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Sun Adds 1.6 GHz UltraSparc-IIIi to Sun Fire V440

Sun Microsystems' announcement that it's shipping a faster processor in the UltraSparc-IIIi processors in Sun Fire V440 servers was buried amid the Solaris 10 extravaganza this week.

The "Jalapeno" UltraSparc-IIIi processor is a cut-down version of the "Cheetah" UltraSparc-III processor, the latter of which includes large cache memories and the electronics to support SMP clustering for big servers. The Jalapeno server is aimed at entry machines with two or four processors where price and heat are issues. This chip debuted in April 2003 at 1 GHz with 1 MB of integrated L2 cache memory, 64 KB of L1 data cache, and 32 KB of L1 instruction cache, all wrapped around an UltraSparc-III core. At the end of 2003, Sun boosted the clock speed of this chip to 1.3 GHz, thanks to the improving yields with the 130 nanometer process used at Sun's foundry, Texas Instruments. Next year, as Texas Instruments moves to a 90 nanometer process, Sun will launch the UltraSparc-IIIi+ chips, which will boost on-chip cache to 4 MB and crank up the clocks on the Jalapenos considerably, perhaps to 2 GHz or more.

But Sun still has to sell servers with the 1.3 GHz and the new 1.6 GHz Jalapenos until then. The 1.3 GHz chip is still the default processor in the V440 machine, in fact, and the company is only selling the 1.6 GHz chip in large configurations of the V440, with four of the processors installed, 16 GB of main memory, and four 73 GB SCSI disk drives. Such a machine costs $33,995, a 29 percent premium compared with the same machine using the 1.3 GHz Jalapenos. That's pricey considering that the chip upgrade probably yields only about 20 percent more performance. Sun has not yet put the faster Jalapeno into the two-way Sun Fire V210, V240, or V250 servers, but it will probably do so as yields on the chip improve.

Sun Starts Lining Up ISVs for Solaris 10

With Sun Microsystems breathing new life into Solaris for X86 this year, particularly with the launch of Solaris 10, and its adoption of the 64-bit Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices in its servers, the company has gone a long way to dispel many doubts concerning its commitment to the X86 platform. Convincing the world that it is serious about Solaris on X86 was the easy part. Getting the world to use Solaris on X86 is another matter entirely.

As is always the case with any new hardware or operating system platform, the support of independent software vendors will largely determine if Solaris 10 and its follow-ons live in a market where Linux and Windows are rapidly growing as server platforms. Solaris on Sparc may have 12,000 applications and thousands of ISVs, but the X86 version is basically starting from zero and has a much smaller base of applications than even the Itanium chip from Intel. But Sun is off to a good start with Solaris 10, with 140 ISVs having agreed to port some 325 applications to it. Sun has not said how many of these ISVs are porting to both the Sparc and the X86 implementations of Solaris 10, but they would be foolish not to, since this will be where Sun sells the bulk of its Solaris 10 licenses in the coming years. Sun has 270 X86 systems certified for Solaris 9, and has 80 certified for Solaris 10, which doesn't even ship until late January or early February.

Notable on the list of supporters for Solaris is Oracle, which just finished the port of its Oracle 10g database for Solaris 9 and has committed to supporting its database on Xeon and Opteron servers and Sparc servers running Solaris 10. Sun and Oracle, the two original Silicon Valley dot-coms, have over 70,000 joint customers worldwide. Presumably, Sun and Oracle will support the Oracle Financials ERP suite on Solaris 10 on those three platforms as well. (PeopleSoft and SAP have agreed to do this, so it seems likely Oracle will, too.) With other key software vendors in the Solaris base on board, such as VERITAS, SAS Institute, and BEA Systems, Sun can cover a big portion of its installed base and hopefully prevent more defections to Linux and Windows.

IBM's p5 575 Uses Four Chips, Not an MCM

Last week, we told you about IBM's forthcoming p5 575 eight-way server, designed specifically for the high performance computing (HPC) market. At the time, we said that IBM could have designed this using one of the top-end multichip modules (MCMs) that are used in the new 64-way p5 595 servers, but that seems not to be the case. From the picture IBM distributed after the announcement, it looks like the p5 575 has four of the dual-core Power5 processors on its main board, rather than a single MCM with four chips on a single substrate. The difference in the way the p5 575 is built is not a big deal, but the MCMs have tighter integration between processor cores, external caches, and each other, which can boost performance a bit on some workloads.

World Community Grid Established by IBM

IBM threw some seed systems and its weight behind a grid computing project called the World Community Grid, through which the company and its backers in the project will foster the notion of donating excess computing capacity to help researchers in the fields of medicine and weather prediction.

