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FreeBSD 6.0 Beta Over, Production Code Available

After only a few weeks of final beta testing in release candidate status, the FreeBSD Project announced last Friday that FreeBSD 6.0, a significantly improved update of that variant of the open source BSD Unix operating system, is available as a production product.

As part of the launch, Yahoo founder David Filo said he was impressed with the performance and stability of the new version, and reminded everyone that Yahoo is one of the biggest users of FreeBSD in the world. That's because FreeBSD is rock-solid, and even if you pay for the distribution CDs (as IT Jungle does for both the 4.X tree and the 5.X tree), it is a nominal fee.

FreeBSD 6.0 continues in that tradition while offering a more reliable, scalable Unix platform. In making the announcement of the production code, the FreeBSD Project highlighted the fact that the Unix kernel can now scale across SMP servers and workstations better, and can support eight or more processors in a single system image. FreeBSD 6.0 also sports a multithreaded file system, which speeds up data access on local disks, RAID arrays attached to a server, files stored on other machines accessed by Network File System (NFS), and data sets stored on storage area networks (SANs). FreeBSD, the project claims, can now outperform Linux when it comes to raw data throughput, so the gutting of the VFS and UFS file systems that helps both uniprocessor and SMP servers double the I/O performance on RAID arrays was clearly worth the trouble. FreeBSD 6.0 also includes "experimental" support for the PowerPC and Power processors created by IBM and Motorola.

The changes to the new version of FreeBSD are not just about servers, of course. FreeBSD 6.0 now supports Intel's Centrino wireless-enabled processors for laptops, and also supports the WPA encryption protocol used on wireless networks. And because networking drivers are always a pain in the neck to get your hands on, the NDISulator, which allows FreeBSD to run Windows network drivers natively under FreeBSD, has been improved to work better. Support for laptop-style power management through Advanced Configuration and Power Management (ACPI) is now supported, too.

FreeBSD 6.0 is available on 64-bit Alpha, 32-bit Pentium/Xeon, 64-bit Pentium/Xeon, 64-bit Athlon/Opteron, 64-bit Itanium, 32-bit PC-98, and 64-bit Sparc processors. There are project in the works to port FreeBSD to MIPS processors and ARM processors. FreeBSD Mall is charging $39.95 for its FreeBSD 6.0 distribution, while BSD Mall has it on sale for $35, down from $40.

IBM Offers Trade-Ins on pSeries-to-p5 Upgrades

It's the fourth quarter push, and IBM is keen on getting a lot of Unix boxes out of its factories and into customer hands. And to that end, Big Blue has announced a Power4 to Power5 trade-in deal for customers that offers significant (yet effectively delayed) discounts.

Under the deal, customers with Power4-based pSeries 670 and 690 servers can trade in these boxes and their associated racks and get a trade-in after they purchase a new p5 590 or 595 server. That is a pretty serious upgrade in performance. To sweeten the deal, IBM is tossing in some processor activations on these machines, which are pretty pricey as well. The trade-in credits span from $32,400 to $216,000, with the amount growing as customers do a box swap for progressively bigger boxes. This trade-in rebate deal runs until December 23, and customers have to install the gear before January 23, 2006. Customers get the rebate back when IBM gets the older pSeries iron in its hands.

First Sun Grid Retail Customer Buys Over 1 Million CPU Hours

Sun Microsystems made a lot of noise about its Sun Grid utility computing infrastructure idea early in the year, and then very quickly sold out the limited capacity it had on the grid it had built to its key customers in the financial services sector. Bringing the grid offering to real customers--what Sun calls the retail grid--was more problematic, and Sun has struggled to iron all the kinks out of the hardware, software, telecommunications, and other issues that are involved in building a utility. While Sun doesn't want to be a utility data center itself, it needs to operate at least some real utility centers as a means of doing product development and to help its customers--who will create and operate utilities--do a better job at it. And because Sun is not exactly operating at a profit these days, the Sun Grid was supposed to have retail customers who would, at $1 per CPU per hour, basically help foot the bill for the development of grid utilities.

That has been the theory for nearly a year, and now it is finally starting to become the practice. Virtual Compute Corporation, a Houston company that was established to create and sell portable high-performance computing clusters and related storage to oil and gas companies in the United States and the United Kingdom, has acquired 1 million CPU hours (presumably at a pretty respectable discount), to become Sun's first retail Sun Grid customer.

VCC has 256 Xeon processors in Boston, 1,024 Opteron processors in New York, 3,000 Opterons in London, and 512 Opterons in Scotland prior to making the announcement that is would be reselling Sun Grid capacity. VCC is buying time slices on Sun's V20z Opteron servers, which are one generation back from the current "Galaxy" Sun Fire machines. VCC's current machines have a total of 4,792 CPUs, and there are 8,766 hours in a year, so it has already invested in 42 million compute hours per year in its own IT infrastructure. You can bet it spent somewhere around $20 million acquire those servers (call it an average selling price of $4,000). Which is why VCC is testing out the Sun Grid alternative to adding capacity for its customers. This way, VCC only spends money when it makes money.

