c0t0d0s0.org

Scotty was asked by the new administration to help on a strategy to use open source for government purposes. The BBC reports in Calls for open source government:

The secret to a more secure and cost effective government is through open source technologies and products. The claim comes from one of Silicon Valley's most respected business leaders Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems. He revealed he has been asked to prepare a paper on the subject for the new administration.

While sitting in a workshop meeting, my thoughts went away from the meeting and circled around the Turbo Boost feature of the Nehalem processor. Too make it clear at the beginning: Turbo Boost is a good feature. It helps to use the existent potential of the CPU instead of the expected potential. Overclockers have shown in the past, das most CPU have more performance potential as the print on the heat spreader says. But while I think this is a good idea, this will open some interesting benchmarketing tricks.

Cisco seems to look for new markets - Cisco planning significant data center assault:

Perhaps the most important example of that will be a new Cisco blade server system expected next year. This will take the company into the data center compute space, right up against longtime stalwarts — and up to now, Cisco partners — IBM and HP.

This matches to rumours and hints i´ve got in in the last few weeks. But i don´t believe that Cisco will play a large role in this business. There are already several players in this game ... IBM,HP,Dell,FSC and Sun. And more important: People think of Cisco as the supplier of their networking equipment ... not of their servers ... and Cisco hasn´t a long track record as a supplier of servers. Cisco needs a real differentiator ... i´m curious what this differentiator might be ... but at the moment i´m not convinced about the success.

And there is another problem: Network admin departments, storage admin departments and server admin departments have seperated supplier spheres in many companies. And Cisco is a supplier for the network admin departments and they rarely connection to the server departments. And: Did you know Sun sold an hardware load balancer for a while? No? Cisco will have a similar problem ...

Funny discussion about boot-up times of pSeries systems:

Hey, I manage 7 p595 squadrons and they are all different. For the most part, the startup time depends on the amount of I/O you have installed. Two of mine are 3 frame p595's with 64 hba, 64 nic, about 20 internal HDD, dual power systems and I think 10 d20 I/O drawers. These servers take about 90 minutes just to initialise the hardware, not including starting any LPAR's. So tell your friend that this is normal and take a good book and a really large coffee with him each time he needs a restart

Well, as Transitive delivers one of the foundations of IBMs PowerVM technology, i expected, that they would acquire Transitive at some point in time. Today IBM announced such a move according to this press release: IBM Announces Plans to Acquire Transitive.

The Transitive stuff allows IBM to run Linux x86 code in a Power LPAR. Okay, i don´t really know if it´s sensible idea to use an expensive Power system to virtualize a cheap x86 system. But they need something like that as Linux on Power doesn´t really have a large support by ISVs.

Reuters writes in Fujitsu to buy Siemens stake in PC joint venture:

Japanese electronics conglomerate Fujitsu Ltd will buy Siemens AG's 50 percent stake in their computer joint venture for 450 million euros ($567 million), aiming to boost its presence

They just talk about the PC business in this article, so there is no new information about the FSC server business.

There is something really strange in the numbers for the EMC Symmetrix DMX4. A colleague gave me this hint. Just look on the specification sheet. They state on page 2 that this system can house up to 2400 disk (albeit they restrict that in the footnote by writing that more than 1920 drives are just available on RPQ). But that´s not the point.

Just look at the numbers at system capacity on page 3: They state on this whitepaper, that you can plug 1920 1 TB hard disks into the system. Okay .... let´s take the example for RAID 5 with 7+1. You could cut 240 of this RAIDs out of 1920 disks (1920/8). 240 multiplied with 7 Terabyte is 1680 Terabyte. But the maximum system capacity is stated by EMC with 585.91 Terabyte. WTF ?!?!? Where is the missing Petabyte? The first approx. 670 1 TB disks in your DMX4 gives you capacity, the other approx 1250 disks gives just heat dissipation and some nice blinking lights.

I don´t really think, that there is an error in my calculations . Why? When you calculate this for 73 GB you get 122 Terabyte ... almost the system capacity number stated on the specification sheet(you have to deduct some of the storage for internal usage, so it´s slightly less).

