so it can hold more drives and tapes. LTO 2 drives are not supported in the library. The L5B library has 30 tape slots of storage, 6 slots of storage near the drives, and up to two LTO 3 drives. The LTO 3 tapes support 400 GB of native capacity (twice that with compression on) and can move uncompressed data at 80 MB/sec. The library is supported on systems running AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, and Linux as well as Windows 2000 and 2003 and OS/400. The base L5B unit, which costs $14,000, holds about 12 TB uncompressed, and the E9U expansion unit, which costs $11,000, holds another 36.8 TB uncompressed. These prices do not include the cost of the LTO 3 drives, which cost $12,500 for a SCSI-connected unit and $14,500 for a Fibre Channel-connected unit.

Zend, Oracle Deliver Integrated PHP Development

Zend Technologies, the company behind the development of the open source PHP programming language, and database maker Oracle said last week that the Zend Core for Oracle tool, which integrates PHP tightly with Oracle databases. Zend Core for Oracle is ready today for Linux as well as IBM's AIX Unix and Sun Microsystems' Solaris Unix; a version of Zend Core for Oracle on the Windows platform is in beta, and the company didn't say anything about HP-UX. Noteworthy in the new product is an updated OCI8 driver for connecting PHP to Oracle databases. Zend said that 1,200 developers had downloaded the beta version of the Zend Core for Oracle tool, which came out at the end of August.

SAP Unveils 28 'Best Practice' ERP Kits for Midsize Businesses

SAP last week unveiled 28 new ERP software packages that it designed to help midsize businesses in a variety of industries get up and running on mySAP software quickly, while maintaining flexibility and minimizing the risks inherent in ERP implementations. The SAP Best Practices packages were customized for 15 industries (including automotive, chemicals, consumer products, consumer durables and home appliances, fabricated metals, high tech, home and personal care, industrial machinery, logistic service providers, mining, retail, pharmaceuticals, professional services, water utilities, and wholesale distribution), translated into 11 languages (including German, English, French, Spanish, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean), and can be equipped with "cross-industry" add-ons that provide functionality in the areas of business intelligence, CRM, supply chain management, Web portals, human capital management, forms, and international accounting standards. Each package includes step-by-step methodologies, reusable documentation, and pre-configuration settings that SAP says "provide everything needed to run specific key processes 'out of the box' with minimal installation effort." What's more, the German software behemoth is encouraging its huge partner network to build micro-vertical packages that further streamline the implementation of enterprise software, or what SAP calls "business content."

IBM Offers Deferred Payments to Goose Leasing of New Gear in Q4

Because my alma mater is Penn State, I think of annual computer sales cycles like a football game. The fourth quarter and fourth down are when it usually gets interesting. IBM is also in a fourth quarter situation, where it wants to show server growth, and that is why it has taken out its tried-and-true financial deferral deal to help boost pSeries, iSeries, and xSeries server sales.

Specifically, IBM is offering a financing deferral plan that allows pSeries, iSeries, and xSeries servers, TotalStorage storage products, various printers, and Integrated Technology Services with financing between $1,000 and $1 million in gear and/or services and 24-month or 36-month financing. Buyers do not have to make payments or incur interest for 90 days. You can buy in Q4 2005 and push it out into Q1 2006's budget. Products acquired under thus deferral program have to ship before December 31. It applies to new machines as well as upgrades, by the way.

Going Mobile: IDC Reckons 850 Million Workers to Cut the Cord by 2009

According to research performed by IDC, there were more than 650 million mobile workers in the world at the end of 2004 and by 2009, the mobile worker count will grow by 200 million more. That will mean about a quarter of the worldwide workforce will not be latched to any particular physical location and will be in need of various technologies to keep them in contact with customers, suppliers, and co-workers. IDC says Asia/Pacific (not including Japan) has the highest number of mobile workers, followed by the United States, Western Europe, and Japan.

Take Part in Gabriel Consulting Group's Unix Usage Study

We have partnered with Gabriel Consulting Group, an IT consulting firm, to help it find IT people to take part in surveys for the purposes of understanding what the devil is going on out there in data centers these days. Gabriel Consulting's survey is a semi-annual Unix Vendor Preference Survey that explores enterprise customer attitudes toward the big three Unix vendors. Dan Olds, the founder of the company, says his surveys are a bit different than the standard IT analyst's "What's on the CIO's Mind Today?" poll. "The biggest difference is that we want to hear from people who are actually on the data center floor and who are intimately involved with technology," he says. "We're looking for IT shop managers, system architects, system managers, application developers, rather than CIOs. Nothing against CIOs, but they generally don't know the down-and-dirty details of what is actually happening in the data center and the challenge of day-to-day operations." Amen to that, brother.

Gabriel Consulting wants to examine the customer experiences with and perceptions of various system vendors (primarily Unix and X86 servers so far) in order to understand how vendors are, or are not, adding value to customer operations. Many Linux shops are also Unix shops (and vice versa), which is why we are helping Olds out with his survey. To make it worth your while, Olds says he will give the first 200 survey participants coming from IT Jungle's publications to take the Unix survey a $10 Amazon.com gift certificate, delivered through email. He adds that you can use an anonymous email account if you wish, but that you should rest assured that you will not receive any spam or sales pitches from Gabriel Consulting and that he promises to never disclose any identifiable data to any third party. You can help out and take the survey by clicking here. Olds has also signed up to be a contributing editor at IT Jungle and to share some of the details of his surveys with our readers. Help him out if you can and, in the long run, what he finds out may help you. Thanks.