A Quarter-Million Dollar Box For A Free OS

popeyethesailor writes: "According to a CNET story, the server startup Egenera will be debut its high end Linux servers for financial services customers, running Red Hat Linux. An earlier CNETstory details their design." That's a hefty pricetag, but the companies they hope to sell to ("market--financial-services companies and service providers") aren't shy about investing in tools. Of course, an S/390 isn't cheap either, no matter how many GNU/Linux images it's running ;)

Comments

Nice Grammar

[David P]

to ("market--financial-services companies and service providers") aren't shy about investing in tools. Of course

Don't forget the "that", pretty boy!

Re:Nice Grammar

[Anonymous Coward]

WOW, you lose. Read it again, failed grammar-nazi.

Re:Nice Grammar

[David P]

Aww, shucks!

/me throws his hat in the dust.

images

[Anonymous Coward]

heres and image for ya

post #2247883

[negativekarmanow tm]

Yowza!

Everything old is new again

[Perianwyr Stormcrow]

It's... a mainframe.

Unix returns to its home.

Re:Everything old is new again

[nobody/incognito]

excuse me? unix' home is a minimcomputer, not a mainframe.

-- nobody

ps: unix ticks its billion second next saturday!

Re:Everything old is new again

[Ami Ganguli]

Actually it's more like a really dense server farm.

Possible markets? The only thing that really comes to mind for me is ISPs. This could replace racks of essentially standalone machines quite nicely. But of course that's not the best market to go after right now.

I'm wondering if more conventional companies would go for this. There are lots of companies that have a ridiculous number of little servers floating around. If they had been deployed on a beast like this from the start then they could have saved a lot of money. But now that they have all these little servers, it's hard to imagine them throwing them all out and replacing them with one box.

Re:Everything old is new again

[nobody/incognito]

er, minicomputer. whatever that is ... they haven't been spotted around these parts for years. gone the way of the wooly mammoth, i s'pose.

nobody

Re:Everything old is new again

[GdoL]

The really big financial houses, who do real math simulation to where apply your money, need strong and reliable machines, aka, LINUX+GOOD HARDWARE !!

Re:Everything old is new again

[Ami Ganguli]

Then there's render farms (for movies) and various scientific applications.

But it still seems like a pretty small market. Of course, a small company doesn't need to sell that many boxes to survive, so maybe that's ok.

Re:Everything old is new again

[Anonymous Coward]

dude, hey sorry to digress, but last main frame i had to deal with was of the R&R class. that was so long ago i've almost ready forgot. funny thing is i most never forget. Now i've had some seriously ill acts upon the DOE dealings we, and i speak of MY time at various DOE sites of crud. last logic that have to server was ill logical. but thats an early morning ago. Facts can be stated. such that any more or less on, idiot, WILL realize the jive that often times go on. Now i gamble and jest a lot, so you will have to excuse me but last i was checked out. the facts of logic were such that the DOE's gang of numb nuts, ie: theif'n bit of nerds that they were then an hmm, leme see, i'll wage all a guess to say they still, deal with UNETHICAL corporations. NOW last i dealt with friendly take overs via, the stocks of market, there was not a Scope of focus on the friends such that we have to rewind to such unpleast times of yore. Now, listen up, we've the best scribes of legal potential to lock up and TAKE down all of M$ as if it happened in 1994. Last eye had to speak such the jive of that time, and the jive being, UNETHICAL treatment to people that worked at that time. Now this is berry berry will chill out facts. however i have this constant taint upon my mouth as the local water supply last i had to check it out puts, fluride in it. now well and good is hard enamel of a teeth state. but. this jo da never has to ever worry about pain, as pain is pure mental. now we do not wanna, combat upon all these local states of time, but hey i'll rip all my teeth out to prove an example. ja most high last in my land of dea was illegal. and that is bogus, base of fact on LOGIC behind, the plant matter, it being cana bliss and what not. of use know buy the simle facts that it is a weed, and can be crop harvest'd last i bother to check no less than 3 times per year. Now papa of this kid, i know he will get a kick outa this, as i can rememeber when he when down and was saved by the rope. now, i like to think i'll 100% hill billy, ie: if you dare dispute the facts and myths of Legend. Well then you are stupid. as there is NO SS last i check'd out that could stop 7 targets flying under wings of russian hush now kid ya might piss some one off, but this hill jack is no longer laced. I'm'N'I of ja way of mass dissproportion such that if the cards wanna joke a day or so longer we can fly birds, that they will never see into there home of ugly dispropo. read the kids track record. listen to the track record, try a Dare against a record of 7 friends already of they will shut up and fly when this record ever likes to stopy. ka ka ka peace it? alph bravo wang chung. zai myth tis dis of my "nombre" = da wei in a langua frank0. 0 in and you will see i never ever joke about peace. and i never ever wanna see my dreams not realiz. ja way of the most hight back'n. so to speak. peace to all. this pirate sails on a 7th sea, if really needy, and trust in this jack of jest, that it will = drop'n all power lines within DC proper, in 24-7, prior to that i'd like to bet u could favor a Reason why the lies of myth must continue futher. sig alpha. Jude alpha over.

