But Wait, There's More

IBM Previews p5 575+ RISC/Unix Box for HPC Shops

Not all supercomputers are built from X64 processors, and IBM wants to not only remind everyone that the ASCI Purple AIX-Power supercomputer exists, but also that it has plenty of performance ready for HPC customers to tap into. This week at SuperComputing 2005, IBM previewed new system motherboards for its eight-socket p5 575+ servers that will support single-core Power5+ chips running at 2.2 GHz and dual-core Power5+ chips running at 1.9 GHz. The p5 575+ machines will support up to 288 MB of L3 cache and from 2 GB to 256 GB of main memory per server--all in a 2U form factor. Each p5 575+ machine has two Gigabit Ethernet ports and two integrated Ultra3 SCSI controllers. AIX 5L 5.2 and 5.3 are supported on these new nodes, as will be Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 and Red Hat Linux AS 3. IBM is suggesting to customers that they use the eight-core node when they need high memory bandwidth (since there will be twice as much L3 cache and main memory per core), and to use the 16 core variant when they have more intensive computational needs. The 16 core version of the p5 575+ offers about 35 percent more oomph than the current p5 575, which uses slower 1.5 GHz dual-core Power5 processors.

IBM Inks Big Chinese Government Unix Server Deal, But Does Not Displace HP

Big Blue is shooting off fireworks because it claims it has been able to dislodge rival Hewlett-Packard from one of its key Itanium-based server accounts. As HP is announcing its numbers tomorrow for the fiscal 2005 year, IBM plans to rub it in that HP has lost the China State Tax Administration as a key Integrity server customer, and that they are porting their Unix applications, which run in data centers in over 30 locations, from HP iron to a mix of IBM's p5 570 and p5 575 servers. The only problem is, of course, that this is not exactly true, according to HP sources.

While it is true that IBM has got a deal with the Chinese tax authorities for what appears to be a few hundred p5 Unix boxes, HP says that not one of the 80 PA-RISC Unix servers currently installed are being replaced, and that all 46 of the Superdome machines that China State Tax Administration--none of which use Itanium as IBM is claiming they do--has installed are going to stay right there, as will the remaining smaller PA-RISC boxes. Back in the summer of 2003, HP was bragging that it had sold over 60 servers to the China State Tax Administration, with 40 of them being Superdome servers running HP-UX 11i. The tax authority was a big IBM shop, according to HP, and the fact that HP got in at all in 2003 is still something of a coup.

The IBM new p5 systems are apparently a different part of a $1 billion investment in infrastructure, called the Golden Tax Project, that will allow the Chinese government to collect taxes and provide other services. This project is expected to take about five years to be completed--which just goes to show you that some things never change. Five-year plan, p5. It makes some sort of cosmic sense.

OSDL's Patent Commons Ready for Grazing

Open Source Development Labs, one of the main stewards of Linux and related open source systems software, this week announced the Patent Commons Project, an online patent commons reference library with over 500 patents in a searchable database. The patents have been donated by IBM, Computer Associates, Intel, Red Hat, Novell, and Sun Microsystems.

While the relevancy to Linux of many of the patents have been called into question, the idea is nonetheless sound and the Linux community is not in a legal position to not accept any patent donations offered by vendors or promises that violations of patents by Linux by certain vendors will not be pursued. In fact, a precise list of patents that vendors won't sue to protect would be a very, very useful thing--albeit a very tough thing to build--and would go a long way toward making those who are nervous about the legal issues surrounding open source products. This is a good start.

Vendors Establish Open Invention Network to Acquire Patents

While having a patent commons like the one established by Open Source Development Labs in the story above is important, it is perhaps more important for the open source community to actually be an acquirer of patents to protect the products that get built in the open source way. I am cynical about the law-- particularly patent law, since I find it completely illogical that a company own the rights to a particular configuration of DNA--the fact is, having a big portfolio of patents is what keeps many IT companies from suing each other out of existence and cross-licensing agreements are what often allow innovation to proceed in a relatively orderly fashion.

That's why IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Philips, and Sony have thrown some cash into a new initiative to actually acquire patents called the Open Invention Network. Novell, which secured some B2B commerce patents from the failed CommerceOne B2B startup, donated these patents to the cause, which it got by buying the carcass of CommerceOne late last year for $15.5 million. The vendors behind OIN won't say how much funding they will supply to license or acquire patents relating to open source software, so it is hard to say how useful it will be.

Many people think that software should not be patentable, and there are very good reasons for this, including the fact that copyright protections ought to be sufficient to protect software developers. But the fact remains that the Patent Office in the United States has granted patents on software, and the courts have upheld these patents, so this is not an issue that will go away. Any open source project can be put into very tough circumstances by a commercial institution hell-bent on using its patents and the threat or reality of a lawsuit to drive open source developers out of a market. There are no easy answers, and even buying thousands and thousands of patents will not stop this potential threat. Licensing patents that could be used to attack Linux is probably a good idea, but to do so usually requires developers who have created a product (the bits of the Linux platform are really a collection of thousands of programs) to get patents of their own. Any way you look at this, acquiring patents, applying for patents, and cross-licensing requires lot of money and lots of lawyers.

Who is going to pay for this?

