But Wait, There's More

Intel Begins "Paxville" Xeon MP Shipments, Adds Goodies

As expected, Intel began shipping its dual-core "Paxville" Xeon MP processors for four-way and larger servers this week. While the Paxville Xeon MPs are not as technically elegant as some of the future Xeons that the company is cooking up for next year, they give Intel's server partners something to sell against existing single-core Xeons and dual-core Opterons until those future chips become available.

The Paxville MP processors, which are technically called the Dual-Core Intel Xeon Processor 7000, come in a number of different variants. The Xeon 7040 runs at 3 GHz, has a 667 MHz front side bus, and works with the E8500 chipset. This chip costs $3,157. A version of the chip, called the Xeon 7041, runs at 3 GHz as well and has a faster 800 MHz front side bus (but won't be available until early next year); that bus is enabled by the E8501 chipset, which is a tweak of the existing E8500 chipset from Intel. (Both chipsets cost $255 a pop.) The Xeon 7030 processor has two cores running at 2.8 GHz and 1 MB of L2 cache per core, running against an 800 MHz front side bus. This chip costs $1,980, and requires the E8501 chipset. Lastly, there's the Xeon 7020, a 2.66 GHz version of the Xeon MP chip with only 1 MB of L2 cache per core, and which uses the slower 667 MHz front side bus; this chip costs $1,177.

People were expecting the 2.66 GHz and 2.8 GHz chips, but the 3 GHz versions were a pleasant surprise. Intel didn't say anything about that a few weeks ago. And it didn't say anything about the fact that the Virtualization Technology (VT), which does the work of instruction set virtualization in electronics rather than in a software layer, was cooked into the Paxville MP. (Apparently, this VT support will be activated with a BIOS command when it is available next year.) Intel didn't say anything about an 800 MHz front side bus, either, which will be available early next year using the E8501 chipset. It looks like server makers have been pressing Intel to get some more impressive things out the door.

These Paxville MP processors are pretty much what high-end server makers have to work with until the large-cache "Tulsa" kickers to the current 64-bit, single-core "Potomac" Xeon MPs ship, but these are not due until the second half of 2006. The Tulsa Xeon MPs will be implemented in a 65 nanometer process and will have 16 MB of shared L3 cache for each four-socket board, which is new for Intel, as well as 2 MB of L2 cache per core.

The Paxville MP platforms using the E8501 chipset will be upgradeable to the Tulsa MP chips. The question is whether the Paxville MP processors launched above, and delivering anywhere from 40 to 60 percent more performance than the single-core 3.66 GHz Cranford/E8500 platforms, is enough to carry customers through to Tulsa Xeon MPs. There are some pretty impressive Opteron platforms on the horizon in 2006.

Sun Overtalks IBM's Support of Solaris 10 on BladeCenters

If you put a pony tail on Ed Zander, the former president and chief operating officer of Sun Microsystems, that doesn't make him Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's current president and COO. But in filling Zander's shoes, Schwartz may have inadvertently picked up Zander's habit of the occasional ridiculous hyperbole.

In a recent blog and in the conference call with Wall Street analysts going over Sun's fiscal first quarter results this week, Schwartz said that IBM was now supporting the Solaris 10 Unix operating system on its BladeCenter blade servers. Well, yes and no. Sun is not yet, as far as I can find out, a member of the Blade.org blade server computing community started by IBM last year, which is trying to promote the BladeCenter chassis (co-developed by IBM and Intel) as a standard for blade servers. But Sun is one of a few operating system suppliers who are supporting the BladeCenter machines, joining IBM itself (AIX), Microsoft (Windows) and Red Hat and Novell (Linux). And while IBM and Sun will work on drivers and testing, IBM is not selling Solaris on the BladeCenters, it is not preconfiguring it on the boxes, and it is not selling support for Solaris, either.

This is not exactly what support means in IT nomenclature. If you want Solaris on BladeCenter blades, you have to buy it from Sun, and ditto for the support. IBM is supporting Solaris 10 like most cliché mother-in-laws support their cliché son-in-laws, it seems. Begrudgingly, and for political reasons. What seems to be actually true is that Sun is supporting IBM's BladeCenter servers with a little help from Big Blue on getting driver support. Sun could write the drivers without IBM's help, of course, and it could do the same thing for Dell or Hewlett-Packard blade servers, too.

Sun Extends Sun Cluster to Geographical Networks

Sun Microsystems this week expanded the full Java Enterprise System (JES) system software stack by adding the Sun Cluster Geographic Edition to the full suite. Which costs $140 per employee at the company per year, and to the Java Availability System software suite, which is just the clustering and failover JES pieces and which costs $50 per employee per year.

The JES suite and the availability sub-suite already have the full Sun Cluster 3 software inside, but this software is limited to campus- and metro-level clustering. With the Geographic Edition extensions, now a Sun Cluster can move up one layer of abstraction and two-node clusters can span the globe and clusters can be nested to create elaborate disaster recovery clusters. Customers have to be at the Sun Cluster 3.1 08/05 release level to upgrade to the Geographic Edition, which is supported on Solaris 8 and 9 right now and imminently on Solaris 10. The software is supported on any iron that runs these Solaris releases, says Jim Sangster, director of marketing for N1 and Sun clustering products at Sun. The software is supported on Sparc and Opteron servers from Sun as well as Sparc and X86 iron from other server suppliers.