Re:Everything old is new again

[Anonymous Coward]

What killed much of mainframes was a its miniscule developer community. No one could afford to develop on them. A powerful machine that has no software does not do much good. This is not going back but it has solved the problem big systems used to suffer from which is poor access due to high costs.
Suse is giving away their distributions to high schools and running it on donated PCs; when did this happen in MVS?

Re:Everything old is new again

[Rotten168]

UNIX has character-driven IO, which would create unnecessary overhead, because the processor processes every mistaken 'n' or 'p' you push. Mainframes like OS's which temporary store characters on the terminals until a key is pressed which then process the information.

Maybe someone else can explain it better.

Re:Everything old is new again

[GdoL]

But they sure will sell the know-how, experience,etc. And there yuo will find the real money. Probably what they are selling is this, the experience, not only a box.

Re:Everything old is new again

[Anonymous Coward]

Or more generally, Unix has traditionally been for interactive multiuser uses, while mainframes focus on batch processing.

Re:Everything old is new again

[Anonymous Coward]

Well said! I remember when the XT370 came out the high hopes we (VM/CMS fans) had that people could actually have a 370 at home and we would see all sorts of new VM software, shareware etc. Alas, it was not to be; they only worked in conjunction with a "real" 370 as IBM was afraid of losing mainframe sales. So we had thousands developing for DOS and almost nobody for VM and look what happened ... VM (at least the CMS part) is almost forgotten although in every way it was superior to DOS.

Re:Everything old is new again

[Anonymous Coward]

This is known as the "pseudo-conversational" mode of the CISC (the TP monitor) programming, although it is possible to code in "conversational" mode similiar to character-mode Unix programs. There is no active process (e.g. shells) while waiting for terminal I/O. This is the secret for IBM mainframes to handle thousands of "concurrent" users.

4GB RAM?

[exceed]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't all these servers going to run with 4GB of RAM? What good will they do running Linux when Linux can't currently scale past 4GB of RAM?

Re:4GB RAM?

[Tomun]

2.4.x supports >4GB of ram.
See http://www.spack.org/index.cgi/LinuxRamLimits

Re:4GB RAM?

[pdiaz]

common misconception!

Linux can scale to more of 4GB of ram. The problem is that, in the x86 arch, a process
(hardware limitation) can't redirect more than
4GB of ram. That doesn't mean that you can have, say, 8 4GB of ram processes. And this is aplicable to the x86, I don't know what happens with big iron beasts

BTW, a s/390 does not run a single linux image

Re:4GB RAM?

[dj28]

Only a CPU can utilize ram over 4GB. An application (webserver, email server, etc) cant.

Re:4GB RAM?

