IBM beefs up array of Unix servers

IBM has added four-core processing capability to the low end of its Unix servers.
The company last week unveiled a quad-core system, the System p5 505Q Express, which IBM is billing as its first IU system with four processor cores. IBM also announced processor upgrades to its dual-core and quadcore Express systems.
IBM is targeting midsize companies with these Express systems by offering the more powerful machines that it says are priced competitively with x86-based servers. IBM also is offering special pricing on preconfigured Solution Edition servers when they are paired with popular enterprise software such as that from Oracle or SAP
By bundling preconfigured hardware designed to run enterprise software at a special price, "we can neutralize the price issue and the customer can consider the other variables," says Charles Bryan, a team lead for IBM's System p integrated offering and independent software vendor marketing.
For example, a System p5 model 510 Express server with a single-core processor carries a base price of about $4,200, while the same model with a four-core processor lists at slightly more than $5,500. Other configurations of the volume-market-segment servers are priced in the mid-teens to more than $20,000. The models preconfigured to run a certain software will carry 10% to 15% discounts from build-to-order servers.
By pairing hardware and software, IBM is "attacking the high cost of integration" for enterprise customers, says Joe Gabby president of Clabby Analytics. Enterprises might buy a stand-alone server but then incur extra costs to install a particular software program on that server.
"They are trying to reduce the cost of deployment and are saying, 'I don't want any hidden costs,'" Clabby says.
With this announcement, IBM adds to the array of servers featuring its four-core processor technology, which lets the CPU handle as many as four tasks simultaneously. A single-core processor could be idle while waiting for another task to be performed, such as retrieving data from a storage device. With multiple cores, the processor can perform other tasks while waiting for that data. Combining multiple independent processors into a single integrated circuit is a more efficient design than putting multiple microprocessors in separate physical packages.
Although dual-core processors are available from other vendors, IBM says right now it offers the only four-core processor.
"We're seeing the move toward multicore processors as one way to increase performance without just winding up the clock speed," says clay Ryder, president of the Sageza Group.
This more efficient use of the CPU helps reduce heat buildup and electrical consumption, factors of growing concern to companies trying to control data center costs, Ryder says.

Microsoft Ends Services for Unix Product

Microsoft has decided against enhancing its Services for Unix (SFU) product and will not release any new versions of it going forward, according to company officials.
SFU is a Unix environment designed to run on top of the Windows kernel. It includes hundreds of Unix utilities, scripting shells and other Unix services.
Microsoft has decided to nix any future, out-of-band releases of SFU, Microsoft officials confirmed earlier this week.
Until recently, Microsoft had been expected to release a "Services for Unix 'Next'" version, which company officials had been hoping to ship in calendar 2005.
Microsoft offers Windows Server 2003 R2 RC0 for download. Read more here.
This release, the follow-on to the currently shipping SFU 3.5 product, was set to deliver support for botoh x64- and Itanium-based hardware.
Microsoft will continue to support SFU 3.5 until 2011, and to offer extended support for the product until 2014, however.
"There will be no additional releases of SFU," said Samm DiStasio, director of product management with Microsoft's Windows Server division. "Customer feedback to us was that they wanted tighter integration of this sort of functionality with the operating system.
"Having nix interoperability functionality integrated in to the OS (operating system) helps customers to programmatically access Windows and Unix resources at the same time, which is super important and something that couldn't be done with the previous architecture."
"It needs to be part of OS development to ensure it works this way," DiStasio continued. "Customers can use APIs (application programming interfaces) from both worlds, and continue to mature/evolve their apps. In R2, this functionality has been re-architected and in some cases completely re-designed in such a way that it will improve customer experience and integration."
Editor's Note: This story was updated to include Microsoft comments on Thursday.
Read the full story on Microsoft Watch: It's the End of the Line for Microsoft's Services for Unix Product

Riverbed streamlines Unix for faster WANs

Riverbed has upgraded its WAN optimization software so customers can reduce the time it takes to send Unix files across wide-area connections.

With Release 3.0 of RiOS software for Riverbed Steelhead WAN optimization devices, the company says it can make network file server (NFS) protocol less chatty, which translates into less traffic having to cross WAN links when Unix files are sent. This means the links and the protocol perform better.

