Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystems' chief executive until January, has accelerated the pace of his public communications from blogging to the even faster-twitch Twitter medium. But he's also considering slowing it down by writing a book.
"I'm thinking of writing a book about my experiences as Sun's CEO (will not be in haiku). What would you like to read about?" Schwartz asked in a tweet on Monday.
(Credit:
Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
The haiku comment refers to Schwartz's parting tweet as Sun CEO, in which he blamed the economy for the fact that Sun was acquired by Oracle rather than remaining independent: "Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more."
A number of suggestions for subject matter have arrived:
• "the decision and discussion and hand-wringing behind the Great Open Sourcing efforts (Java, Solaris, etc.)," from pholdings.
• "Would like to hear about boardroom discussions about research directions: any disagreements? & Thoughts on A.I.," from FriskyBoy.
• "how to balance community rules & philosophy with company duties & profitability," from danieledemauro.
• "I'd love to know 'all' about the transitional period between between Scott 'stepping' down and you taking over," from rudids.
As Sarah Palin and countless other authors have found, autobiographies are a great opportunity to present personal history in a flattering light--and Schwartz has demonstrated skills in framing debates to his advantage. If a book comes to pass, let's hope that there's a healthy dose of reality in there, too.
Google has made YouTube available over IPv6 in an effort to encourage more use of the next-generation and more capacious Internet addressing system.
The transition from the current Internet Protocol version 4 has been slow and difficult for the computing industry. But Google has been gradually making its services available over IPv6, including search in March 2008, to those with sufficiently reliable connections.
The number of IPv4 Internet addresses still unused is steadily dropping toward zero, according to Comcast.
(Credit: Comcast)"The service most requested to have IPv6 support has unquestionably been YouTube," said Lorenzo Colitti and Steinar H. Gunderson, Google IPv6 network experts, in a blog post Friday. "Given all of this, we're proud to make YouTube available over IPv6 and to begin streaming videos from a select number of sites worldwide to our Google over IPv6 partners."
Because IPv6 hasn't been backward compatible with IPv4, its adoption has been a classic chicken-and-egg problem in the industry. With no services available, there was little incentive to built out the new IPv6 network to attach to them, and with no network, there was little incentive for services.
That's gradually changing, though, as the number of unused IPv4 addresses dwindles away. Google, among others, has been trying to nudge the world toward IPv6.
One big gating factor to IPv6 adoption is support by Internet service providers. Comcast is testing the IPv6 waters, though, with a trial program this year for its customers.
"In 2010, we will be conducting several IPv6 technical trials in our production network, with customers, in order to prepare for the IPv6 transition," Comcast said on its form for volunteering for IPv6 trial. "We will consider all volunteers."
The big advantage IPv6 has over IPv4 is the number of unique addresses it can accommodate--4.3 billion for IPv4 compared to about 34,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 for IPv6. Although 4.3 billion may sound like a lot, addresses are often allocated in large blocks that mean many aren't generally available, and some experts forecast an end to new IPv4 addresses in 2011.
IBM on Monday is launching its long-anticipated Power7 processor and systems based on the chip.
IBM Power7 chip
(Credit: IBM)The processor is a big step for IBM, integrating eight processing cores--four times the number of cores in the prior-generation Power6--in one chip package, with each core capable of executing four tasks--called "threads"--turning an individual chip into a virtual 32-core processor. As a yardstick, Intel's high-end Xeon processors--systems that Power7 will compete with--typically have two threads per processing core and contain four cores.
Blg Blue has already tipped its hand on the Power7 chip in discussions about its upcoming Blue Water supercomputer.
Power7 fuses the flagship Power chip design with key technology from a separate "Cell" processor--the latter was part of IBM's Roadrunner supercomputer system at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. "We took some of that genetic material from the Cell program--ways to do floating point (calculations)--and embedded that right into the Power7 core," Bradley McCredie, an IBM Fellow in the Systems and Technology Group, told CNET last year.
Rivals include Hewlett-Packard servers based on Intel's Xeon and "Tukwila" Itanium processors and servers from Sun Microsystems.
New Power7 systems
The new Power7 systems include:
- IBM Power 780: a new category of scalable, high-end servers, featuring an advanced modular design with up to 64 Power7 cores.
- IBM Power 770: a midrange system with up to 64 Power7 cores, featuring higher performance per core than Power6 processors and using up to 70 percent less energy for the same number of cores as Power6 processors.
- IBM Power 755: a high-performance computing cluster node with 32 Power7 cores.
