Tom Bradicich, chief technology officer of IBM's System x business selling servers using x86 processors such as Intel's Xeon and Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron, has begun a blog.
Bradicich's posts so far show a slant toward blade servers, not surprisingly given their importance to the server market and IBM's product specifically. Also up his alley is a discussion of the Geneseo initiative to let special-purpose accelerator chips use the PCI bus to boost mainstream processors.
But there's other food for thought as well.
"I was thinking a while back about what a great invention putting things in alphabetical order is. That guy ought to get an award or something," Bradicich wrote. "Think of what a great time-saver that is. You go up to vote, give you name, and 'bam,' they find it. Imagine how long you'd be standing there if putting things in alphabetical order was not invented."
IBM has created a mainframe version of PHP, widely used scripting-language software that lets servers create Web pages on the fly from information stored in a database.
The company published the work on its AlphaWorks Web site for research projects it wants others to try out. The software requires version 1.6 or later of the z/OS mainframe operating system. The software uses version 5.1.2 of PHP.
The Union Bank of California is standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the software company said Monday. The bank moved away from AIX, IBM's version of Unix, and also is testing the waters with Red Hat's JBoss Java server software and the open-source MySQL database software.
"Open-source technology plays a major role in the customer-facing sales and service product line,ï¿? said Mok Choe, the bank's chief technology officer. He said the company is moving its Web site to a "horizontal" architecture involving larger numbers of inexpensive servers.
Update: MySQL is included with Red Hat's operating system product and can be downloaded for free from MySQL's Web site, but in this case the bank also has a direct relationship with the company, said Zack Urlocker, vice president of marketing for MySQL.
The Eclipse Foundation, the open-source programming tool project that's had a sometimes-fractious relationship with Java creator Sun Microsystems, has joined the Java governance system Sun established years ago.
The foundation announced the move Friday, noting in a press release that Eclipse is used in several Java projects administered by that governance system, called the Java Community Process. Eclipse initially was established as a Java programming tool project by IBM, which has been a Java ally but didn't always see eye to eye with Sun about the technology's fate.
The move shouldn't raise eyebrows, said Mike Milinkovich, the Eclipse Foundation's executive director, in a blog posting Thursday.
"There are some who are going to view this story through the lens of the historically frosty relationship with Sun, and try to color this as somehow controversial," Milinkovich said. "But I really don't see any basis for controversy here. Sun has always acknowledged that Eclipse is part of the larger Java ecosystem, and we've always used JCP specifications. It's simply time to recognize that."
SAN FRANCISCO--IBM will return to the Consumer Electronics Show in January, the first time it's had a presence at the Las Vegas convention in 10 years.
No, don't expect to see a Big Blue-branded digital media player to take on the iPod. Instead, the company will tout lower-level technology that gadget makers can use, such as technology for nearly instantaneous translation of speech into Arabic or Chinese, said Mike Fay, an IBM communications executive, in a gathering here with reporters on Thursday.
IBM makes most of its money selling business-oriented products such as servers and server software as well as services for those same customers. And although it sold off its stake in the personal computer business to Lenovo, it has some indirect connections to the consumer world such as manufacturing gaming console processors.
The public is invited to listen to and participate in a CNET News.com interview of Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM's vice president of technical strategy and innovation, in the Second Life virtual realm.
The interview is scheduled for 10:30 a.m. PDT (and Second Life time) Tuesday, Dec. 12, at CNET's Second Life office. Second Life users can find the site by searching for "CNET Networks" and teleporting, or can click on this SLURL, which will bring up a browser offering teleport to the CNET Second Life office. The interview is in the auditorium on the third floor of the CNET office, and the easiest way to get in is to fly to the open balcony to the right of the building's main entrance.
Wladawksy-Berger over the years has overseen the launch of IBM initiatives in e-commerce, Linux and open-source software, and on-demand computing. He also leads the company's university relations office.
