But Wait, There's More

Sun Beefs Up Clustering with Sun Cluster 3 Release

Sun Microsystems announced this week that it has tweaked the Sun Cluster 3 software, which is one of the core components of its Java Enterprise System middleware stack.

With the Sun Cluster 3.1 09/04 release (Sun's naming conventions for software include the month when development finishes as a subrelease designation), the company is increasing the scalability of its clustering software from eight to 16 nodes. Two years ago, with the launch of Sun Cluster 3.0, Sun boosted the cluster scalability from four to eight nodes. Back on June, when Sun Cluster 3.1 first hit the market, Sun was emphasizing its support for Solaris 9 on X86 platforms, the first time its clustering middleware was available on X86 boxes.

This time around, with the Sun Cluster 3.1 09/04 release, Sun is offering tighter integration between its Solaris Volume Manager (which is also a free element of Solaris and an alternative to the popular Veritas volume manager and file system software) and Oracle's 9i Real Application Clusters. This functionality is being bundled as Sun Cluster Oracle RAC SVM Edition, and costs $7,000 per node for new customers who just want this functionality; existing Sun Cluster and Java Enterprise System customers get it for free. Java Enterprise System is available on an annual subscription basis for $100 per employee, per year; pricing for Sun Cluster as a stand-alone product is based on server tiers, ranging from $1,000 on a uniprocessor Sparc or X86 processor to $100,000 on a fully loaded Sun Fire 15K. Sun says that the Oracle 9i RAC agent in this edition allows customers to deploy an all-Sun software stack (excepting Oracle's database, of course), which simplifies sales, support, and acquisition.

Sun also said that, with this release, it is tweaking its graphical Sun Cluster configuration tool to make it easier to view and administer the servers in a cluster. This is probably coming in pretty handy this week for Major League Baseball, one of Sun's clustering customers, as the Red Sox and the Yankees vie for the American League slot in the World Series and the Cardinals and the Astros slug it out for the National League slot. Traffic on the MLB site has exploded.

HP Discounts Unix Software for Educational Institutions

Unix got its start in academia, and all of the Unix vendors want it to remain a vibrant piece of the academic IT community. And that is one reason why Hewlett-Packard is giving discounts on HP-UX 11i software to educational institutions that use HP-UX for teaching or research. The discount on HP-UX 11i itself is 100 percent; HP is giving it away for free. Further discounts, which go as high as 45 percent, are available for HP-UX middleware products and HP ServiceGuard, the company's Unix clustering software. Discounts are also available for support services for installed HP 9000 and Integrity servers and HP Unix workstations that are used to run this software in classrooms or in research facilities.

That 45 percent discount can also be applied to back-end data centers used by colleges and universities to do their student management and accounting, as well, as long as that processing is restricted to student and faculty e-mail and collaboration, student registration, and financial applications.

So why is HP giving the discounts on Unix software? One word is enough to explain it: Linux. HP has to bring HP-UX to price parity with Linux in order to keep Unix the preferred teaching platform at colleges and universities. It's that simple.

Sun Says Solaris 10 Adoption Is Good in the Education Market

Sun Microsystems is, like Hewlett-Packard and IBM, well aware that the uptake of Unix within the academic community is vital. That's why Sun was crowing this week that some 30,000 students and educators have participated in the Software Express beta program for Solaris 10, which is expected to launch in November. Many of these people have also participated in the free, Web-based training that Sun is offering on its site for Solaris 10, and still others are involved with Sun's source code program or participate in the Developer's Challenge program, which gives educators and students prizes if they show off cool things to do with Solaris 10. You can take the challenge on Sun's Web site.

Sun Partners to Push Solaris-Based Subscription Grid Computing

Sun Microsystems launched its utility based pricing of $1 per CPU per hour for server clusters a few weeks ago, but the company never expected that all of its customers would access such utility computing through Sun. The company actually expects that its partners will use this utility model and drive most of the processor-hours that their respective customers consume, leaving Sun as the back-end server, storage, and software provider. This is more or less how Sun became the backbone of the Internet a decade ago.

Sun announced this week that partners, including Electronic Data Systems, CGI, and Atos Origin, will peddle CPU cycles under a new program called the Sun Utility Computing for High-End Grids. The utilities that these three partners will build will be comprised of two-way, Opteron-based Sun Fire V20z servers, Solaris or Linux operating systems, and N1 Grid Engine grid middleware. Pricing for compute cycles will, of course, be set by these partners, not by Sun.