IBM is touting the Power7's ability to manage millions of transactions in real time--necessary for applications such as smart electrical grids. IBM said electric utilities can move from processing less than one million meter reads per day, in a traditional grid for example, to more than 85 million reads per day in a smart grid.
eMeter, a leading maker of software that runs e-grids, ran a successful benchmark on IBM Power6 systems for more than 20 million smart meters. "Combining eMeter and IBM's Power7 we are confident we can hit much higher numbers to meet their needs," Scott Smith, eMeter client business manager, said in a statement.
Ken Jacobs
(Credit: Oracle)Ever since Oracle closed on its acquisition of MySQL, the open-source world has been wondering where the code has gone. Many people searched, fruitlessly, for the formerly available MySQL source code.
They might have done better to search for Oracle's point person on MySQL, Ken Jacobs.
On Friday, Jacobs announced his resignation from Oracle to key members of the MySQL team via e-mail. Jacobs, a 28-year Oracle veteran and one of its first 20 hires, has been Oracle's liaison with the MySQL community for the past several years, ever since Oracle acquired the popular MySQL storage engine, InnoDB.
While Jacobs doesn't give an explicit reason for his departure, he does hint at disappointment that he was not selected to run MySQL's database business post-acquisition. "I imagine you all know that I will not be leading the MySQL GBU, as I had expected," he said.
I share that disappointment.
I, among others, worried that Oracle's acquisition of InnoDB effectively amounted to a hostile takeover of MySQL's financial fortunes, but such has not been the case. Arguably, Jacobs is a primary reason that Oracle's ownership of InnoDB has been peaceful, not a declaration of war.
I don't expect Jacobs' departure to significantly alter Oracle's plans for MySQL, which I believe to be good (the temporary absence of source code notwithstanding), but I do worry that his thoughtful interaction with the open-source community will be missed.
Jacobs, himself, in his departure e-mail, noted the benefits MySQL will receive from Oracle's ownership:
I know that there are many people in the open source community who are concerned about Oracle's plans for MySQL. They are wrong to worry. Oracle will keep its commitments to invest in MySQL, and help grow the business. Oracle will make MySQL better. Doing so gives Oracle a presence in new markets, and the resources and investment Oracle will make should mean great things for customers, as well as the larger community.
You will find Oracle a terrific place to work! I believe it is good for MySQL (the product, the company, the people and the community) that you are now part of a software company. And a database company. And a company that is profitable, and that innovates and delivers high customer satisfaction. That's where MySQL belongs!
Edward Screven, Oracle's chief corporate architect, will be overseeing all-things-open-source at Oracle, leaving less room for Jacobs but also demonstrating Oracle's positive intentions for MySQL. Screven reports directly to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and should be a good advocate for MySQL within the company.
Even so, I will miss Jacobs. I have had many interactions with him over the years, and he has always proved to be a thoughtful, measured advocate for and defender of Oracle. His influence will be missed at Oracle as it takes on the arduous task of managing the world's largest database community.
Microsoft plans to begin phasing out Unix and Linux platform support for its FAST enterprise search products, as of its next release.
According to a Thursday blog post from Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Bjørn Olstad, the team will be "investing in interoperability between Windows and other operating systems, reaffirming our commitment to 10 years of support for our non-Windows products, and taking concrete steps to help customers plan for the future."
Enterprise search remains a lucrative, if oddly fractured market. According to analyst firm Gartner, in 2008, software revenue (new licenses and maintenance revenue) in the enterprise search market totaled $1.1 billion worldwide. The firm also forecast that revenue would rise to $1.9 billion by 2013, with a compound annual growth rate of 11.7 percent.
Currently, the market is dominated by Microsoft and Autonomy, though recently, the Apache Lucene project (commercialized by Lucid Imagination) has made inroads into the enterprise, as has Google's search appliance.
But Microsoft has one huge advantage, in that it effectively controls the data through the Windows file system, along with a vast array of applications and server platforms.
Windows has an obviously huge corporate server software footprint, and SharePoint continues to provide additional inroads into business data. But enterprise systems are expanding into a multitude of different services--on-site and off-site, that are far from homogeneous.
While it makes sense, from a development perspective, for Microsoft to drop Linux and Unix support for FAST, it doesn't make much sense from a market perspective. Offering FAST only on Windows means that businesses that want to use it will potentially incur costs for Windows licenses, system administration, and systems redesign.
Linux servers, especially for file systems and non-Exchange e-mail, continue to grow. Throw in the notion of cloudlike systems that are effectively operating system-agnostic, and this move seems even less logical.
In the same blog post, Olstad references cloud-based services that customers can choose instead of on-premise deployments. Cloud services may work for some enterprises, but most will want to keep their data behind the firewall.
Software heavyweight Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems has (and will have) a wide impact on the technology market.
