Oracle-Sun merger likely to take some time, thanks to regulators

Though Sun shareholders may give the thumbs-up to a merger with Oracle in a meeting today, users shouldn’t expect it to be complete for months, despite Oracle’s claims and hopes.

Two weeks ago, Oracle announced that the U.S. Justice Department had issued a request for more material in its antitrust review of the merger between the two big technology companies. The request, according to Oracle, was regarding the way in which Java is licensed once Sun becomes a part of Oracle. Richard Jones, vice president of data center services for The Burton Group, said that if Oracle were to start changing the Java license, it would be “shooting itself in the foot.”

Oracle added that despite the request, it still hoped to complete the acquisition this summer. But according to a story in the Wall Street Journal, second requests from the Justice Department do not generally happen that quickly. They are measured in months, not days.

In testimony delivered in late 2007, Thomas Barnett, former head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, said the average length of a second-request review was 154 days. A similar length of time would have Oracle receiving the Justice Department’s blessing to close the Sun acquisition no sooner than late November.

Some antitrust experts say second-request investigations can take even longer. John Harkrider, an antitrust practice co-chair at the law firm Axinn, Veltrop & Harkrider LLP, who has been retained by the Justice Department to investigate antitrust issues in the past, said he advises clients to allow for six to nine months for such reviews.

“If you move heaven and earth to comply, you should certainly be able to do it within six months,” Harkrider said.

Sun Microsystems scraps Rock project as Oracle ownership nears

Sun Microsystems scrapped development efforts for the 16-core “Rock” UltraSparc processor, which the company once hoped would help them compete against chips from IBM and Intel, according to the New York Times.

This news surfaces as the Oracle Corp. takeover of Sun nears. Many IT pros have expressed concerns about the future of Sun technologies under Oracle, and one could assume that this will be the first of many Sun projects and products to hit the chopping block when Oracle gets a hold of Sun.

Sun has invested more than five years and billions of dollars on the project and had hoped to use the chips in its high end systems. The Rock was supposed to start shipping in 2008, but was delayed several times due to glitches, according to the Times article. 

Sun has not verified that the Rock project has been cancelled, but this wouldn’t be the first time Sun aborted a chip after years of work and billions of dollars in research and development. Back in 2004, Sun ditched efforts for the UltraSparc V and Gemini chips and in 2006, Sun killed “Serrano” chips to focus their efforts on the Niagra and Rock chips.

Sun will come under Oracle leadership once the acquisition deal closes, sometime this summer.

Rackable acquires Silicon Graphics, takes SGI name

Rackable Systems completed its acquisition of Silicon Graphics, Inc. on Monday and oddly enough, Rackable will adopt SGI as its global name and brand, instead of the other way around.

Rackable closed the transaction to acquire the debt-ridden Silicon Graphics (SGI) for $42.5 million in cash on May 8 and the company said it will change its name to Silicon Graphics International - or SGI - but will keep the Rackable Systems product line and ticker symbol (RACK) the same.

I wonder if abandoning the Rackable brand in favor of SGI is a good idea. Sure, SGI was hugely successful in the 1980’s and is still a more recognizable brand than Rackable because of its legacy, but SGI is also a failing brand that filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2006 and again in April 2009 due to unmanageable amounts of debt.

In fact, I liken SGI to the captain of the high school football team; you know the type - a leader in its time, popular, and admired by all, but 20-some years later? Balding, broke, and holding desperately to what used to be.

Maybe I’m being too critical of SGI’s brand, but others question Rackable’s decision to take the SGI name as well. SGI is “Well known, sure. But more than a bit tarnished and not descriptive of Rackable’s business,” said Illuminata Analyst Gordon Haff.

Coincidentally, Sun Microsystems Inc. was founded the same year as SGI - 1982 - and they, too, are being acquired this year, by Oracle Corp. (Oracle won’t be dropping its name for Sun Microsystems though. )

Either way, Rackable now has a much larger portfolio of high performance computing products, with SGI’s x86 cluster offerings, shared memory clustered compute products, scalable data center and storage technologies, modular data centers, data management software, HPC tools and visualization technologies.

