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Latest Solaris 10 Beta Adds 64-Bit X86 Support

As November drew to a close, Sun Microsystems announced its latest Software Express beta release for the future Solaris 10 operating system. This release of the beta, called Software Express for Solaris 11/04, includes support for the 64-bit memory extensions implemented by Advanced Micro Devices in its Opteron processors and cloned by Intel in its Xeon EMT64 processors. This is one of the major features that Sun is touting with Solaris 10, and it is also one of the missing features in Windows Server 2003.

Sun was expected to deliver Solaris 10 with the 64-bit X86 support in September or October, but the operating system got pushed out to early 2005. Sun says the production version of Solaris 10, which will have Solaris container partitions, is expected at the end of January or in early February. Microsoft had originally planned to have 64-bit Xeon and Opteron support by the end of this year, but in July it said it would not make that deadline, and pushed it out to sometime in the first half of 2005. Once that happened, Sun relaxed its schedule, since John Loaicono, who heads Sun's software unit, only committed to beating Microsoft to market with 64-bit X86 support.

HP Says It Considered Break Up Several Times

Hewlett-Packard hosted its Wall Street analyst meeting in Palo Alto, California, on Tuesday. During a question and answer session, HP's chairman and CEO, Carly Fiorina, and CFO, Bob Wayman, said that on three occasions since the merger with Compaq, in May 2002, the company has contemplated breaking up the company in a number of different ways. The idea was shot down every time by the company's board of directors.

The fact that people keep asking HP about a break up is something that any big company with complex and somewhat unrelated product lines faces. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, IBM suffered the same litany of questions and free advice about breaking itself up when its mainframe business went on the rocks as the IT landscape changed with the advent of Unix servers and client/server applications. IBM's managers and board decided that the company was more valuable as a whole--regardless of the short term gains that might have been made from spinning out then-profitable units and separating them from less-profitable divisions. HP is facing the same choices and criticisms as it tries to balance its consumer and corporate businesses. HP has a very profitable printing business, thanks mostly to ink and toner refills, and it hardly makes money on its various IT units.

What Wall Street just can't seem to countenance with HP, as it could not with IBM a decade ago, is any suggestion that a company exists for something other than wringing out profits and driving up the stock price. HP is right by staying whole, in the moral sense as well as the economic sense. HP is more valuable--and in ways that are not so quantifiable--as a single entity, addressing the gamut of IT needs. Do you spin out research because it doesn't make money? Take a look in the mirror, Wall Street.

AMD to Put Power Management in Server Chips

The future of IT is about using computers more efficiently, which is why Advanced Micro Devices is going to be adding its PowerNow power optimization technology to the server variants of its future Opteron processors. AMD says that PowerNow with Optimized Power Management features will be added to the Opteron line in the first half of 2005. These features were originally used in the laptop versions of AMD's Athlon processors, which have had power management capabilities for more than four years, and it turns out that Opteron chips currently in production using 130 nanometer and 90 nanometer processes include it. However, system BIOSes and operating systems (Windows, Linux, and Solaris) need to be tweaked to take advantage of it.

With PowerNow, as servers run with a diminished workload, the system automatically cuts down on the voltage across the processor and runs it at a slower clock speed, too. This dramatically cuts down on the amount of electricity the chip uses, the heat it generates, and the amount of cooling that is necessary to keep a computer running properly. This saves money on electricity twice over and also allows servers to run more quietly, because fans can run slower, too. Intel is well aware of the problem and is working to add its similar SpeedStep technology to its Xeon and Itanium processors.

Earlier this year, AMD launched special low-heat Opteron variants, for which it is charging a premium, which attests to the market value of more efficient computing. A regular Opteron runs 2 GHz at 1.5 volts and dissipating 89 watts of heat. But AMD sorts through the bins to find chips that can deliver the same clock speed with lower voltage, and delivers a 1.3 volt, 55 watt variant (Opteron HE) and a 1.13 volt, 30 watt variant (Opteron EE), which both run at 2 GHz and deliver exactly the same performance. This is a big improvement in energy conservation, but it is static. PowerNow is dynamic and will allow all Opterons to scale themselves down as workloads change. The combination of an Opteron EE chip with PowerNow is going to be a very popular chip in dense computing clusters, if AMD can make them both work together.

