But Wait, There's More

Faster Itanium 2 Due Next Week

Intel will apparently get its promised kicker to the current Itanium 2 processors out the door next week. Earlier this summer, the word on the street was that Intel had hoped to get them to market by the Fall Intel Developer Forum show in early September. That didn't happen. But next week Intel will push out the faster "Madison" Itanium 2s, which will be something of a relief to Hewlett-Packard, NEC, Unisys, and a few other players that push the majority of Itanium iron.

Intel was widely expected to deliver its larger cache Itanium 2 processors, which had 9 MB of cache, a 33 percent increase in cache size over the current top-end Itanium 2s, at 1.7 GHz, 1.8 GHz, and 1.9 GHz clock speeds. The jump in clock speed from the current top-end 1.5 GHz, 6 MB cache chip to the 1.9 GHz chip (a 27 percent increase) should allow the servers based on the new Itaniums to do about one third more work. However, it is unclear whether Intel will launch the faster clock speeds. A few weeks ago, HP and Oracle ran a three-tiered SAP sales and distribution benchmark test that used a 1.6 GHz, 9 MB Madison chip. This could have been an early yield of the new chips, or it could be as far as Intel intends to push clock speeds for now. We'll know for sure next week.

Sun Praises IBM eServer p5s; Drags Out the Tired Old "Two Horse Race" Analogy

It is not every day when you hear the chief competitive officer of Sun Microsystems say something nice about one of its bitter rivals, but that is exactly what Larry Singer, the chief competitive officer of Sun, did in an interview last week. Singer was talking about IBM's new eServer p5 Power5-based "Squadron" servers. "We think the p5 stuff is pretty interesting," he said. "IBM has spent a lot of money on benchmarks, and as far as we can tell, it did not manipulate them. The truth is, they did a reasonably good job on the p5."

He went on to say that while IBM had spent probably several hundred million dollars developing the Squadron technology, he found it puzzling that IBM talks a lot about Linux and how it is the future, but it is making its money on AIX on Power. He said further that there was a "noticeable absence" of HP-UX and related server announcements coming out of rival Hewlett-Packard, and then he picked up the old "two-horse race" analogy, which all three Unix vendors have been using for years to try to exile at least one of their rivals from any conversation in the data center. Singer said he was convinced that the Unix market had come down to Sun and IBM, both of which had steeped into the breach made by "HP's beleaguered status in the Unix market."

That is laying it on a bit thick, which you would expect from a feisty chief competitive officer. The Unix market is a solid three-horse race, with several open-source BSD ponies doing a lot of workhorse jobs, even if they never get any glory. No matter how many times IBM and Sun protest otherwise, HP can and is competing in the Unix market, and it is doing it on Itanium systems.

VERITAS Delivers Improved OpForce Server Provisioning

Storage software specialist VERITAS Software has aspirations elsewhere in the IT market, and that is one reason it bought server provisioning software maker Jareva Technologies last year. This week, VERITAS has upgraded the OpForce 4.0 Enterprise Edition server provisioning tool so it can remotely install unattended instances of Microsoft Windows Server 2000 and Windows Server 2003 and Red Hat's Enterprise Linux AS 3 on bare iron. The software had already supported provisioning for IBM's AIX and Sun Microsystems' Solaris as well as Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. It stands to reason that support for HP-UX will soon be added to OpForce. OpForce 4.0 is set to be available in mid-November, and costs $7,500 per management server and $500 per managed processor.

Server Shipments in Eastern Europe Booming

According to researchers at IDC, shipments of servers into Central and Eastern Europe exploded in 2003, with shipments up 17 percent compared to 2002. However, the rapid shift to low-cost X86 systems in that market, away from proprietary and Unix systems, meant that total revenues in this important region of the world's IT community were only up 1.1 percent. However, this year, things look to be better for the server makers (and presumably for the customers in the region), since IDC is predicting that server shipments are expected to climb by 20 percent in 2004 and revenues are expected to climb by 15 percent. In a lot of cases, this will significantly increase the profit margins among the server makers that play in Eastern and Central Europe.

The Russian IT market is the juggernaut of this region, but server sales in Poland and the Czech Republic are not too shabby, either. These three together accounted for 64 percent of server shipments in 2003. IDC added that Bulgaria, Croatia, and Romania are the fastest growing server markets in the region.

IDC reckons that Hewlett-Packard was the dominant vendor in the region in 2003 and will probably hold that position in 2004; IBM is number two and Dell is number three. Two Russian server makers, Aquarius and Kraftway, were in the fourth and fifth positions in the market. X86 machines accounted for 97.6 percent of shipments in 2003, and Windows was installed on 80 percent of the machines. Unix and NetWare sales were obviously small, and contracting according to IDC. However, Linux server sales were up 72.2 percent in 2003.

Glorified PCs Dominate $2.2 Billion Workstation Market

In the old days of the Unix market, it was the Unix workstations that drove the Unix server business and gave Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, SGI, IBM and others the chip volumes that were necessary to allow them to be in the chip business at all and therefore create Unix servers in the first place. Thanks to the advent of very powerful PCs and very powerful, high-volume graphics cards, the traditional RISC/Unix workstation market that offered the workstation foundation for the Unix server market has been eroding steadily for years. The fact that HP has withdrawn its Itanium-based workstations (because there were not enough applications on them or customers supporting them) is stunning, really. It just goes to show how much the workstation market has changed.

The workstation market still matters, however. According to Jon Peddie Research, a Tiburon, California company that tracks the workstation, multimedia, and graphics markets, says that in the first half of 2004, 8.3 million workstations were shipped, with 92 percent of these machines being PC-style machines and the remaining boxes being true RISC/Unix workstations. PC-style workstations accounted for 84 percent of the $2.2 billion in worldwide workstation revenue in the first six months of the year.

Oracle Raises Its Final Bid for PeopleSoft

Oracle has given PeopleSoft what seems like its millionth but what will be its last offer to acquire the company: $24 a share, or $9.2 billion. That price is where PeopleSoft stock was trading in early January 2004, and represents about 19 percent premium compared to where the companies stock has been trading recently. Larry Ellison said that this price is final and non-negotiable, but said other merger terms are subject to negotiation. Oracle is giving PeopleSoft's board until November 19 to drop its poison pill and recommend that shareholders accept the deal. Oracle needs to have shareholders tender at more than 50 percent of the company's shares to do the deal, and the company says that if it does not get that level of support from PeopleSoft's shareholders, it will walk away.

FSMLabs Tweaks BSD, Linux for Real-Time Use

If you are looking for an implementation of the open source BSD Unix or Linux platforms for real-time computing, Finite State Machine Labs, which is based in Socorro, New Mexico, has announced its RTCoreBSD 2.1 and RTLinuxPro 2.1, which are POSIX-compliant, custom real-time operating systems that hook into BSD or Linux as their application servers. FSMLabs is supporting NetBSD 1.6 and Linux 2.4.25 with these two latest releases of its RT product. The RT kernel and BSD or Linux extensions to it run on embedded ARM or PowerPC processors on up to Intel Pentium and Xeon and AMD Athlon processors.