SGI will maintain its corporate headquarters in its current Fremont, California facility, with offices around the world, and the new management team will have senior executives from Rackable Systems and the former SGI.

Sun Microsystems SPARC Enterprise T5440 server rocks, user says

Sun Microsystems, Inc.’s SPARC Enterprise T5440 server won the Bronze award in the server category in SearchDataCenter.com’s Product of the Year 2008 awards, but the system is performing at the platinum level for René Wienholtz, a CTO / CIO for STRATO, the second largest web hosting provider in Europe.

The T5440 was released in September 2008 and is the result of the joint development efforts of Sun and Fujitsu Computer Systems. It is an upgraded version of the T5220 system.

Wienholtz recently emailed me about STRATO’s experience using T-series servers for the company’s internet service farms. Their data center is full of T5220 and T2000 servers and some of the latest T5440 systems, which the company is quickly adding more of because it supports their Web 2.0 applications so well, Wienholtz said.

The T-series systems support STRATO’s Web Services (https), Mail Services (SMTP-In/-Out, IMAP, POP3, AntiSpam/-Virus Filters), Shop and Database farms and makes up about 80% of all the company’s infrastructure today, Wienholtz said.

The T5440 is used mainly in STRATO’s Web & Mail farms, as that is where the highest load profile and the most parallel requests per second are, Weinholtz said.

“What we like most about the T-Series, and the T5440 especially, is their energy efficiency. The CoolThreads architecture is literally designed especially to our needs. We run multi-threaded internet applications that don’t need much calculating power, but the amount of parallel requests per second is absolutely massive - billions of hits per hour or a billion mails per day have to be handled,” Weinholtz said. Because of this, “the
CPU speed itself is not king - it’s the high amount of thread units that helps these applications to perform.”

Another great feature of this architecture is that upgrading the number of “T”-CPUs in a system equal a nearly linear upgrade in performance, so two T5220’s are equivalent to one T5440, Weinholtz said.

While one T5440 performs just as well as two T5220’s, the T5440 uses less power than its predecessors; “it has more efficient power supplies and [other power efficiency technologies] built in. This helps us saving money in OPEX (operating expenses) and CAPEX (capital expenditures), as a single T5440 is a little cheaper than two T5220,” Weinholtz said.

Pricing for the T5400 starts at about $45,000 and maxes out at around $200,000, according to Sun.

Pretty hot review of the T5440, to put it mildly. If anyone has a love story about a server you can’t live without, please share. By the same token, if you are dealing with a system you can’t stand, I’d love to hear your horror stories.

AMD ships more efficient, faster versions of 45nm Opteron CPU

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is now shipping seven new versions of its latest Opteron processor, the 45 nanometer quad-core chip, code-named Shanghai; five are high efficiency (HE) and two are designed for higher performance than the standard version of Shanghai.

The new versions of Shanghai are essentially identical to the original flavor, only the HE is more power efficient and the SE offers better performance than the standard versions.

The 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron HE processor is 55-watts, compared to the standard 75-watts, and speeds range from 2.1 to 2.3 GHz. A server with an HE version can save 20% more than similarly configured systems during idle times, AMD reported.

The new HE processors are available in eight server systems from HP, Rackable Systems, Dell, Sun Microsystems, and other vendors are expected to start shipping the CPUs by mid-year.

Additionally, two new 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron SE processors (2.8 GHz) are designed for performance-intensive workloads; this compares to the standard Shanghai chip speed of 2.7 GHz. The SE chips aren’t conservative on power though; they come in a 105-watt ACP thermal envelope and are aimed at data centers where performance trumps power efficiency, said John Fruehe, AMD’s director of business development for server and workstations.

“Depending on the application, the SE version offers up to 5% better performance [than the standard version], but it also uses more power,” Fruehe said. “The customers that use these chips are less interested in the power efficiency and more interested in the performance, so we don’t do power testing on these.”

The new SE processors are also immediately available in three new systems from HP and other AMD technology partners.