I smell a architectural weakness here. Something like "640 Kilobyte is enough for everyone" decision ... just on a larger scale

The third quarter of HP is the one we call the fourth quarter at Sun. So it covers the time from April to June. There is one interesting chart in the earnings presentation of HP - the revenue for Enterprise Servers ans Storage :

The next earnings announcement will be an interesting one. In the next earning announcement they can´t say that they grew year over year in this area. Nevertheless, there is an clear downward trend in this chart. Perhaps this is the reason why they bought EDS. They need that business to cover the decreasing revenue from their server branch.

There is a lot of interesting stuff in the 3Q 2008 Earnings Presentation of IBM (you find the pdf here). Let´s have a look at page 12: Legacy System i is 82% down, i assume the 7% up for converged System p comes from customers buying pSeries instead of iSeries. xSeries is down 18% and storage 3%. IBM Microelectronics is down 27% year to year. In total the System&Technology business lost 10% (at constant currency it´s even 11%).

So yould easily say: Software and Services rescued IBM in the last quarter. But not everything is looking bright there. The signings for Global Services for short-term is up, but the signings for long term deals decreased 19% for strategic outsourcing, 17% down for Global Technology Service and 16% down for Global business services.

By the way: SMB is mentioned often as the big strength of IBM. They make 4,7 billion $ dollars out of this segement. But you have to take into consideration, that IBM has a strong retail equipment department (point-of-sales terminals for example).

I already wrote about the latest benchmarketing trick of IBM in the last blog article, but this article was in german, so i repeat this in english. There was an bold statement in a recent press anouncement of IBM - "IBM Builds on Industry-Leading UNIX Portfolio With New Servers, Software":

The Power 560 can save up companies up to $840,000 and 80-percent in energy by consolidating 13 Sun Fire V490 servers on a single Power 560 server with PowerVM, as compared to consolidating the same number on four Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 servers with dynamic system domains."

I´ve asked myself, how they get to such numbers. This number of servers couldn´t based on performance. We don´t need 4 M5000 just to substitute 13 V490. But after thinking about after reading the article in the Computerwoche i found out what´s the trick of this comparision. The trick is a cheap one ... even for IBM marketing.

You can partition an M5000 in up to 4 domains. When you just want to consolidate 13 servers, you obviously need 4 systems. This comparision doesn´t compare the compute power of the M5000 with the compute power of the p560. It compares two different virtualisation technologies. So the even the choice of 13 V490 is a really perfidious one. Twelve systems to consolidate would lead to 3 M5000, 13 systems lead to 4 because you have one domain too few. But that´s not the point: You won´t consolidate 13 V490 by using domains. You would use Solaris Containers (perhaps in conjunction with Solaris 9 Containers) for this tasks. By using this Containers you would need only one system, too. And you would need less processing power for it, as Container are a more efficient virtualisation technology in comparison to *PARS.

By the way: The answer "one system" is false for both systems. Independently from the system architecture, virtualisation technology you want at least two systems and a cluster when you consolidate 13 systems on one. Without an additional standby system you are toast in the case of a system failure or maintainance. But that´s a persistent error in every benchmarketing comparision of IBM.

Whenever you want to dismiss the claims of a competitor or want to set your own or prefered technology in a better light, you should do some research on your topic. Otherwise you may end up with a document that´s outright ridiculous.

I found a really strange piece of "comparison". It´s called "A comparison of virtualization features of HP-UX, Solaris, and AIX". It´s written by Mr. Ken Milberg. And i wasn´t able to stop my shaking the head in disbelive. This text reinforces my personal impression, that this author is just a hired gun to publish claims even IBM doesn´t want to make. But let´s dissect his newest blurb. You shouldn´t read it ... it´s just a really abysmal document. I´ve sacrified my time to do it for you, so don´t waste your own

In the last few days the stock of IBM was hit quite hard. Two days with roundabout 5 percent decrease. You can wonder a little bit about this, but there is an interesting article in the "Between the lines" blog: What’s really ailing Big Blue shares? Hint: IBM is part bank. Larry Dignan writes:

Big Blue’s financing unit, which leases hardware and finances projects, is big enough that the Securities and Exchange Commission put IBM on the “do not short” list. This list is designed to get shorts–folks that bet against stocks–off the backs of financial services companies long enough to raise capital or at least survive.

Thus IBM is possibly hit by two trucks: By economic slowdown as a computer ... sorry ... consulting company and by the credit crisis as a financial company. The article is really an interesting read.