Sun, NEC, and AMD Partner for 50 Teraflops Opteron Cluster

Considering that Itanium-based server supplier and vector supercomputer maker NEC and RISC/Unix and Itanium server maker Fujitsu pretty much rule the indigenous supercomputer market in Japan, it was somewhat surprising to see that Sun Microsystems partnered this week with NEC and AMD to deliver a 50 teraflops supercomputer based on future eight-socket "Galaxy" Opteron-based servers. You would have thought that Sun would have partnered with Fujitsu to beat out NEC for the deal at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

Under the deal, Sun and AMD will deliver a cluster running Linux (with Solaris 10 as an option on the nodes) with 5,240 dual-core processors. The machine, comprised of 655 servers, will also have 360 Advance co-processors from ClearSpeed for boosting the speed on HPC algorithms. By next summer, the Tokyo Institute of Technology plans to add another 240 Advance co-processors and boost the number of Opteron servers such that it can reach 100 teraflops of performance. This is by far the largest HPC deal--in terms of processor count and raw aggregate performance--that Sun has ever been involved in, and it bodes well for the Galaxies. It will have over 21 TB of main memory and 1.1 PB of disk storage (which is coming from NEC) in the initial 50 teraflops configuration. The machines will be lashed together using InfiniBand interconnect from Voltaire. Sun's N1 System Manager and N1 Grid Engine software will be used to manage the cluster.

Zend Studio 5 Ships with Commercial PHP 5

Zend Technologies, the commercial support company that is behind the open source PHP language and runtime engine, announced this week that the long-awaited commercial implementation of PHP 5, which is called Zend Studio 5, is ready for public consumption. The new PHP 5 has better integration with databases, including IBM DB2 and Cloudscape, Oracle 9i and 10g, Microsoft SQL Server, as well as PostgreSQL, Derby, and SQLite. (Oddly, MySQL was not mentioned in the announcement, but PHP 5 clearly supports the MySQL database and this is the most popular database behind PHP.) Zend Studio also does FTP over SSL, has integrated support for the Subversion version control system.

Zend Studio Standard Edition, which is aimed at single developers and which includes an internal Internet Explorer browser, costs $99. (I am a bit mystified about how IE is running on a Linux or Unix box, but once we figure out how to get it installed on our SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 development server, I'll let you know what the deal is.) The Professional Edition, which adds the Subversion integration, costs $299, and the Enterprise Edition, which adds a code quality control and test environment, costs $1,495 for a perpetual license or $499 for an annual license. All versions include one year of tech support. Zend Studio 5 runs on Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Windows, and Mac OS X.

Aberdeen Report Pegs Growth in Midmarket ERP

Now that they have gone through an extended belt-tightening exercise, medium-sized enterprises are beginning to focus their attention on building revenue and are willing to turn to technology to accomplish these goals. That's what the latest research from Aberdeen Group reveals anyway. According to "ERP in the Mid-Market Enterprise: The 2005 Benchmark Report," a significant portion of the mid-market is relying on core business applications to provide competitive advantages.

For the purposes of this research, Aberdeen Group surveyed primarily manufacturers that assemble components from parts and distribute those products. Epicor Software, a company that specializes in customer relationship management, supply chain, and financial accounting technologies sponsored the report. Aberdeen also conducted a similar report in 2004, which provides a basis for comparison in its trend analysis.

Based on its survey results, Aberdeen concludes that 77 percent of mid-market firms have made revenue growth their top priority. Lowering costs, which one year ago was gaining the most attention, remains a major factor in these shops, but only slightly more than half of the respondents rated it as their major concern.

Expanding the revenue and customer base have become the most powerful drivers for many medium-sized companies, where an emphasis on customer satisfaction, staying competitive, and controlling costs continue to dominate conversations between IT and business executives. Katherine Jones, author of the report, says these firms are ready for a technology overhaul, which could include newly installed software, hosted solutions, or outsourced services.

"The mid-market is beginning to invest in technology to get ahead. Prime examples of that investment in the next 12 months are in supplier relationship management, customer acquisition and retention tools, and technology to help companies hire better talent--and then retain that talent," Jones says. "Chief technology directions are toward implementing ERP suites, integrating existing business applications where they aren't already, and moving toward enterprise-wide consolidation on applications and infrastructure."

One of the indicators identified by this survey is that ROI on current ERP systems is less than 50 percent. This leads to two conclusions: Either companies are not taking full advantage of what they have or the solutions aren't providing it.

Rather than refuting the idea that technology is the answer, the analysis reveals flaws in many existing systems. To begin with, companies are faced with integrating fragmented business applications. Only 26 percent of those surveyed have suitably integrated applications, while 60 percent say they are ready to make it happen this year. Slightly more than 10 percent indicate they will be replacing existing solutions in order to achieve this goal.

The report also points a finger at companies that cling to solutions as long as they provide adequate use. Many have grown and applications have not kept pace. This is particularly true with financial applications. When firms rely on old applications, bottlenecks occur due to increased volume, heavier transaction loads, and higher performance requirements.

Although many situations show signs of IT development falling behind overall company growth, Aberdeen identifies the roll-your-own applications as often being particularly expensive to maintain. It also notes that companies that have traditionally done much of their own application development complain about off-the-shelf not meeting unique needs. Aberdeen claims that much of this criticism is unwarranted.

Much of the blame, according to the report, relates to the length of time ERP applications have been deployed. The survey shows that 21 percent of those responding have applications older than five years and 29 percent have applications that are three to five years old.

Jones recommends companies answer these questions about their existing ERP systems:

• Is the solution adequate?
• Does it work?
• Are there performance and uptime issues?
• Are other business requirements unmet because application features have not kept up with needs?
• Are costs in line with results?
• Are support and maintenance costs in line?
• Will hardware and network costs increase due to upgrade requirements?
• Is excessive data entry required because of disparate applications?

Click here for a complimentary copy the complete report.