The AMD Opteron pricing model for HE versions range from $316 to  $1,514, and the two SE models are $1,165 and $2,649.

Server sales suffer on economy, virtualization; vendors branching out

With the U.S. economy in a recession, world economies suffering and virtualization adoption on the rise, it comes as no surprise that factory revenue in the x86 worldwide server market declined 5.2% year over year to $12.6 billion in the third quarter of 2008 (3Q08), according to the IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker released December 3.

In fact, this is the largest quarterly revenue decline for servers since the fourth quarter of 2002, and the sluggish server unit shipment growth of 2.8% year over year in 3Q08 represented the slowest increase in server shipments since 4Q06, the IDC reported.

“The x86 server segment was definitely impacted by the economic downturn; there was significant deceleration in the quarter with a particular weakness in September,” said Jed Scaramella, IDC Senior Research Analyst, Servers. “Due to the uncertainty in the market, customers cut back on all nonessential spending.”

Volume systems revenue declined 7.2% year over year in the third quarter, the first decline for this market segment in more than 14 quarters, and revenue for mid-range enterprise servers declined 9.5% year over year. Shipment growth also slowed significantly for x86 servers to 4.0% (1.97 million units) because of a low demand, and revenue declined 6.6% year over year in 3Q08, representing the largest year-over-year decline for the segment in more than 24 quarters, IDC reported.

The IDC didn’t mention this in their release today, but it is obvious that virtualization is partly to blame the slowing demand for commodity x86 servers because it increases server utilization.  According to Tom Bittman, VP and distinguished analyst with Gartner, virtualization has penetrated 12% of the market, and the number of VMs deployed doubles every year. “By 2012, we expect more than half x86 workloads will be run on VMs,” Bittman said in an interview about his presentation on the virtualization market for Gartner’s 27th annual Data Center Conference this week.

“Virtualization and cloud computing have screwed up the market; vendors used to compete in compute islands, they were all direct competitors, but now they fight for control of an entire virtual layer. IBM and HP are competing in broad server technologies, instead of HP and IBM competing only in the area of server hardware,” Bittman said. “All vendors worry about becoming commodities and they all want to be considered the brains of the industry”

Perhaps that concern, along with slow server sales, is why vendors including HP, Dell and Sun have branched out into the area of data center services this year that could add a revenue stream beyond selling hardware. HP acquired EYP Mission Critical Facilities about a year ago and began offering data center services in March. Just this week, Dell announced it would offer services to help people extend the life of their data centers. Before that, Sun announced data center services that include data wiping.

But, there were exceptions to the grim server market numbers; revenue for high-end enterprise servers grew 4.0% year over year, the third consecutive quarter of growth for the segment. Other exceptions to the slowdown were blade servers (11% of the market) and IBM System z (9.4% of the market), which both increased this quarter, IDC reported.

Scaramella said IBM System Z sales didn’t suffer because they tend to be cyclical and are built into companies long-term budgets, which is not always the case for the smaller x86 systems. “Customer are more likely to push out [x86] purchases and see what they can do without,” he said.

And blades were the only platform to experience positive growth in the quarter, with all major vendors exhibiting double-digit growth in blade volumes, IDC reported.

I’m no analyst, but I am guessing the demand for blades didn’t slow down along with other x86 servers because today’s blades are pitched as ideal virtualization platforms. The HP ProLiant BL495c virtualization blade, for instance, is one of many new blades designed with more memory, data storage and network connections to meet the needs of memory and I/O-hungry VMs.

In addition to their appeal as a virtualization platform, blade servers are desirable because they take up very little space in cramped data centers and many blade surpass rack servers in power and efficiency.

So, it will be interesting to see whether server sales recover when the world economies improve, or if they remain depressed due to the increasing use of virtualization.