[battlemage]

I'm not sure here, but AFAIK Linux 2.4 supports more than 4GB RAM using Intels Physical Address Extension (PAE), which every PPro or newer should have.

I know this is a workaround, not a clean solution, but the problem is the 32bit architecture here, not Linux itself.

At least I'm sure I saw more than one announcement of a "linux monster" like this in the past.

Re:4GB RAM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Abnd the whole 4GB limit only applies to linux/x86 and other 32-bit archs anyway. On a 64-bit architecture with true 64-bit addressing, linux is fine

Re:4GB RAM?

[Wesley Felter]

Besides the fact that Linux can access more than 4GB of RAM, this thing isn't a single server; it's a cluster. If each of the nodes has 4GB of RAM, that adds up to a lot.

???

[labratuk]

A $1/4 Million machine?

With 96 Xeons in it?

...and they're lazy enough to just go and run RedHat on it?

When this fucks up its not going to look good for the linux community.

And yes this post is probably going to get me the most troll ratings I've ever had, but I had to say it.

How can they be naive enough to have such a poerful machine and run a _desktop_ targeted distribution on it?

...and we get at M$ for getting people to run windows on their webservers.

Re:???

[praedor]

Pardon me, but "desktop targetted"? My ass. Redhat is is more insterested in server space with desktop as a (close) second. Do you assume that if something is designed to install easily or have an array of choices for a GUI environment it couldn't POSSIBLY be targetted at being a server?

CLI is not a necessity to be a server (a MacOS X system can be a fine server and it has a real purdy GUI).

Re:???

[bsdfish]

Well, how should I say this, RedHat's standard user distribution would not make the best server in the world. It's true that RedHat has enterprise-level solutions, but I would say that there are other OSes(*BSD, Debian come to mind) that offer superior serving.

As to your argument about the CLI, I am quite sure that a good CLI interface is more important than a pretty GUI for a server. It's much easier to handle things on a lower level if you know what you're doing. MaxOS X . . . I never tried using it as a server, but I can't imagine how it gets good performance -- it seems so slugish for workstation use. Remember -- in any case, GUI takes up resources. . .

Re:???

[Anonymous Coward]

MaxOS X . . . I never tried using it as a server, but I can't imagine how it gets good performance -- it seems so slugish for workstation use. Remember -- in any case, GUI takes up resources. . .

Apple's website runs on OS X... probably OS X Server. The slow GUI will be fixed this month with the 10.1 update!

Another destined failure?

[GreyPoopon]

Could somebody please explain to me where the $250,000 value is? Is this just another case of bad allocation of venture capital? The $250,000 is the BASE price of a system that can hold up to 24 cpu boards that CAN be connected to a network or CAN be connected to a drive array. The stated purpose in the article is to provide redundancy for failover. The only cool thing I can see is that if a cpu fails, another cpu will assume its name, characteristics and storage space. What wasn't clear was whether or not all 24 CPU boards were redundant, or whether you could have several redundant machines within the same "cabinet." But there wasn't anything really magical going on here. These boards would contain either 2 or 4 high-end processors (just over 1 GHz). I can see a price tag of maybe $40,000 or something, but certainly nowhere near the order they are asking. Anybody have any insight on this?

Re:Another destined failure?

[smaughster]

I think that for such a price, you do not only get a piece of hardware, running a piece of OS with various pieces of software on it, which may account for $40,000 or something, but you also get support, based on a good service level agreement. For businesses, good guaranteed support is worth much more then just hardware and os.

Re:Another destined failure?

[mrfiddlehead]

This is a solution meant for the "big guys". The one's who require absolute, or near absolute failover. The suits are willing to spend this kind of cash because they're looking for piece of mind. I'm sure we could all slap something together for them in a week or two that would do the same for 40K but would it keep runniing for a couple years with minimal attention and would it be easy to configure and keep running?

If you think you can do it for 40K then you've obviously got yourself a golden opportunity, call up the venture capitalists today! Okay, tomorrow.