One customer that beta tested RiOS 3.0 says it reduced NFS transaction times to 30% of what they were before. Aircraftassembly design firm ElectroImpact in Mukilteo, Wash., already used Steelhead devices and has upgraded to RiOS 3.0 in its home office and at two sites in the United Kingdom, says Jon Wilson, senior network engineer for the firm.

The previous version of the software sped up mixed traffic on the connections so that a 5GB sample that took more than an hour to transfer without the device took just a minute and a half,Wilson says.

Like other WAN optimization vendors, Riverbed uses multiple methods for speeding up traffic, including compression, storing large traffic patterns so they can be tapped locally rather than across the WAN1TCP optimization and application optimization. The company competes against Certeon, Expand Networks, F5 Networks, Juniper and Racketeer.

Riverbed has software that optimizes common Internet file systems traffic as well as MAPI,HTTP and MS-SQL traffic.

RiOS 3.0 also adds support for Cisco's NetFlow records so network administrators can better track traffic that passes through Steelhead devices.Wilson says he uses the feature as a troubleshooting tool. The combination of NetFlow and Steelhead data lets him look at overall network traffic and discover congestion points from a single application rather than having to monitoring multiple devices. Once he has located trouble, he uses other tools to pinpoint the cause of the problem.

He says he is also using the QoS feature that is part of RiOS 3.0 to prioritize VoIP traffic. "We used to get the occasional stutter with the VoIP, but we don't get it now," he says.

Riverbed also has announced a new hardware device called Interceptor 9200 that parcels out traffic to deployments of multiple Steelhead appliances at a single site. If a company needs 10 Steelheads at headquarters to handle all the traffic from its remote offices, the Interceptor would handle the traffic first and disburse it to the Steelheads using round-robin queuing (see graphic).

A Fortune 500 financial firm beta testing the device that spoke on condition of anonymity says Interceptor would replace policybased routing it now uses to distribute the traffic. Policy-based routing is more complex and more difficult to troubleshoot than the Riverbed device, the firm says. Interceptor 9200 costs $50,000.

Riverbed also is introducing two Steelhead devices, one of which is its top-of-the line Steelhead 6020. The 6020 has throughput of 310Mbps and support for 40,000 simultaneous TCP connections. It costs $120,000. The other is the Steelhead 5520, which supports 155Mbps throughput and 15,000 simultaneous TCP connections. It costs $70,000.

In face of Linux, Unix vendors get creative

A little less than a year ago, Internet Brands, which operates Web sites for such big-ticket purchases as cars, homes and mortgages, was looking to rid itself of the big-ticket hardware in its data center.

The company had been running Solaris on expensive Sun boxes since it launched as CarsDirect in 1998. Early last year, as it revamped its name to reflect its expanded business focus, it also was considering refreshing its hardware, with the goal of cutting costs.

"People wanted to go to Linux," says Min Kang, director of IT at the firm in El Segundo, Calif.

With Unix maturing and moving from expensive, big servers into more flexible packages that, in Sun's case, run even on competitors' hardware, Kang and his team had broader options.

Today the company's Web sites, which get about 15 million unique visitors per month, are supported primarily by Dell servers running Solaris.

"This gives us freedom, because Solaris on x86 runs on pretty much anything:You can run it on HRyou can run it on Dell - you can choose your hardware. But then you also get the reliability of Solaris support, and that's my main thing - support," Kang says."If Sun didn't have Solaris 10 on x86 we would probably have gone to Linux."

It's that scenario that has all the Unix vendors - HP IBM and Sun - on their toes. As x86 servers become more capable, IT managers are taking a closer look at their Unix installations to determine whether a move to Linux or Windows might make sense, analysts say.

"The defensible hill for Unix is the big, vertically scaling, mission-critical application, which is usually some type of database serving," says Andrew Butler, a vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "But increasingly, the appeal of Windows- and Linux-based systems running on cheaper, commodity hardware is becoming more and more compelling."

At the same time, there remains a huge installed base of Unix systems, and the vendors are showing no sign of weakening commitment to their respective operating systems. Enterprise customers can expect updates from all the Unix vendors in 2007 that focus on security enhancements, advanced virtualization capabilities and broader management tools. In addition, expect the vendors to roll out lower-priced Unix systems as they attempt to compete with the less-expensive hardware that supports Windows and Linux.