Oracle's strategy of targeting an "all in one" relationship with its customers--providing hardware, software, and services--is something to which the rest of the high-technology industry will have to pay close attention. Modeling yourself after the "IBM of the 1960s" is not a bad target, especially when you consider market share.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison
(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET)However, when it comes to cloud computing, Oracle has taken a fairly "arm's length" position. CEO Larry Ellison's famous "cloud is fashion" rant sort of set the tone for the company's perceived skepticism toward the cloud model.
Apparently, that's all about to change. According to TechTarget, Oracle is preparing a public-relations onslaught, intended to change the perception of Oracle as cloud critic. According to the article, in the Webcast Oracle hosted last week to discuss its strategy for the Sun assets, Ellison explained:
Said Ellison: "Everything's called cloud now. If you're in the data center, it's a private cloud. There's nothing left but cloud computing. People say I'm against cloud computing--how can I be against cloud computing when that's all there is?"
He also stressed what will doubtless become another key Oracle message, which is that Oracle software (and soon hardware) powers other people's clouds.
That statement says a lot about the behavior we've seen from Oracle over the last year, especially with respect to the Sun acquisition. When originally announced, I suggested to some that Oracle would shed the hardware business, and concentrate on the virtualization and cloud capabilities (as well as the customer base and channels) that they acquired.
I was wrong. Instead, Oracle seems to be focusing on Sun's infrastructure portfolio, including servers, storage, and virtualization, shedding the cloud offerings altogether.
Sun's chief technology officer of cloud computing, Lew Tucker, has already left Oracle, and this week, there are reports that Oracle executives have confirmed the demise of Sun's reborn Network.com offering. The service, once hosted in the Las Vegas-based SuperNAP data center, was taken off the market soon after it went to beta testing, as Oracle announced its intent to acquire Sun.
The now-defunct cloud infrastructure service was a replacement for Sun's earlier failed grid offering of $1 per CPU-hour, and it was targeted at developers looking to create new applications and businesses expressly for the cloud. The service was acclaimed by a number of developers that had a chance to use it, and it is reported to have hosted 13 customers and 48 applications before its demise.
Without an infrastructure service of its own, Oracle seems to be taking a tack with which I'm quite familiar, given my role at Cisco Systems: being an arms dealer to the stars of cloud computing. Ellison mentioned Oracle's role in Salesforce.com and iTunes during last week's Webcast, and it has been offering its database software on Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service for well more than a year.
What remains to be seen is what, exactly, Oracle will offer the cloud world. Based on Ellison's tone, it may be playing a "business as usual" game, with the obvious addition of data center hardware to its portfolio. In fact, some evidence supports this direction, as Oracle recently presented a cloud vision in a Webinar that claims, among other things, that Oracle already has a "private PaaS," or platform as a service, portfolio based on its existing application server, database, Linux, and virtualization products.
However, with the Sun acquisition, Oracle received one of the best open-source virtualization offerings out there, as well as a variety of cloud computing-related software (including the Q-Layer automation platform). Will it offer a private cloud user experience of its own?
In the end, Ellison's love-hate relationship with the term "cloud computing" may provide a short-term PR challenge, but it will likely do little to damage the impact of Oracle's products on the cloud-computing landscape.
The Transaction Processing Performance Council has released a new benchmark called TPC-Energy for measuring how much work computers get done for a given amount of energy.
The move reflects the growing concern with power efficiency given environmental issues such as carbon footprint and financial issues involving the cost of electricity for running computers and cooling data centers.
The group already has developed a variety of server benchmarks: TPC-C and the newer TPC-E for database performance and TPC-H for data warehouse performance. TPC-Energy in effect does a little extra math on those tests to yield a "watts per performance" score, the group said in an announcement this week.
TPC has 24 members from the computing industry, including all the major server manufacturers--though with Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems two members are now one.
"In recent years, the number of global server installations has increased exponentially. The amount of energy required to operate, run and cool them has increased to keep pace, and energy consumption is now commonly identified as one of the three most important criteria for IT purchases. Buyers require an objective method of comparing price, performance and energy consumption in order to select equipment that best fits their requirements," said Mike Nikolaiev, chairman of the TPC-Energy committee, in a statement.
Benchmarks are a useful way to compare the value of different systems, although inevitably they tend to emphasize particular workloads and often can be gamed with unrealistic configurations. Another challenge: it can be difficult to get manufacturers to run benchmarks, which particularly in the case of servers can be an expensive, time-consuming undertaking.
The 55-page TPC-Energy report (PDF) is available from the council's Web site.
For a reason beyond any fathom I can measure, I failed to follow Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz on Twitter. Now I am attempting to kick myself. I am missing.