Re:Another destined failure?

[GreyPoopon]

This is a solution meant for the "big guys".

Obviously. :)

The suits are willing to spend this kind of cash because they're looking for piece of mind.

I'm glad to hear that they find peace of mind in paying these kinds of prices, but I honestly don't think that even for the $250K price tag that they will get the performance and service they are expecting.

If you think you can do it for 40K then you've obviously got yourself a golden opportunity, call up the venture capitalists today! Okay, tomorrow.

Nah, I'd need at least a week. :) But seriously, I think that after the $40K level, there's really no additional value that can be added. Sure, they can add tons of service and support agreements, but if there's a drive array failure, the whole thing is down anyway. If lightening strikes the building and fries all of the power supplies, there's no redundancy. I don't know, maybe they are planning on setting up a full repair shop right next to all of their customers. Somehow though, I think that at the first "incident," this company is going belly-up. Am I being too harsh?

Re:Another destined failure?

[Anonymous Coward]

You probably are being too harsh. IBM Mainframes have MTBFs in the 50-year range. That's reliable.

An IBM mainframe will "call home" and order a replacement part as soon as it detects fluctuations in performance indicative of imminent failure.

When the CPUs are running, they're each really two CPUs - at a per-instruction level on the silicon itself, if the results from both CPUs
differ, the CPU is "retired".

There's similar failsafes and interlocks all through the system.

And the I/O throughput is both phenomenal, and transactional.

The PC has a MTBF of a few years, often much less. Thus, while you might get equivalent computing power, once you get up to a few hundred PCs, you spend as much time running around "changing lightbulbs" - i.e. replacing PCs that have failed, as doing useful work.

The PC hardware architecture is a "toy" compared to a mainframe, or even a commercial unix box, or (ironically, given the amiga's "toy" image) even an old amiga motherboard.

Re:Another destined failure?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry: further context. That is to say a _real_ mainframe (ca. $1 million), not a box full of x86 chips, is the way to go for reliability.

Re:Another destined failure?

[Object Relational]

Its M$ legacy again. Unless you pay tons of $$$ PHB won't think that the solution is going to work for him.

Re:Another destined failure?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you guys get it..

How do you cable 96 CPU's in a single rack?

How do you manage that, both physically and logistically? How do you do it cost effectively when it is all gigabit? Do you call Cisco and pay their per-port prices?

There's a lot more to it than plugging a bunch of systems into a switch.

I don't know what Egenera brings to the table, or what they do and do not attempt to solve.. It doesn't surprise me that they're keeping their details under wraps until they are good and ready.

I do think it is rather funny that some slashdoter's immediately think they can spend a couple of hours at Fry's and duplicate anything anyone else does in a weekend.

And when they figure out they can't fit that many CPU's in a rack and cool them, they're just going to fire Spice up on the PC, bang out a design, and call their buddies in Malaysia for some quick prototypes. Right. Get real..

One other thing.. the RLX CPU's are *TOYS*. They may be okay for serving static porn, but for today's bloating dynamic work-loads and real-world applications, they are grossly inadequate.

Re:Another destined failure?

[Anonymous Coward]

I love how you bots can divert a discussion about mainframe prices into dwelling on 'M$'. First of all, Microsoft is a cheapo vendor compared to everyone else this side of RedHat, but I'm sure your world stops pretty much there. Second, you really meant to say 'IBM'.

Re:Another destined failure?

[GavK]

I think that after the $40K level, there's really no additional value that can be added

You are plain wrong I'm afraid, the fact that you haven't seen any tasks where more money equals more value just means you aint seen nothin'

Re:Another destined failure?

[Gigs]

its surprising to me that people don't see the value in high end server machines (Sun Enterprise, IBM mainframes) but then most of you have never had to poll 35 international long distance switches at and AVERAGE of 7000 transactions a minute. And then be comfortable enough to walk in to the data center infront of the Execs and pull the network connection out of the back of the main server, to prove to the guys they are touring thru the building that we have serious failover protection. When you can do that people suddenly don't care about the price they paid just that the can sleep at night... :-)

Can you imagine...