Server Maker Bull Bailed Out by French Government Again

As French server maker Bull (which resells IBM's Power line of AIX servers, as well as its own Itanium-based Windows, Linux, and GCOS proprietary servers) was announcing that it had named Didier Lamouche as chairman of the board, the company also said that Bull has been able to get its third and final cash infusion from the French government as part of a bailout plan three years ago. Bull, which has had a tough time staying profitable in the intensely competitive server market, has been able to restructure its debt and get a cash infusion. If Bull can repay the 450 million euros it got as a loan back in November 2002, the French government will be allowed by the European Commission (which frowns on governments propping up indigenous companies so that they can compete in the broader market) to give Bull a new "restructuring aid" of 517 million euros. That's a net gain of 67 million euros, which is about $90 million at current exchange rates. Bull is expected to cut about 7,800 people from its payroll as part of the restructuring. This restructuring gives Lamouche, who used to run IBM's worldwide chip manufacturing operations, some breathing space as he takes over as Bull's chairman and CEO on February 1.

Disk Array Market Is Up in the Third Quarter

Despite insane levels of competition, the rapid introduction of less-costly disk arrays and disk drives, and rampant discounting in the storage market, the aggregate storage industry posted its sixth consecutive quarter of revenue gains in the third quarter of 2004, according to a report from IDC.

The growth rate has cooled a bit, however, with $3.4 billion in external disk array sales in the third quarter, up 3.5 percent. The overall disk market (including internal arrays such as those used in the AS/400, iSeries, and i5s) grew by only 2.1 percent, to $5 billion, which suggests that internal array sales continue to fall as companies embrace storage area networks (SANs) and network-attached storage (NAS) arrays. Incredibly, IDC estimates that the aggregate amount of capacity sold in the third quarter was up 50.5 percent, to 310 petabytes (that's 310,000 terabytes), the highest growth in seven quarters and the most disk capacity ever sold in a quarter.

In the external disk market, EMC is the market leader, with $724 million in sales (21.2 percent of sales) and 17.4 percent revenue growth. Hewlett-Packard's external disk business has taken it on the chin in the past few quarters, and saw a 7.5 percent revenue decline, to $647 million, in the quarter, dropping from first place to second place, with 19 percent of external disk array sales for the quarter. (HP has been the number-one disk array seller since buying Compaq, more than two years ago.) IBM is a distant third, with $448 million (13.1 percent) of the external disk array pie in the third quarter of 2004, down six-tenths of a percent. Hitachi saw sales drop 2.3 percent, to $289 million (giving 8.5 percent of the pie), while Dell had 11.9 percent growth, pushing sales to $237 million (6.9 percent of the pie). The NAS array market grew by 14.3 percent, crested above $2 billion, a level it first attained in the second quarter of the year.

In the overall worldwide disk array market (external plus internal arrays), HP is still the market leader, with $1.2 billion in sales and 23.6 percent of the market; but the company lost more than two points of market share. IBM is number two, with just over $1 billion in sales and a smidgen of growth. EMC, Dell, and Hitachi are numbers three, four, and five in the market, respectively, and other vendors accounted for $1.4 billion in sales, 28.1 percent of the storage pie in the quarter.

IBM, Fujitsu Agree on Autonomic Computing Standards

Server makers IBM and Fujitsu said last week that they would collaborate to create a set of open standards for autonomic computing. All of the major server platform makers have been investing in hardware and software technologies that allow their systems to do predictive self-maintenance and self-healing, which enable those systems to gracefully deal with crashes. However, all of those platforms have radically different electronics, and their system microcode and higher-level software platforms (including operating systems and systems management programs) are not exactly compatible, either.

To that end, IBM and Fujitsu have agreed to work on standards surrounding the Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) event format. IBM has proposed an "event format," a way of describing a failure of a component or some other aspect of it that is important to autonomic management of a server, to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, one of the main standards consortia behind Web services standards. IBM and Fujitsu are going to collaborate on a standard set of actions that are driven by events, as well as another set of standards that govern how software is installed and activated on servers.

Computer Associates Taps Top IBM Software Exec As Its New CEO

Beleaguered software giant Computer Associates, which has seen its top brass booted from the company as it has been embroiled in an accounting scandal, has gone to IBM's top ranks to get a 26-year veteran to come aboard the company as its new CEO. After reviewing 30 potential candidates for the job, Computer Associates chose John Swainson, who headed IBM Software Group's sales team until he spearheaded IBM's WebSphere middleware products, starting in the late 1990s. After former chief executive Sanjay Kumar was stripped of the title in April, in the wake of the accounting scandal, board member Kenneth Cron has been acting CEO, and he will retain that job for a few months as Swainson gradually takes over the reins.