HP Offers 20 Percent Discounts on Virtualization Software for HP-UX

Hewlett-Packard wants its HP-UX customers to make use of all of the sophisticated virtual machine partitioning software it has created for its variant of Unix, and to that end it is giving a 20 percent discount off the cost of buying so-called Virtual Server Environment suites for HP-UX. These are add-ons to the HP-UX Foundation Edition, which sells for $750 per processor, and converts these operating systems into more virtual and more rugged environments. The 20 percent discount is available on the Standard VSE Suite, which adds Workload Manager, vPars, and reference architectures for BEA Systems' WebLogic application server and Oracle's 10g database. The Mission Critical VSE Suite adds the MC Serviceguard clustering software from HP to the mix. Normally, Standard Edition costs $6,150 per processor and the Mission Critical Edition costs $10,236 per processor. Anything that cushions the blow on those HP-UX 11i costs is going to be appreciated by customers--no question about it. While HP says this is a limited time offer, it doesn't say how long it will run to.

Former Dell Shop Replaces 22 PowerEdges with Two Sun Galaxies

Sun Microsystems is crowing this week because one of its early customers for the "Galaxy" Sun Fire X4200 servers is a company called NewEnergy Associates, which is replacing 22 X86-based PowerEdge servers from Dell with two two-socket, four core Opteron boxes. NewEnergy, which is a Houston-based company that specializes in energy IT and trading systems and related consulting services and which is a subsidiary of Siemens Power Generation unit. So you would expect NewEnergy to be somewhat conscious about the power and cooling issues of its own IT systems. To that end, it has consolidated down its 22 Dell boxes in its Houston data center to two X4200s with a total of eight processor cores; the company is piloting a project to replace another right uniprocessor, single-core servers in its Atlanta data center with a single X4200 with four cores. That Atlanta data center has a total of 60 servers, so the Galaxy pilot could cause the ouster of a total of 82 servers at the company. NewEnergy reckons it is cutting power requirements and heat output in the Houston data center by 84 percent.

While the size of this deal is not large in terms of the server count for Sun or the revenue stream, the argument is compelling and that is why Sun has done what it has, engineering-wise, with the Galaxies. A few hundred thousand deals per year like this, and Sun has a real X86 business that puts it in the Tier One category.

Apple Updates Mac OS X with Tiger 10.4

Apple Computer has rolled out a dot release for its "Tiger" Mac OS X Unix-derived operating system for its desktops and servers. Tiger 10.4.3 has a lot of tweaks for the Spotlight desktop search feature that was one of the key features in Tiger when it was released last year. It also includes an updated Safari browser, which allows it to pass the Acid2 Web standard test (my Windows XP Pro desktop running Internet Explorer did not pass the test). Safari is now operating with a wider variety of Webcams, and Tiger now can encrypt iChat messages without the requirement of an SSL server. There doesn't seem to be much new for server setups running Tiger.

Sun, Microsoft Work on Java-.NET Interoperability

The love fest between rivals Sun Microsystems and Microsoft continued last week as the two companies announced they would provide substantially improved interoperability between the Java and .NET programming environments.

In April 2004, Microsoft and Sun buried the hatchet in their bitter war, which saw Sun attack Microsoft on antitrust grounds in the courts and Microsoft create a Redmond dialect of Java called .NET with which it could attack Java. By stopping the Java-.NET wars, Sun was able to get close to $2 billion, which it desperately needed, and Microsoft was able to get some interoperability agreements, which both of these companies customers (and, indeed, all Java and .NET customers) needed very badly.

According to Joe Keller, vice president of marketing for integration platforms at Sun, last week's Java-.NET interoperability announcement is the third phase in the commitment that the two companies made to not just stop fighting, but to start cooperating. In May, Sun and Microsoft delivered single sign-on capabilities for Windows and Solaris platforms, and then a few months later they committed to support the WS* specification relating to systems management, which is called the WS-Management spec. With this support, Windows servers can access systems management data and features in Solaris operating systems, and Solaris can access similar features in Windows. This allows Solaris administrators working with Sun's N1 systems management tools to seek out, monitor, and control Windows servers and Windows administrators working in the Microsoft Management Console to reach into Solaris servers and do the same.

The WS* specifications include some 13 different specifications on how to create a Web service. Sun has committed to implement more WS* specifications, including those relating to SOAP-based messaging, metadata, security, and quality of service in the Java platform, and Microsoft has committed to do the same in the .NET platform. Microsoft will be implementing these specs in the Windows Communication Foundation, formerly known as the "Indigo" project, while Sun will be implementing those specs first in project "Glassfish," the open source version of its Java Enterprise System application server. WCF is one of the nifty features coming out in the future "Longhorn" Vista Server. The commercial implementation of Sun's J2EE application server with this interoperability embedded in it is expected at the JavaOne show in May 2006. Sun is also putting the support into its Java Web Services Developer Pack development tools. Sun will be up in Redmond testing the interoperability this week, in fact, using early editions of this code. IBM, as a strong Java and Web services proponent, is expected to eventually equip its tools and application servers with similar features, and it won't be long before Linux gets them, too.

Keller says that while the WS-I spec and the SOAP protocol allowed Java and .NET to talk to each other, this interoperability is more robust. Now, you can be sure that services built in .NET or Java can talk to each other securely, predictably, and reliably. "This allows you to build truly enterprise-class service-oriented applications," explains Keller. "And as funny as this might sound, you don't have to care if the services are built in Java or .NET. They are just exposed as services on a network, and programmers just don't have to care."