[Anonymous Coward]

no, no I can't.

redhat high availability server?

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like they bought a copy of the Redhat High Availability server for about $2000 and loaded it into a rack of CPU's.

Pretty much any competant tech could do it. I've had customers running systems like this for Geophysical 3D Migrations for over a year now. No big deal really.

It sure took me forever to find a "product" in their website. Mostly just organisational and marketing bullshit.

Re:redhat high availability server?

[WildBeast]

And why not? RedHat are great at marketing, although it's not my distribution of choice, it sure as hell is my favorite Linux company. RedHat is the best at making you pay for something you can get for free.

We're heading back to the '80s

[sticks_us]

Here's why:

1. The dot-com boom has pretty much evaporated, leaving the realm of "professional computer work" to geeky types with college degrees and bad hair (I'm one of them). The work that is done is now more mundane and laborious(billing, insurance, reporting, etc) than $20K-bonus-scooter-riding-dot-com-hipster-streamin g-multimedia stuff. (I'm not bitter-I'm jealous)

2. Computers are now getting bigger and more mainframe-y (See comment above). More and more enterprises are centralizing mission-critical functions, primarily for ease of management as well as power and security. Proof:. We've already got Linux/390, the Solaris E10K, there's some newbigandexciting Intel box out there I keep hearing about that has 64-way SMP and now this.

Anyone have the newest Creative Computing?

Re:We're heading back to the '80s

[it's a culture thing]

Speaking as another geeky types with college degrees and bad hair who works on things like this (distributed data storage/high end computing) I'd agree with point 1 & disagree with point two.

There was a revolution to put computing power on the desk, we did it, it's been done, it's time to move on to more interesting things. A century or two ago the commoners knew nothing about medicine leaving everything to the *professionals*. Now adays most of my dept can do CPR, basic first aid, diagnosise of common ailments. This doesn't make them doctors - just as using Office doesn't make people Computer Scientists.

Point 2. Computers are now getting bigger and more mainframe-y The defining point of the mainframes was their fixed location for processing, with requests being sent from essentailly dumb terminals.

The current research interest is in tying high end systems together as a utility Grid like resource where lots of mainframes are tied together to either provide a specific service or to do the job in the quickest time possible. This deviates from the mainframe concept in the eighties in the idea that there is no one central point for the system and that processing, storage etc can be done wherever is easist/cheapest without having to spend money on redundant resources.

Cases to prove my point are: IBMs investment of $4 billion for server farms/grid archietcture for businesses, the dutch governments four location grid, the Uk governments £120 million investment in a National Grid with lots of nice new supercomputers & data storage all linked together, NSFs $53 million investment in a Teraflop+ processing grid shared between SDSC, NSCA & two other sites.

Re:We're heading back to the '80s

[King_TJ]

Hmm... interesting points. I've been doing a lot of thinking about the mainframe/dumb-terminal vs. power-user PCs on all desktops models lately.

I work in I.T. for a business (7 locations around the U.S.) that is in the process of centralizing our servers and storage right now. We started out with VT-100 dumb terminals and DEC VAX servers originally, and as the PC revolution progressed, moved to a much more distributed model. (We had 2 file/print servers installed on-site at each of our locations, and tape backups were done independently at each location.)

Now, we've invested heavily in Citrix Metaframe and a storage area network solution, and power is becoming centralized again.

I think the primary reason people moved away from a centralized computing model was the rise of the GUI interface. Microsoft and Apple brought the GUI to the forefront, and millions of individuals became comfortable using it. Despite all of its problems, it made it possible for a whole generation of workers to learn the basics of using a computer at home. Instead of training someone in exactly what menu selections to choose in a custom-written app on a dumb terminal at one particular business, you could train them in general PC usage concepts instead. The knowledge carried over to anything you put in front of them.