Big Blue Tries to Promote Open Source Storage, Whatever That Means

A decade ago, the battle cry was open systems standards, and now, the battle cry is open source standards. One little word change has not made much of a difference. Last week, IBM got together with Cisco Systems, Engenio Information Systems, Fujitsu, Network Appliance, Sun Microsystems, McData, Brocade Communications Systems, and Computer Associates to form an organization called Aperi, which aims to create open source storage management software. Aperi is a Latin verb meaning "to open," and it might have just done that to a can of worms.

I don't know about you, but I get suspicious about any organization that claims to be starting a standard where half of the major players in the market are not present. EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, and Dell, among others, all have huge storage businesses and in the case of the first three, their own storage management software. And where is Microsoft, Red Hat, and Novell? You can't have a standard without them, and I cannot even imagine so many players agreeing on creating a single, open source--which means shared--storage management software program. The idea is not technically unthinkable--such software can surely be written--but it is politically and economically difficult to conceive of. Moreover, Aperi, for all of its goals of creating harmony among rivals, misses the fact that standards emerge from markets and through the action of market forces, not because vendors say so, but because customers do, and that you don't start writing a software first and then make a standard later, but rather a standard specification with customer requirements is written up first, there is much argument and disagreement, and then the standard is hammered out. Only then can each vendor in its turn implement the software that adheres to that standard. You cannot skip steps. Even the Eclipse Foundation that IBM helped spawn to form an open source framework for integrated development environments--to its great credit--did not bring enough people to the table immediately. Microsoft and Sun were noticeably absent, and still are. That is not a standard when two of the most influential application development tool providers and the standard bearers for .NET and Java are not at the table.

Aperi probably should not have launched until the other storage players were on board. But, because we are optimists, perhaps some good may come out of this in the long run. It is hard to say, really.

Computer Security Institute, FBI Release 10th Annual Computer Crime Report

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Computer Security Institute (CSI) last week released their tenth annual Computer Crime Report, outlining the nasty things that go on inside corporate data centers and on corporate desktops that no one wants to talk about publicly. The FBI-CSI survey of 700 companies, which you can read in full here, showed that attacks by computer viruses still represent the biggest financial losses for companies, but denial of service attacks have moved into the slot two position when it comes to causing the most economic damage. While cybercrime--by which the FBI and the CSI mean manual rather than viral unauthorized access to computer systems--was up slightly in 2005, the amount of economic damage it caused was down. Web sites are getting slammed more frequently. In fact, 95 percent of respondents reported ten or more incidents of hacking or attempted hacking on their Web sites.

Across the 700 companies surveyed, 639 suffered economic damage, and the total bill for computer crime at these sites came to over $130 million. $42.8 million was the result of viruses, $31.2 million from unauthorized access, $30.9 million from the theft of proprietary information, $7.3 million from denial of services attacks, $6.9 million from employee Internet abuse, and $4.1 million from laptop theft. Misuse of a public Web application only accounted for $2.2 million in damages, lower than the $2.6 million in damages from financial fraud.

SMBs Are Ill-Prepared for Security Threats, Trend Micro Says

Smaller organizations without dedicated IT professionals suffer the most for lack of security, according to a new study by security software firm Trend Micro. The study compared the security concerns of small and medium size business (SMB) users across the world, and found that the same security threats don't necessarily track across the globe. For instance, spyware is "much more likely" to be encountered by computer users in the U.S. than in Germany and Japan. However, the incidence if spyware encounters is growing the fastest in Japan, where one out of three users say spyware has increased in the last month. The Germans are more security conscious than their Americans and Japanese SMB counterparts, and are more likely to request security guidance from their IT department. However, only slightly more than half of German and U.S. SMB firms, and about a third of Japanese SMBs, even have an IT department. "Smaller businesses face a dilemma," says Steve Quane of Trend Micro. "Encounters with security threats are rising faster in smaller organizations, but these same organizations are restricted by time, cost, and available resources." The solution, according to Trend Micro, is to buy and use software that provides protection from online security threats, such as antivirus software, firewalls, and intrusion prevention systems.

IBM Launches WebSphere Community Edition

Last week, IBM launched WebSphere Community Edition, which is not an open source version of Big Blue's own WebSphere Application Server for J2EE applications, but rather the open source code that IBM promised it would release after it acquired privately held Gluecode Software, a provider of support for the Apache Geronimo Java application server, back in May. Gluecode was just about ready to launch its Joe application server, a commercialized implementation of the Geronimo project, when IBM snapped it up this past summer. Last week, IBM made good on its promise to make Joe open source and to offer commercial support for it. The Joe app server has been given the boring name WebSphere Application Server Community Edition.

WebSphere CE is a J2EE application server, and it has hooks into Oracle, MySQL, and Microsoft SQL Server databases, and somewhat ironically, support for IBM's own DB2/400 database for the iSeries and DB2 for Linux, Unix, and Windows is not yet available. The current 1.0 release of the software has tools for porting from Gluecode Standard Edition (the release prior to Joe from Gluecode) as well as from Apache Geronimo and Apache Tomcat servers. There are not, as yet, porting tools to move to proper full-blown WebSphere app servers, but you can bet that such tools are in the works. You can also bet that eventually WebSphere CE will end up on the iSeries in some way, shape, or form.