IBM donated a bunch of pSeries 630 Unix clusters and some xSeries 345 Linux clusters to the cause, as well as its Shark disk arrays and DB2 relational database for Unix and Linux. United Devices, the grid middleware software maker behind Gateway's attempt to harness the computing capacity in its ill-fated retail stores and rent it out of profit, has joined IBM as the software partner on the World Community Grid project. The two companies worked on a similar grid a few years ago that lashed together computing cycles on desktops from over two million volunteers to help researchers look for a cure for smallpox. IBM says that with the proved track record of projects like SETI@Home and some 650 million PCs in the world using very little of their peak capacity, the World Community Grid could go a long way to helping cure Alzheimer's disease or AIDS, or predicting shifts in the global weather patterns that affect the lives of millions of people. The World Community Grid expects to host several projects a year.

The Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, working in conjunction with IBM, United Devices, and the University of Washington, will be the first organization to make use of the grid. Specifically, the grid will host the Human Proteome Folding Project, which will seek to understand the protein folding patterns of the 30,000 proteins that the human genome (which has been decoded) controls the production of.

Hyperion Shows Off Essbase OLAP Performance on HP-UX

Online analytical processing (OLAP) server maker Hyperion is bragging about a recent run of its Essbase OLAP server on the APB-1 benchmark that shows a four-way HP-UX server besting a four-way Windows server by a sizeable margin. The APB-1 benchmark was established in 1998, and was dominated in recent years by Oracle and Microsoft as they promoted the OLAP servers that they bundled with their databases and that Hyperion sells its Essbase against.

Hyperion tested a four-way rx5670 Itanium server from Hewlett-Packard running Windows Server 2003 in November 2003. That server used the 1.3 GHz Itanium 2 chips and had 32 GB of main memory; it was able to process 119,085 analytical queries per minute (AQM). On the latest test, Hyperion shifted to the HP-UX 11i v2 operating system and its latest Essbase 6.5.4 OLAP server, and boosted performance a little bit by moving to an rx5760 using 1.5 GHz Itanium 2. This setup was able to handle 254,525 AQM. Both machines cost just under $500,000, so this is obviously a big improvement in bang for the buck. How much of the performance boost came from the new Essbase program, from the slightly faster Itaniums, and the move to HP-UX is unclear.

SCO, BASIS Chase the OpenServer Base

The SCO Group, which derives its revenue from selling its OpenServer and UnixWare Unix variants on X86 servers, and BASIS International, which sells development tools for SCO Unix platforms (among others), have teamed up to offer customers discounts on upgrades to their most current products. The promotion, which runs through December 31, offers companies a 40 percent discount if they move to SCO OpenServer 5.0.7 and BBj 4.02, a Java development environment from BASIS, or PRO/5 5.0, the company's client/server and host computing development environment for Unixes. BASIS supports Tru64, HP-UX, AIX, and Solaris Unixes, as well as Linux and Windows, with these tools.

Under the promotion, customers that upgrade to OpenServer 5.0.7 now, and to one of the BASIS tools, will get not only a 40 percent discount but also a free upgrade to the future "Legend" release of OpenServer (due next year) and to the subsequent releases of the BASIS tools. BASIS says that its tools were used to create the applications at which some 1.7 million users worldwide sit each day to do their work, so this is a pretty big installed base to chase.

PeopleSoft Rejects Oracle's Final Offer

PeopleSoft's board of directors has rejected Oracle's final offer of $9.2 billion in cash to acquire the company in a hostile takeover. PeopleSoft's shareholders, who have been asked directly by Oracle to tender their shares for $24 each to that company, will now decide the fate of PeopleSoft. If Oracle gets a majority of the shares, it will become embroiled in a proxy fight with the board to have its own directors elected. Oracle could then remove the "poison pill" that has prevented the company from taking PeopleSoft over as cheaply as it wants to, and acquire the rest of the company.

"The board concluded that PeopleSoft is worth substantially more than Oracle's latest offer," said Dave Duffield, PeopleSoft's founder and chairman and CEO, in a statement. "We are a vibrant, strong company with a focused, motivated management team and employee base dedicated to executing on the company's plan." Skip Battle, chairman of the committee dealing with the hostile takeover, put it bluntly in the same statement: "As members of the Board have testified in Delaware, we would be willing to discuss an offer made by Oracle at an appropriate price--but $24 isn't it. We told Oracle that its price must reflect both PeopleSoft's intrinsic value and the fact that PeopleSoft is materially more valuable to Oracle now than it was when Oracle made its inadequate $26 per share offer. Oracle indicated they understood our position and appreciated the call." Oracle has said that while many of the terms of its latest acquisition offer were negotiable, $24 a share was its final price, and it would not be pushed higher.

PeopleSoft is hoping that its own sales and profits will make investors less likely to tender their shares to Oracle, and Oracle is hoping that they will take the $24 a share and run. In a presentation to Wall Street analysts last week, Kevin Parker, PeopleSoft's chief financial officer, said that the company is expecting sales of new licenses to range from $175 million to $185 million in the fourth quarter, with overall sales of between $700 million and $715 million. For 2005, PeopleSoft is projecting sales of between $2.8 billion and $2.9 billion, with license sales up between 5 and 10 percent, to $640 million through $655 million, and with profits of between 82 and 87 cents a share. (This guidance does not include projections of an upside if the Oracle deal fails, and if it does fail PeopleSoft could see sales increase during 2005.)