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Sun Broadens Storage Utility Offerings

Hoping to steal a little thunder away from rival Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems made some of its own utility computing announcements this week. While HP put out a broad announcement outlining new utility computing services, Sun fleshed out its existing storage utility offerings.

Specifically, Sun announced that customers in the United Kingdom would be the first to get their hands on two new services that will eventually be available worldwide, called Sun Grid Remote Backup and Restore (RBR) and Sun Grid Remote File Vault (RFV). The first service is similar to other remote backup services that IBM, Evault, LiveVault and others have launched to help companies backup data on their laptops, desktops, and servers over the Internet rather than onto local tape or CD storage devices. In fact, for the RBR offering in the United Kingdom, Sun is partnering with InTechnology, which has already built the infrastructure to provide remote backup services in Britain. The RBR service is intended to be used to create an initial snapshot of data files and then move the incremental bits of files that change over the virtual private network linking a machine to the RBR service; the software that performs this backup, including encryption and data compression to speed transmission and provide security, apparently comes from EVault, in fact.

The RFV service is intended to me a much longer term storage option, and it is really designed for companies with very large data sets--like seismic, geophysical, or molecular data sets--that are used in conjunction with applications on a frequent basis and are too big to be moved around easily. While the RFV service does not require customers to use the Sun Grid Compute Utility--Sun's network of Linux and Solaris machines for running workloads on a pay-per-use model--it is designed to work in conjunction with the Sun Grid. The RFV service is based on Sun's own QFS/SAMFS parallel file system and the Solaris 10 operating system, and the infrastructure behind it will be hosted by Sun's partners.

The RBR service costs 5 pounds per GB per month, while the RFV service costs 2 pounds per GB per month. You might be wondering why short-term backup costs more than long-term backup. It's an issue of how many times you need to move the bits around. The more times you mess with data, the more costly it is to store it.

Sun also announced that one of its customers on the Compute Grid, Virtual Comp Compute Corporation, a utility computing provider based in Houston, has bought its second million CPU hours of compute capacity because its own customers have chewed through the first million CPU hours it bought in no time at all. vCompute sells manages its own data centers, aimed at number crunching applications in the oil and gas and life sciences industries, and is using the Sun Grid to cope with peak capacity demands from its customers.

Sun Bundles Open Source Database with Solaris

Server and Unix operating system maker Sun Microsystems has finally done what many of us in the industry have believed it would do: offer an integrated version of an open source database with its Solaris 10 operating system. And, true to its BSD roots, Sun has picked the PostgreSQL as its first integrated database. Sun does not plan to create its own database variant, however, but to offer support for open source databases like PostgreSQL--and almost certainly Ingres now that Computer Associates has sold off the Ingres business to venture capitalists who plan to make a business out of Ingres, which shares its BSD roots with PostgreSQL.

Sun will be working with the PostgreSQL community to weave its Solaris container partitions and DTrace and other system management features into the open source database and to tune it to run on Solaris on both Sparc and Opteron platforms. Sun will be offering for-free, 24x7 technical support for PostgreSQL. Exactly what this will cost is unclear. And why the database is being pitched as an add-on to Solaris rather than as an element of the Java Enterprise System middleware stack--where it belongs--is a bit of a mystery.

AMD Is Ready for More Black Ink

Chip maker Advanced Micro Devices hosted a financial analyst day with Wall Street analysts last week just to talk up its prospects for the future. Things haven't looked so well for AMD in its chip-making business ever.

Dirk Meyer, president and chief operating officer of AMD's Microprocessor Solutions Sector business, said that AMD outgrew its competition by over 140 percent in the past year, and that it expects to grow by more than 100 percent in the coming year. While Athlon chips have allowed AMD to grow by almost 20 percent, the advent of the Opteron processors for servers have allowed AMD to really take the lead on innovation. AMD is projecting that it can grow its server-related microprocessor shipments at double the rate of the entire chip industry as a whole, which is projected to grow at around 10 percent in 2006. AMD's growth--and the thickening black ink at its bottom line--will be driven by server processors as much by mobile and desktop chips. Robert Rivet, AMD's CFO, predicted it would be a "pretty good" year for AMD in 2006, with Microsoft's Vista pushing desktop upgrades in the second half for Athlon chips and a continuing ramp for Opteron in the server space. Meyer said that AMD had about $1 billion in chip sales in the X86-based consumer device market that had a $15 billion total addressable market, and that the commercial X86 chip market (servers and desktops for businesses) represented about a $15 billion total opportunity and AMD got about $1 billion of this space. River said AMD was expecting to generate $1 billion in operating profits next year.

