But Wait, There's More

Windows Server Longhorn the 'Ultimate Gauge,' Muglia Says

Bob Muglia last week was put in charge of Microsoft's Server and Tools unit, the division responsible for developing the Windows Server system, as well as Visual Studio development tools and SQL Server database. Formerly the head of the Windows Server Division, Muglia participated in a Q&A session with Microsoft's internal PressPass news organization, where he defined his goals. "Windows Server Longhorn will be the ultimate gauge of how we are doing," Muglia said in that interview. Muglia also talked about the need for transparency within the Server and Tools unit. "Our customers need to be able to plan their technology purchases and deployment schedules months or years in advance. They need to know as early as possible how our server products and tools are evolving, and they need to be able to mark delivery dates on their calendar, so they can plan and budget around those dates." In recent years, Microsoft has suffered several high-profile setbacks with the products in its current pipeline, particularly with Windows Longhorn--which had the Windows File System, arguably its most important new feature, eliminated so the product could come to market as soon as possible--and SQL Server 2005, which will be launched next week, almost three years late. Muglia replaces Eric Rudder, who is now working directly for Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman and chief software architect.

Oracle Ships Free Database for Windows and Linux

Oracle's new free database, officially named Oracle 10g Express Edition, became available for beta testing yesterday. Oracle says the database, which it also calls Oracle Database XE, is aimed at providing students, developers, and database administrators with a starter database for developing and deploying their applications. The database is also being positioned for embedding into other applications by hardware vendors and third-party ISVs. Oracle Database XE is available for 32-bit Linux and Windows operating systems, and is limited to running on a computer with a single CPU (it can be a dual-core processor) and 1 GB of memory. Only one instance can be loaded on a single computer, and it's limited to 4 GB of data.

Intel Begins "Paxville" Xeon MP Shipments, Adds Goodies

As expected, Intel began shipping its dual-core "Paxville" Xeon MP processors for four-way and larger servers today. While the Paxville Xeon MPs are not as technically elegant as some of the future Xeons that the company is cooking up for next year, they give Intel's server partners something to sell against existing single-core Xeons and dual-core Opterons until those future chips become available.

The Paxville MP processors, which are technically called the Dual-Core Intel Xeon Processor 7000, come in a number of different variants. The Xeon 7040 runs at 3 GHz, has a 667 MHz front side bus, and works with the E8500 chipset. This chip costs $3,157. A version of the chip, called the Xeon 7041, runs at 3 GHz as well and has a faster 800 MHz front side bus (but won't be available until early next year); that bus is enabled by the E8501 chipset, which is a tweak of the existing E8500 chipset from Intel. (Both chipsets cost $255 a pop.) The Xeon 7030 processor has two cores running at 2.8 GHz and 1 MB of L2 cache per core, running against an 800 MHz front side bus. This chip costs $1,980, and requires the E8501 chipset. Lastly, there's the Xeon 7020, a 2.66 GHz version of the Xeon MP chip with only 1 MB of L2 cache per core, and which uses the slower 667 MHz front side bus; this chip costs $1,177.

People were expecting the 2.66 GHz and 2.8 GHz chips, but the 3 GHz versions were a pleasant surprise. Intel didn't say anything about that a few weeks ago. And it didn't say anything about the fact that the Virtualization Technology (VT), which does the work of instruction set virtualization in electronics rather than in a software layer, was cooked into the Paxville MP. (Apparently, this VT support will be activated with a BIOS command when it is available next year.) Intel didn't say anything about an 800 MHz front side bus, either, which will be available early next year using the E8501 chipset. It looks like server makers have been pressing Intel to get some more impressive things out the door.

These Paxville MP processors are pretty much what high-end server makers have to work with until the large-cache "Tulsa" kickers to the current 64-bit, single-core "Potomac" Xeon MPs ship, but these are not due until the second half of 2006. The Tulsa Xeon MPs will be implemented in a 65 nanometer process and will have 16 MB of shared L3 cache for each four-socket board, which is new for Intel, as well as 2 MB of L2 cache per core.

The Paxville MP platforms using the E8501 chipset will be upgradeable to the Tulsa MP chips. The question is whether the Paxville MP processors launched above, and delivering anywhere from 40 to 60 percent more performance than the single-core 3.66 GHz Cranford/E8500 platforms, is enough to carry customers through to Tulsa Xeon MPs. There are some pretty impressive Opteron platforms on the horizon in 2006.