You see, Schwartz decided that the best way to tell folks that he was leaving Sun-- recently purchased by Oracle seemingly because Larry Ellison still can't find a hostile way to grab the Golden State Warriors by their Nikes--was to confirm rumors of his departure in a tweet.
"Today's my last day at Sun. I'll miss it," he wrote at Twitter.com/OpenJonathan. Then he added, mystically, "Seems only fitting to end on a #haiku. Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more."
One assumes that the haiku upon which Schwartz ended, after suffering from this painful haiku d'etat, was accompanied by a sum of money that will not prevent Schwartz from visiting his favorite hairdresser as often as he would dare. However, one wonders if his former employees were charmed by this disarming farewell.
What would you do if you were to attempt a twittering haiku as your public farewell? Might you, instead of offering a sweetly self-serving, self-referential reminder of your thwarted, or perhaps Schwarted, excellence, offer a small good-bye--in true haiku form or something a little less true--to your fellow man and woman?
Something like, "Wish you got/As much as I did/Sorry you won't."
Or perhaps, "I climbed/On the back of good people/To riches."
Or even, "Gosh/You're all screwed/I'm so sorry."
I am sure that Schwartz believes that he has been deeply progressive by using Twitter to announce his move on to, no doubt, better things. But, when he was CEO, how might he have reacted, if one of his employees had decided to take a hike(u) and tweeted a resignation?
Say, "Useless management/On to better things/FU Sun."
I have a feeling that the looser parts of him might have twitched. Still, perhaps he has, indeed, started a progressive trend, one that might encourage freedom of speech on departure. Perhaps corporate lawyers will soon be unable to keep up with an avalanche of this new style of adieu.
Be a Twitter quitter. It makes you look good. It makes you feel good--about yourself, that is.
IBM has a tall order from the U.S. Air Force--create a cloud network that can protect national defense and military data.
Big Blue announced Thursday a contract from the Air Force to design and demonstrate a cloud computing environment for the USAF's network of nine command centers, 100 military bases, and 700,000 personnel around the world.
The challenge for IBM will be to develop a cloud that can not only support such a massive network, but also meet the strict security standards of the Air Force and the U.S. government. The project will call on the company to use advanced cybersecurity technologies that have been developed at IBM Research.
"Our goal is to demonstrate how cloud computing can be a tool to enable our Air Force to manage, monitor, and secure the information flowing through our network," said Lieutenant General William Lord, chief information officer and chief of Warfighting Integration for the U.S. Air Force, in a statement. "We examined the expertise of IBM's commercial performance in cloud computing and asked them to develop an architecture that could lead to improved performance within the Air Force environment to improve all operational, analytical, and security capabilities."
To meet the challenge, IBM's own researchers, software engineers, and cybersecurity experts will work with military personnel and government agencies to build up the strong level of network security required. The company said it would employ "stream computing" analytics, a technology that will let the Air Force continually monitor and analyze all data running through the network for any signs of a threat or failure.
Sensors would deliver real-time data on the health of the cloud-based network, helping the Air Force to instantly respond to a cyberattack or other problem. IBM said it would also employ autonomic computing, through which the network could constantly change its performance and responsiveness on its own without the need for technical staff to intervene.
Security has been a challenge in the world of cloud computing, with survey after survey quoting business users who see it as the number one fear of keeping their data in cyberspace. Cybersecurity also made the news in Washington this week. On Thursday, the U.S. House of Representatives approved the Cyber Security Research and Development Act. White House Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair warned the Senate on Tuesday that the U.S. is under severe threat of growing cyberattacks unless it beefs up its security defenses.
A virtual Windows 7 running on the iPad.
(Credit: Citrix)Citrix Systems claims that it can help users run a virtual installation of Windows 7 on the Apple iPad, when the tablet device is released later this year.
Writing in a blog post on the company's site, Chris Fleck, the company's vice president of Community and Solutions Development, said those companies that use either of the company's desktop virtualization platforms, XenDesktop or XenApp, will be able to use Windows 7 from the iPad.
"It turns out [that] the 9.7-inch display on the iPad, with a 1024x768[-pixel] screen resolution, works great for a full [virtual desktop infrastructure] XenDesktop," Fleck wrote on the Citrix blog.
Fleck went on to say that any Windows application will "run unmodified and securely in the data center." It will even allow for users to use multiple applications at once--a major sticking point with Apple's iPad software.
It should be noted that Windows 7 can't be directly installed on the iPad. Citrix's software runs Windows from a server and simply displays it on the iPad. In other words, the service is a thin client, not a full-fledged Windows 7 installation.
"The iPad looks to be an ideal end-point device that can empower users to be productive wherever they are," Fleck wrote, "and IT will be able to safely deliver company-hosted virtual desktops and apps without worry."
Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
