c0t0d0s0.org

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.

According to the article "Re-engineering AMD" in Fortune´s BigTech blog AMD plans to spinoff it´s fabs:

Since it can’t afford to do this anymore, AMD plans to spin off its chip manufacturing operations by year’s end, probably by hawking them outright or by inking a partnership with a larger chipmaker – a maneuver akin to selling a house and leasing it back.
[...]
“We’re going to go away from a captive fab model to more of a fables model for the CPU part of the business,” Meyer says. “Longer-term, it relieves us of the burden of having to shell out cash for these gigantic factories. So it will be more of a pay-as-you-go model like a traditional fables semiconductor company.”

Not a good news. I hope that this spin-off won´t lead to lay-offs for the fine people at the Dresden fab.

Sun and Fujitsu have started to deliver systems with the 4 core SPARC64 VII. But Fujitsu already talked about the next generation at the HotChips conference: An 8 core processor in development and they hope to talk about this a little more at the HotChips next year. 8 core SPARC64 would lead to a 1024 threads M9000 ... 4 Teraflops in a single operating system image.

For my non-german speaking readers a link to an english background article in the Register -Date bug kills VMWare systems:

Reg reader Duncan said VMWare's FAIL represented a "fantastic bug for a company trying to embed itself into the modern computing world." While another reader, Eric, said the "time bomb" contained in the update was causing a lot of panic among businesses.

"Customers were fuming this morning having planned downtime for weeks. Vmware have alot of answering to do on this and no doubt share price will take a hit again," he said.

Heise.de reports about a timebomb in the Update 2. The system denies the migration, creation and suspension of virtual machines with the message that the product has expired. That matches my opinion about VMware with all this big vendors introducing virtualisation solutions, but that´s a different story Well, Heise writes that the suggest workaround ist to set a date in the past and to disable the time synchronisation. But as virtual clocks are just a rough guess of the actual time, this doesn´t look as a viable workaround for me.

BTW: They have annother problem. The support website seems to suffer the slashdot effect started by the link on the heise website.

I don´t have a subscription for the Wall Street Journal, but the free preview says enough about this Fujitsu-Siemens divorce rumour: Siemens Set to Pull Plug On Venture With Fujitsu:

In a move that could set the stage for the sale or dismantling of a leading European maker of personal computers, Siemens AG has informed Fujitsu Ltd. that it wants out of their nine-year-old joint venture, people familiar with the matter say.

This revisits this rumour reported before from other news outlets. The rumour made it even into a german news broadcasting service today.

VMware announced a free version of their ESX server product. Well, this may be an effect of the 500 pound gorillas entering the business. Sun will announce xVM soon, Microsofts developed Hyper-V ... thus the market for it´s hypervisor may get narrow. At the end, the auxillary tools earn VMwares money, thus giving away the hypervisor is a clever move.

(Disclaimer: This article is my personal opinion, i´m not aware of the official opinion of Sun Microsystems regarding this rumours)

Well, this is a really interesting development: According to the german news portal heise.de with their article "Bericht: Siemens kündigt Vertrag mit Fujitsu"(on german) and a report on Reuters Siemens wants to get out of the joint venture (JV) with Fujitsu as the Siemens CEO doesn´t see FSC as a business unit that´s profitable enough to stay in the company.

This is interesting for Sun out of a simple reason: FSC is not just that notebook company. FSC is a distributor of the SPARC Enterprise Systems (M-Class and T-Class) and those systems are identical to ours. In Germany FSC has quite a market share.

Okay, according to the reports there is an agreement in the JV contract: Whenever someone wants to get out of the JV agreement, the leaving partner has to offer it´s stake to the other partner at first. But i don´t think, that Fujitsu will buy the part ... especially not when there are signs of a adverse global economic downturn. Thus it looks reasonable that they will offer the part to someone else will buy it interested in the well known Fujitsu-Siemens brand for desktops and notebooks. It would be further reasonable to assume that a new owner would concentrate on the x86 business and thus won´t take the SPARC business. And this would open an opportunity for Sun.

Well, i will go to bed now and think a little more about this development. But as usual: Interesting times ahead of us ...


PS: Maybe this was thee reason for announcing the Xeon based mainframe a few days ago ... this would give Siemens a opportunity to keep their mainframe business without the SPARC procs from Fujitsu.

This is the english translation of an article i wrote to answer an strange blog article in another german blog. While answering it, i found a case of "History Repeating".

In the actual installment of the Prozessorgeflüster (a reoccuring CPU technology article in the german computer magazine c´t) Andreas Stiller discusses the the first facts about the new manycore processor "Larrabee" from Intel. Stiller states in this article, that this processor was discussed to release with with 16 to 24 cores, but will release with 32 cores when it appears in 2009. To the surprise of many experts, the cores are well known. The cores are nothing more than Pentium P54C cores. Well, the P54C was announced 1994. This would be similar to a Niagara T1 on the basis of the SuperSPARC II, which was announced 1994 as well.

Annother interesting fact reported in the article: The Larabee xPU will use roundabout 300 watts. That´s much much more than a UltraSPARC T1 CPU. I know, Larabee is a GPU at start, but do you really believe that a manycore GPU with x86 compatible commands will stay on the graphics card for long time?

There is a small irony at this story. Sun learned many things about designing multicores when Sun developed the MAJC-5200 CPU and used it on the XVR1000 and XVR4000. The XVR4000 was the graphic card, that didn´t used something earthly like a PCI-bus, you plugged it directly onto the Fireplane Interconnect of the V880 instead of the CPU. Sun learned so much about multicore that some of the findings will reappear only in future incarnations like the Rock CPU (speculative multithreading e.g.)

The funny (and "history repeating" part): Intel start s to use it´s first manycore design on a graphics card as well. Like we did ... in 2002.

There was a small company called Plattform Solution. This company developed a Mainframe clone based on Itanium procs. And big IBM sued the small PSI. This could be a story of hate, legal dodges and the game of sueing and counter sueing. But the story ended differently: The big IBM simply simply swallowd the small PSI as reported by Computerworld for example.

Well ... where leave this the mainframe market. IBM took it´s nearest competito out of the game. This can lead to two developments in the future. You might think (and some industry analysts indeed do) that IBM will use the technology of PSI to build a new class of cheap mainframes. My personal opinion to that: Dream on and pigs might fly. IBM would canibalize it´s high margin mainframe business with such an offer and it needs the high margins to refinance the further development of the mainframe technology for a shrinking group of customers. And additionally: I heard on several occasions, that IBM uses laptops internally with mainframe emulation for test purposes. It would be easy for the large IBM to productize this emulation if they really want to do that. They don´t need to buy a company to do that (and more logical targets would be their own pSeries or xSeries and not an a somewhat strange Itanium server)

The more probable possibility is in my opinon a different one: They simply want to take out a competitor to protect their market share. And this would leave this acqusition as an interesting target for antitrust inquiries. But thats only my 2 cents, time will tell.