IBM Previews "Viper" DB2 Database Version

The battle for the hearts and minds of database administrators and application architects is about to get a lot hotter if IBM has anything to say about it. The company has just offered a sneak peak--what Big Blue calls a product preview--of the future "Viper" release of its DB2 database for Windows, Unix, and Linux. DB2 Viper will be distinct from current DB2 database implementations in that it will be able to store XML-formatted data inside the database natively--XML support will not be bolted onto the side. Viper will also support relational data stores, of course, and access to those database tables using the SQL programming language. The XML data will be accessible through the XQuery XML query language, which is an analog to SQL for relational databases. IBM reckons that the addition of native XML support will expand the $7.8 billion relational database market by another $1.4 billion. And IBM wants to get the bulk of that additional XML-related revenue for databases.

Viper will be able to store structured data--traditional database tables--as well as unstructured data--PDFs, spreadsheets, documents, and so forth. IBM also added that DB2 Viper could be packaged with the Zend Core for IBM product it co-created with Zend Technologies, the creators of the open source PHP programming language. DB2 Viper is in beta now, and will ship some time in 2006. You can get the beta version at this link.

Egenera Says Solaris 10 Is Ready for BladeFrames

A little more than a year ago, blade server maker Egenera announced that it would work to deliver support for the Solaris Unix variant from Sun Microsystems on its BladeFrame blade servers alongside the already existing support for Windows and Linux. Support for Solaris makes a certain amount of sense, especially when you consider that Egenera's founders hail from the financial services industry, were actually users of Solaris iron themselves, and were trying to pitch the BladeFrames running Linux as an alternative to expensive Sparc-Solaris boxes.

Back in November 2004, Egenera was projecting that Solaris 10 would be ready for its blades and its Processing Area Network (PAN) systems management and provisioning software in January or February of this year. Clearly, the job to integrate Solaris with the BladeFrames was a bit more complex than anticipated, but to Egenera's credit, Sun didn't even get a production version of Solaris 10 out the door until late January and it wasn't until the March 2005 snapshot that the code was really ready for primetime. It will be interesting to see if Solaris support will help both Egenera and Fujitsu-Siemens, which has committed to sell $300 million worth of BladeFrames over between September 2005 and March 2008 as part of a reseller agreement with Egenera.

Big Blue Gets Presidential Award for Processor Innovation

IBM has been presented with the National Medal of Technology by President Bush for its efforts to advance the art of processor development and production here in the good old U. S. of A. The White House cited IBM's advances in DRAM technology, multicore processors, copper and silicon-on-insulator, and strained silicon chip making processes (used in the PowerPC and Power families of chips), and high-speed silicon-germanium chips (used in cell phones and other communications devices) as the reasons for giving IBM the award. The company's East Fishkill and Albany, New York; Austin, Texas; Burlington, Vt.; Rochester, Minn.; and San Jose, Calif., labs were specifically cited in the award. The National Medal of Technology is the highest honor that the White House gives to technology innovators. It was established in 1980 by Congress to help promote and highlight indigenous technology development.

IDC Says Tectonic Shifts Coming for Outsourcing

The outsourcing market was undergoing some pretty fundamental shifts in 2004, according to the market researchers at IDC. In a nutshell, deals are getting smaller, outsourcing is not just covering IT operations but also business process outsourcing (BPO), and there are more players in the market.

IDC based its assessments on the top 100 deals in 2004, which may seem a bit dated as we come to the close of 2005, but that's why its called research--it takes time to compile and sift through the information. IDC said the top 100 deals accounted fro $69.1 billion in sales in 2004, down 1.2 percent from the $68.3 billion for the top 100 deals in 2003. The minimum ante to be in the top 100 was $184 million, which was 5.1 percent higher than the entry 100th deal on the 2003 list. The BPO component of the top 100 deals grew from $10.4 billion in 2003 to $17.3 billion in 2004, which means that without BPO--which is all the rage at IBM these days and the main reason Big Blue bought the IT consulting PricewaterhouseCoopers--the IT business actually declined by 11 percent in 2004 to $51.8 billion.

IBM has seen a more pronounced shift to BPO contracts in 2005, and to smaller contracts, so it will be very interesting to see what happens when 2005 is long since over and IDC reckons what happened to the top 100 deals in 2005. It seems likely that BPO will continue to grow and more traditional IT outsourcing deals will continue to decline. What any of this says about the midrange market and the kinds of outsourcing trends customers in this market will see is unclear, but the midrange tends to lag in most trends and probably is not even accustomed to the idea of outsourcing yet, much less BPO--which amounts to having companies like IBM run your business. To which I say: Physician, Heal Thyself!