Now, the GUI has been fully integrated to the point where it's feasible to make a dumb-terminal (now renamed "thin client") that works just like the full-power desktop PC. For reasons of security and ease of administration, I.T. has always wanted to centralize the PC environment. Until now, though, the benefits of using GUI desktops outweighed that desire.

The challenge, now, is convincing users to let go of some of the control we gave them in the 90's. Where I work, our more knowledgeable users feel punished when you take that Pentium III off their desk and replace it with a thin client. You can overcome some of that by upgrading their monitor. (Everyone likes a bigger, brighter screen.) Still, they resist when they discover they can't install those 30-day free trial programs anymore, or they can't load a driver for that custom 6-button cordless mouse they bought without I.T. knowing about it.

I think the final solution will really be a mix of high-end PCs and thin clients. The high-end PCs will be able to enter and exit the Citrix Metaframe environment at will, while everyone else "lives" in the Citrix environment all day long. People who can give legitimate reasons to keep a PC will do so. Otherwise, they're getting the thin client.

In summary, we might have come full circle, but today, users have been on both sides of the fence. You'll see more of them wanting a mix - rather than one model or the other.

Re:We're heading back to the '80s

[PD]

Anyone have the newest Creative Computing?

Now that's a blast from the past. Used to love that old mag. That and 80 Micro.

Anyway, I'm waiting for IBM to come out with the IBM Personal Computer code named "We really mean it this time."

Re:We're heading back to the '80s

[Syberghost]

IBM is even running TV ads now for Linux on the S/390.

progress ;)

[^Z]

What we have seen 10 yrs ago? Last-generation hardware being used for servers. Now we see newer and better software running on older hardware designs (e. g. S/390). Do the math. Next generation of even more powerful software will run on even older (yet refurbished) hardware designs: expect Linux 4.x run on 8192 processor UNIVAC, with 5.0 kernel for 50GHz ENIAC in the works.

Re:progress ;)

[Anonymous Coward]

Now we see newer and better software running on older hardware designs (e. g. S/390).

I was going to reply pointing out your idiocy, but I decided you're too idiotic to learn from it. So, GO LUNIX!!!!!!!!

Just like old times

[mac123]

Sounds like 5 years ago. I remember like it was yesterday.

Running 1000 user Netware 3.x on a Netframe 450. (I especially remember the $5000/1GB drives)

This "new" architecture sounds a lot like a repackage of that idea. They have multiple server blades in 1 chassis with a proprietary (800Mhz) backplane to communicate. They could even run Netware/OS2 and NT in the same chassis.

This new one even has the "Rcon" (lights out) capability (hee hee).

Enterprise credibility

[TheLoneCabbage]

This is a verry good trend when you stop to think about it.

One of the key issue technical column writers have been b!tching about is that Linux lacks enterprise server credibility.

With Linux driving mainframes and massive Credit Card / insurance company type machines who could complain about Linux's capabilities to handle their buisness demands. (if it can balance the budget for a fortune 500, it can host your stupid ASP/Intranet/fileserver/DB)

Think about the (Ugh! I'm gonna be sick) marketing angle... the average small buisness, or even home user, can have access to the same toys as multi-billion dollar corporations and goverments. (barring the obvious memmory and other hardware limits, this is about perception after all)

And it's not about a free OS. It's about the ability to develop the app on a PC and recompile it to run on a computer that makes Deep Thought look like Rain Man. And on top of all that the big system will work just like any other linux box running X. So it's easy to administer (wow! Who would have thought to say that about Linux!!)

Re:Enterprise credibility

[Anonymous Coward]

hmmm. They people in my office @ work (The Linux/BSD & MacOS users) say NT4/5 lacks enterprise server scalability. They say it crumbles under the load.

Re:Enterprise credibility

[TheLoneCabbage]

No question about it. NT's scalablity has never been verry good, but that's the problem with refrain, if you say something enough times, eventually people start to believe you.