The IDC is predicting this slowdown to continue throughout most of 2009, but server sales will rebound with the economy, Scaramella said. “We are not anticipating a quick rebound [but] I do not think we will see the same extreme fall-off the market experienced after the dot.com bust,” he said. “At that time there was a tremendous amount of excess capacity built out in the infrastructure. Over the past few years, many companies have been in a consolidation mode - reducing the numbers of servers they have in operations as well as reducing the number of data centers they have in operations. Back in 2001-2002, companies were able to put off purchase due to the excess capacity, this is not the case today.”

Sun Microsystems provides storage, hard drive wiping services

Last week I chatted with Michelle Dennedy, Chief Privacy Officer for Sun Microsystems Inc., about a new data erasure service the company is offering as part of Sun’s recently announced Datacenter Services suite that could help avoid serious data loss or data breaches.

“When people move their storage and server arrays from location A to B, these systems are loaded with sensitive customer data, and if one asset falls of the truck, they would be out millions of dollars in data and in a lot of trouble,” Dennedy said. “Also, when someone comes in to repair systems they have access to all of the data on those systems,” so erasing the data is a smart move. 

For example, I recently read this article about a private contractor who downloaded sensitive data from a U.K. government system onto a memory stick, and then lost it. And another story, also from the U.K, reported that a computer disc containing the medical records of more than 38,000 National Health Service patients went missing when it was sent to a software company to be backed up, ironically, in case the records got lost.

While Sun didn’t divulge the specific customers or incidents that inspired this new service, I imagine they where similar to those reported above. Dennedy said Sun’s new data erasure service was created to prevent vulnerabilities when repairs are being done by a third  party or when systems are being re-deployed to a new site. “You should know that if you lose a piece of equipment, you are losing only that silicon and not the data that was on it,” Dennedy said.

Another time to erase data is when a system is decommissioned and disposed of; many companies don’t think about erasing the data before ditching the old hardware, and that data could end up in the wrong hands, according to Dennedy. “It isn’t that they don’t care, but there is some ignorance about the massive amounts of data contained by the people getting rid of the equipment,” she said.

“Our technicians will administer software based erasure service for storage and servers, and will hand over a certificate to say, this is no longer an information asset,” she said. Sun is offering the service to non-Sun servers and storage as well.

Of course, users can erase data in their own systems using hard drive erasing software (a simple Google search yields over 480,000 results) and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other companies offering this service, along with a certification, as well.

It is unfortunate that we live in a time when there are so many criminals waiting in the wings to steal data; the market for stolen data is about $276 million, according to Symantec Corp. Knowing this, taking every precaution to secure customer data with services like those from Sun and other companies is very necessary today.

Sun, Fujitsu push out smaller Sparc64 server

Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu today announced the M3000, a 2U, single-chip server based on the quad-core Sparc64 VII processor.

It might seem odd to have a single-processor server that has no room to expand for more processors. Most likely this machine will cater to existing Sun users running old Solaris applications on old Sparc64 infrastructure — particularly those homegrown applications that are geared to run on single threads and just need to go, go, go. For that purpose, the M3000 is probably a good bet. It’s a smaller footprint that doesn’t run as hot as older Sparc64 servers, and it has a lot more power.

The Sparc64 processor, unlike the multithreaded UltraSparc chips, is more focused on single-thread applications such as database and batch transactions. UltraSparc-based chips are better used for Web-serving applications that serve a lot of users at the same time, but at slower speeds than a Sparc64.

Earlier this year, Sun and Fujitsu came out with their M-series line of servers based on the Sparc64 VII. Those included boxes as big as the M9000, which can have as many as 64 processors.

The M3000, meanwhile, tops out at one chip. That along with 4GB of memory will cost you about $15,000. Memory is expandable up to 32GB, and it has 4 I/O slots.

Tom Donnelly, product manager of enterprise systems at Fujitsu, and Tom Atwood, Sparc systems manager at Sun, both said the M3000 is targeted toward existing Sparc customers looking to upgrade their Solaris infrastructure, as well as toward existing HP-UX and AIX users.

“We are focused on the RISC market,” Donnelly said, “displacing IBM and HP systems whenever we can.”

Atwood added that the M3000 will take up half the space and half the power while giving twice the performance as two equivalent UltraSparc IIIi-based servers from five years ago.