George Santayana sagte mal: "Wer sich der Geschichte nicht erinnert, ist dazu verdammt, sie zu wiederholen." Danach sieht die Nummer mit dem angeblichen Ausstieg von Siemens irgendwie auch aus. Ein Kollege hat mich darauf hingewiesen, wo das "ji" zwischen "Fu" und "tsu" herkommt. Die Wikipedia schreibt dazu:

Als Hersteller für Telefonzubehör wurde die Fujitsu Limited 1935 in Tokio unter dem Namen Fuji Tsūshinki Seizō (富士通信機製造) gegründet. Sie entstand aus dem Kommunikationsbereich der Fuji Electric Company und war ein Joint Venture mit dem deutschen Unternehmen Siemens. Hieraus entstand auch der Name Fujitsu, der sich aus Fuji Electric, Jīmenzu (Siemens auf Japanisch) und Tsūshin, dem japanischen Wort für Kommunikation, zusammensetzt

Why did i wrote the article about the "non-unicode/unicode" benchmarketing? Because of articles like this one: SAP-Benchmarkergebnisse für Intels neuen Hexa-Core-Prozessor. It´s frightning. The publications of the publisher Heise had a good reputation in the past. But they jumped the shark long time ago. They should really stay at testing displays and notebooks and something like that and Andreas Stiller should transform his "Prozessorgefluester" column into an independent blog. One of the highlights of the last few day - "Don´t understand the nature of benchmarks":

Bei den Vierprozessorsystemen konnte sich HPs ProLiant DL580 G5 mit Windows Server 2003 und Microsoft SQL Server 2005 mit 5155 SD-Usern(1,97 s, 25.380 SAPS) klar vor Suns Fire X4450 mit Solaris 10 und MaxDB 7.6 behaupten, das nur auf 4600 SD-User (1,94s, 23120 SAPS) kommt.

As i wrote before, the HP result of 25380 SAPS is a non-unicode result, the Sun result is based on a unicode installation. So dear Heise.de: Before drawing any conclusions from existing data, try to understand the data.

In der Euro am Sonntag(ich werd nachher mal in den von mir präferierten Bahnhofsbuchhandel gehen) steht ein Bericht über die angeblich schon weit fortgeschrittene Zerschlagung von Fujitsu-Siemens. So schreibt golem.de:

Siemens betreibt die Trennung von Fujitsu Siemens weiter. Wie die Wirtschaftszeitung Euro am Sonntag aus informierten Kreise erfahren hat, wird derzeit ein Modell diskutiert, nachdem der japanische Fujitsu-Konzern den Anteil von Siemens im ersten Schritt übernehmen und das Endkunden-Geschäft später abstoßen wird. Als möglicher Interessent gelte der chinesische Computerhersteller Lenovo, der bereits das Notebookgeschäft IBMs übernommen hat. Fujitsu ist offenbar "vor allem an der Geschäftskundensparte interessiert", so das Blatt weiter.

So leid es mir für die Mitarbeiter fuer FSC tut (ich glaube nicht, das das ohne Kahlschlag dort abgehen wird) ... ich denke das kann hier durchaus interessant werden fuer Sun in Deutschland. Siemens ist immer noch eine Firma mit tiefer Verwurzelung im Governmentbereich. Ist halt so irgendwie immer noch eine deutsche Firma, obwohl das bei so grossen Firmen oftmals irgendwie auch nur noch so halb stimmt. Ich denke, das Siemens sich nicht dieses Zubrot entgehen lassen wird, auch wenn vielleicht nicht mehr Teilhabe an FSC hat.

FSC ist ja nun einer der Vertriebsarme fuer die System der Sparc Enterprise M-Klasse. Frage ist, ob sich Fujitsu diesen Arm in Zukunft noch leisten will, oder ob das dann über Sun laufen wird. Ich stecke aber in den Eigenheiten dieser Zusammenarbeit viel zu wenig drin, um da irgendwas nicht vollkommen Spekulatives sagen zu koennen. Ich denke, da lassen sich in der Zukunft aeusserst interessante zusätzliche Moeglichkeiten der Zusammenarbeit finden. Schaun wir mal ...

Aber man wird abwarten muessen, wie das Modell wirklich aussehen wird. Interessanter wird hier die Frage, ob es FSC oder der Nachfolger schafft, das Vertrauen aufrecht zu erhalten. Seit der Benq-Nummer verfallen ja Deutsche in solchen Situation in eine kollektive Empörungsschnappatmung.