HP, Oracle Push 3-Tier SAP Benchmark with Unix Boxes

As IBM blasts its 64-way, Power5-based "Squadron" p5 595 servers onto the market, taking many of the top slots in various industry benchmarks, rival Hewlett-Packard is rushing out its benchmarks to show that its 64-way Superdome Integrity servers can top the tests, too. This week, HP rolled out a result on the three-tiered implementation of SAP's Sales and Distribution test, one of the most frequently cited benchmarks in the industry. A 64-way Superdome running HP-UX 11i and Oracle 10g on an Integrity server, using the not-yet-announced 1.6 GHz, 9 MB cache Itanium 2 chip, is able to support 95,400 SAP Sales and Distribution users.

This is roughly twice the number of Sales and Distribution users that IBM could support with its prior-generation of 32-way pSeries 690 servers with 1.3 GHz Power4 processors. IBM has supported 20,000 SD users on the p5 595s on the two-tier test (which puts the SAP database and application servers on a single machine), but it has not yet run the three-tier SD test on these machines. Based on IBM's rPerf relative performance metrics, a 64-way Squadron should be able to top 200,000 SD users using the 1.9 GHz Power5 chips, provided a fleet of application servers can keep that central 64-way database server fed. HP's bragging rights on this test will probably not last long, unless it starts using the mx2 dual-Madison processor modules in its tests and can tune SAP to make great use of them.

PeopleSoft, Oracle Haggle Over the Price

Looking at it from the outside, the merger of Oracle and PeopleSoft looks increasingly likely, at least based on the fascinating testimony of executives from both companies, as Oracle is suing PeopleSoft in Delaware Chancery Court to compel it to remove its poison pill. The testimony, which came in the wake of Craig Conway being fired as CEO of PeopleSoft, showed that Conway stretched the truth a year ago when he said that the Oracle situation was not affecting PeopleSoft's sales. However, as we wrote about in our coverage of Conway's firing, it seems more likely that Conway was released over technology issues, and PeopleSoft board member Skip Battle more or less admitted this in his testimony. According to Battle's testimony, which was reported in the Wall Street Journal, Conway was fired because he "had lost sight of the importance of technological innovation" and that PeopleSoft "was in danger of losing its collaborative work style."

As things stand in the dramatic hostile takeover bid, PeopleSoft has said that Oracle's $7.7 billion bid is not sufficient, and Oracle has hinted that it may come to the conclusion that PeopleSoft is not worth that much. In the meantime, Oracle fights on, trying to get the courts to force PeopleSoft to remove its customer assurance program, which would force Oracle to continue to support PeopleSoft programs or refund customers' license fees, and to get rid of the boosted compensation plans PeopleSoft has enacted to make it more expensive to acquire.

Offshoring Giants Tata, Infosys Profit Big-Time

Offshoring pays, if you happen to not be one of the programmers or managers whose job gets offshored. Indian outsourcing firm Tata Consultancy Services said that, in the second fiscal quarter ending September 30, it added 52 new customers and pushed sales to 24.3 billion rupees (about $530 million), and that the company broke through $1 billion in sales for the first six months of its fiscal year for the first time in its history. While revenues were up 43.6 percent in the quarter, net income rose by 51.8 percent, to $125.7 million. The company went public in August and raised $1.2 billion on the Bombay Stock Exchange in India.

Infosys Technologies, another big Indian offshoring house, is also seeing its sales and profits boom. Infosys also ended its second fiscal quarter on September 30 and is traded on the BSE. The company had sales of $379 million in the second quarter, adding 32 new clients and 5,010 employees, bringing its total to 32,949 employees. Net income was $97 million, up 49 percent.

Let's do a little math and turn these numbers around. Infosys brings in about $48,600 per employee, per year, at this run rate, which the company said that it can sustain in fiscal 2005. In calendar 2003, services giant EDS had 132,000 employees, who generated $21.5 billion in sales, or about $162,900 per employee. While these offshoring firms and EDS don't exactly equate, what's clear is that it costs a lot less to employ IT people in India doing sophisticated software and services than it does to do it here. Looks like a factor of 3.4 to 1. The question is, what can we do about it?