The Unix updates and new systems will come despite less than encouraging numbers. For the past few years, analyst firms have seen Unix sales drag. While the number of installed Unix systems remains strong, Windows and Linux revenue has been on the upswing, while Unix sales have lagged.

Windows servers nudged out Unix for the first time in 2005 with revenue of $17.7 billion - just topping the $17.5 billion spent on Unix servers. It was the first time in more than a decade that Unix was not ranked as the No. 1 server operating system, according to IDC.

IDC's latest numbers show Unix servers still in a downturn, with a nearly 2% decline in revenue for the third quarter of last year compared with the same period the previous year, while Windows and Linux server sales jumped about 5% compared with the earlier quarter.

Market shirts already are happening: SGI last year announced it would no longer sell the Unix-based systems the company was built on, and is hoping a shift in focus to Linux and x86-based hardware will help pull it out of bankruptcy By year-end analysts expect Hpwhich is moving its HP-UX customers onto Itanium-based hardware, to stop selling its PA-RISC systems.

"We see Unix coming under increasing attack," Gartner's Butler says. "And frankly, we don't believe there is any way that Unix is likely to truly grow in the future. In other words, it has seen its best days"

With the number of legacy Unix systems huge - IDC pegged it at 3.5 million last year - enterprise buyers should not expect their Unix vendors to forsake them anytime soon, analysts say What they can expect, however, is an interesting year as the vendors figure out the best way to shore up their Unix businesses. In the past, most vendors had a similar message and strategy, and the market hinged on straightforward performance, analysts say.

"But we're getting into a maturing market where all of the players have solid equipment, solid operating systems and good [independent software vendor] support, so the differentiator here now isn't speeds and feeds so much, it's business value and what kind of business value customers can get out of their Unix systems," says Dan Olds, principal at Gabriel Consulting Group.

Sun is a prime example. By opening its Solaris operating system to a variety of vendor platforms, it hopes the business value of the operating system alone will outweigh the draw of Linux or Windows, even as customers move to lower-priced hardware.

"The way the industry has dealt with Unix in the past has been to look at it as a system, so you look at Solaris and Sun hardware and it's all packaged together? says Tom Goguen, vice president of the software group at Sun. "From our perspective, that's a very old view of what the industry is all about."

In addition to providing support for Solaris on x86 hardware, Sun made its Solaris 10 code open source in January 2005 and says that more than 6.5 million licenses have been downloaded since then.

"Key to [reinvigorating Solaris] is we didn't restrict the operating system to our hardware or Spare hardware," Goguen says. "We had to change our business model and we did: We made the product free and broadly available."

The challenge for Sun will be attracting new customers - as well as ISVs - away from Windows and Linux, especially now that Web-based applications are written in such operating system-agnostic languages as Java and .Net.

"What I see Sun doing is reawakening ISV interest in Solaris. But ISVs are not going to abandon their commitment to Windows and Linux for Tier 1 versions of their products," Gartner's Butler says. "What Sun can hope for is to put Solaris in a position that is higher-priority than AIX or HP-UX."

HP and IBM, meanwhile, have solid Linux and Windows businesses to fall back on, but they aren't sitting still when it comes to the Unix market.

HPfor example, late last year added security updates to HP-UX 11i, integrating encryption capabilities directly into the operating system, and has plans to enhance automation and management within virtual environments when it releases HP-UX 11i Version 3 early this year.

IBM also is focusing on virtualization and security. Power6 and AIX 5.4, both due this year, will provide better utilization rates in virtualized environments by letting users move running partitions among servers. In addition, the new release of AIX, due mid-year, will add security features, such as encrypted file systems and the ability to patch a running operating system, says Karl Freund, vice president of marketing for IBM System P.

"In 2007, enterprise buyers can expect the vendors to keep pushing the bar up in terms of business value, manageability, utilization and getting more bang for the buck when it comes to Unix systems," Gabriel Consulting's Olds says. "While it's not getting any easier to be a Unix vendor, I don't see any of the vendors dropping out any time soon. If anything, it's going to become more of a dogfight."