IBM is bringing Microsoft Windows into the fold of its high-end graphics visualization system, but plans more sophisticated network abilities for its current Linux-based product in 2007.
IBM's Deep Computing Visualization technology, which uses Linux today, will work on Big Blue's Windows workstations as well in December, the company told customers Tuesday. Specifically, IBM will release Windows support for its Remote Visual Networking (RVN) software that lets geographically distant co-workers collaborate by sharing graphical images over an encrypted network connection.
IBM already offers a separate Linux tool called the Scalable Visual Networking (SVN), which lets a cluster of computers collectively render a large image shown with a collection of displays or projectors. That technology can be useful for "immersive" graphics that surround viewers, for example to improve the realism of a flight simulator. SVN for Windows will be available in the first half of 2007, IBM said.
Also in the first half of 2007, IBM plans to introduce an SVN-related technology for Linux, Scalable Parallel Visual Networking (SPVN). SPVN will be more flexible, easier to upgrade and more cost-effective, IBM said.
IBM's push into visualization coincides with the fading of Silicon Graphics, which once specialized in the area but these days prefers to call itself just SGI. "Visualization...is an insignificant portion of our business today," SGI Chief Executive Dennis McKenna said in September.
Novell on Wednesday announced the availability of a product that bundles its Suse Linux Enterprise Server with several IBM software packages and is designed to run on IBM x86 servers. The product, called the Integrated Stack for Suse Linux Enterprise, includes Novell's operating system and IBM's WebSphere Community Edition, DB2 Express-C and Centeris Likewise Management Suite.
The software support subscription for the first year costs $349, Novell said.
SAN JOSE, Calif.--If there was any doubt that a chip's clock frequency is no longer the preeminent measure of the chip's worth, a senior Intel chip designer put the idea to rest Tuesday.
"We're not focused on gigahertz at all," Dileep Bandarkar, architect at large in Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, said in a speech at the Fall Processor Forum here. Performance matters, but only within the context of power consumption, and clock speed is just one way of boosting performance for the company's server chip lines, Xeon and Itanium, he said.
"It's about delivered performance. Frequency doesn't really matter," Bandarkar said. "With Itanium, frequency has not been a major thing. We've focused on performance on server benchmarks--TPC-C, TPC-H, SAP. We never had that same megahertz mania on the Itanium line. Now, even on the Xeon line, megahertz is just one of the ways of doing more performance. If I can get the same performance on flat megahertz or even down, that's OK."
That's position contrasted sharply with IBM's. Brad McCredie, chief architect of IBM's Power6 processor, had to restrain himself from boasting that the new server chip is performing at the high end of the company's promised 4GHz to 5GHz range.
"We're coming in above target, and we'll be delivering some very nice frequencies next year," McCredie said.
Intel has been publicly stepping away from clock frequency since 2004, but the internal discussion has been going on longer than that.
"I gave a talk 10 years ago at Gartner that frequency doesn't matter," Bandarkar said, then quipped, "Nobody in Intel management saw it so they didn't fire me at the time."
IBM in January began giving away its low-end Express-C version of its DB2 database at no cost. But to hear Big Blue tell it, the company isn't just promoting its products by giving them away for free, it's pioneering an innovative adaptation of the open-source software movement.
"We're using the open-source licensing model but not the development model. We've learned we can separate the two," said Scott Handy, IBM's senior vice president of Linux and open source, in a news conference here at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo on Tuesday. By offering the software without charging a license fee, "We're testing the business-model side of open source," he said.
One of the merits of open-source software is indeed that, being free, anyone can download it and try it out. But cost isn't the defining definition of open-source software or its progenitor, "free software" espoused by the Free Software Foundation. As FSF founder Richard Stallman is fond of saying, his movement emphasizes "free as in spech, not free as in beer."
Those freedoms include developers' rights to copy, modify and distribute the software's underlying source code--rights that definitely don't come with DB2 or with other freely available but proprietary software such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