Dell Trumpets Its PowerEdge-SQL Server 2005 Combo

Misdirection is not only a trick of magicians, but also of IT vendors. Server maker Dell, which yesterday warned Wall Street that it had cut its prices a little too aggressively in the consumer PC space and is having some sales problems in Europe, today is trying to run the news cycle with a pre-announcement look at how its PowerEdge servers are going to perform running Microsoft's "Yukon" SQL Server 2005 database management system. Like other server makers, Dell is announcing that its PowerEdge servers now support the dual-core "Paxville" Xeon MP processors, which Intel started delivering today. Dell is also trumpeting that its PowerEdge servers, which support both Xeon DP and Xeon MP Paxville variants, are going to give top-notch performance and bang for the buck running SQL Server 2005.

Specifically, Dell says that it is the first vendor to get below $1 per transaction per minute (TPM) on the TPC-C online transaction processing benchmark test. A PowerEdge 2800 server with a single 2.8 GHz dual-core Paxville DP processor, equipped with the 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition and SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition, was able to crank through 38,622 TPM on the TPC-C test on a machine with a street price of $38,028, or 99 cents per TPM, after a 15 percent discount. On that configuration, SQL Server 2005 cost $5,999 and Windows Server 2003 cost $719 before the discount. Dell is also promising that machines using the Paxville Xeon MP processor in the PowerEdge 6850 server line are going to see some pretty big performance increases, at least as gauged by the SPECjbb2000 Java benchmark (which implements a Java variant of the TPC-C OLTP test). Dell says that in its own labs, it has run the SPECjbb2000 Java test on a PowerEdge 6850 using the dual-core Paxville chip and is showing a 51 percent performance increase compared to the same server using a 3.36 GHz single-core Xeon MP.

Computer Security Institute, FBI Release 10th Annual Computer Crime Report

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Computer Security Institute (CSI) last week released their tenth annual Computer Crime Report, outlining the nasty things that go on inside corporate data centers and on corporate desktops that no one wants to talk about publicly. The FBI-CSI survey of 700 companies, which you can read in full here, showed that attacks by computer viruses still represent the biggest financial losses for companies, but denial of service attacks have moved into the slot two position when it comes to causing the most economic damage. While cybercrime--by which the FBI and the CSI mean manual rather than viral unauthorized access to computer systems--was up slightly in 2005, the amount of economic damage it caused was down. Web sites are getting slammed more frequently. In fact, 95 percent of respondents reported ten or more incidents of hacking or attempted hacking on their Web sites. Across the 700 companies surveyed, 639 suffered economic damage, and the total bill for computer crime at these sites came to over $130 million. $42.8 million was the result of viruses, $31.2 million from unauthorized access, $30.9 million from the theft of proprietary information, $7.3 million from denial of services attacks, $6.9 million from employee Internet abuse, and $4.1 million from laptop theft. Misuse of a public Web application only accounted for $2.2 million in damages, lower than the $2.6 million in damages from financial fraud.

IBM Launches WebSphere Community Edition

So, how many different WebSphere products are there? I don't think anyone knows for sure, but one thing is for certain: there's one more. Last week, IBM launched WebSphere Community Edition, which is not an open source version of Big Blue's own WebSphere Application Server for J2EE applications, but rather the open source code that IBM promised it would release after it acquired privately held Gluecode Software, a provider of support for the Apache Geronimo Java application server, back in May. Gluecode was just about ready to launch its Joe application server, a commercialized implementation of the Geronimo project, when IBM snapped it up this past summer. Last week, IBM made good on its promise to make Joe open source and to offer commercial support for it. The Joe app server has been given the boring name WebSphere Application Server Community Edition. WebSphere CE is a J2EE application server. It has hooks into Oracle, MySQL, and Microsoft SQL Server databases. Somewhat ironically, it lacks support for IBM's own DB2/400 database for the iSeries, as well as for DB2 on Linux, Unix, and Windows. The current 1.0 release of the software has tools for porting from Gluecode Standard Edition (the release prior to Joe from Gluecode) as well as from Apache Geronimo and Apache Tomcat servers. There are not, as yet, porting tools to move to proper full-blown WebSphere app servers, but you can bet that such tools are in the works.