NT's multi-cpu and native SMB support don't make up for it's internal memory bugs and enevitable system failures.

In my mind there is no question that Linux's (or really any Unix) superb range of database support, combined with the reliablity of Apache (or Tux) and PHP as a development language is a fantastic combination. Linux out scales NT easily not only in it's culstering capablities but also it's portablity (most anything developed on Linux can be ported in short order).

But the problem lies not in reality, but perception. Nerds can scream at the wall's till there throughts are bare, but it wont impress the suit's that sign the checks. All they understand is MS is a big company that makes good-enough software that they "understand" (read hand holding). No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft (I'd fire the f#cker!!) And that's the real problem.

TCO

[onion2k]

This just goes to show that the total cost of ownership for Linux/Unix/NT/2k has very little to do with the license for the OS at all. Hardware, admin, the software running on the box and so on more than make up the the trivial price differences between most server operating systems. Just because a Linux CD might be free doesn't mean running it on an enterprise box is going to save you a single penny.

Re:TCO

[mindstrm]

Right. Unless you are talking about a large MS install, in which case yearly licensing and forced upgrade purchases make a significant dent in your operating budget.

Re:TCO

[Anonymous Coward]

Much of my training was on Linux at home on Redhat5.1 and I have a job as an admin on Solaris. What is your point? If I did that on Windows I would have had to buy NT + C++ and VB compilers and Access, and SQL server on a modern machine. I did this on a 166Mz. Training costs on Linux are nil as I created a training environment for myself on Linux. Apache C and Postgres. Do you find it surprising I can do Solaris and Informix(and this is just similar)? Even a $1000 hit at the training stage raises labor cost a bunch. Free software lowers the cost all the way from traing to production as well as licence management overhead that bits us in the ass every year. It just goes to show you do not know the implications

If software prices are trivial why don't vendors just raise the price? If I were a stock holder.......

Re:TCO

[The Raven]

The yearly licensing fees even for MS BackOffice are still overshadowed by the cost of the one or two experienced technical people to manage and maintain the servers.

I am one of the rare people who works on both sides of the fence, and likes both sides. Both *nix/BSD and Microsoft have advantages and disadvantages. Though I don't use it or like it myself, I even concede that Apple has its place.

Every platform has benefits and drawbacks, and TCO for a MS platform office isn't that different from TCO for a *nix based office. My personal opinion is that TCO is best when you mix both services together along with people experienced with both, and use whatever platform works best for the task at hand.

Re:TCO

[kimihia]

This requires big metal because it needs big power! Nobody said the hardware was free.

If you spend megabucks on hardware, not having to pay for the software softens the blow.

On the other hand, requiring a bunch of machines running Windows to do the exact same task can be expensive too.

Linux is more cost effective because you aren't shelling out several billion in software.

Only a 1/4 of a mil of dollars? were we speaking

[Anonymous Coward]

of usa dollars? that is cheap. last i bother to check. last, i called via hmm was it AT&T, ad DC house hung up on me. yes folks, that is neither hear, nor there. I was rude lee interupted from a communication request, last i checked into things, to do so, was A)not of justice, and I) not in the lest, issue. wierd, how hard it is to get a serious prime modal disscussion of existance this time of day. mark, check. best of care, too all.

nigs

[Anonymous Coward]

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SECURITY: UnixReview: Thinking about Security
(Sep 3, 2001, 13:05 UTC) (236 reads) (0 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
"This month, I thought I'd take a slight detour to talk about security. The Code Red worm and its sequels have been in the news a great deal, and admins running *Nix servers and Apache might be getting a little complacent in the security department, figuring that all is well as long as they're not running IIS."

GNOME Summary for 2001-08-19 - 2001-09-01
(Sep 3, 2001, 12:19 UTC) (549 reads) (0 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
GNOME accessibility, Sun's Desktop Division making headway, GNOME 2.0 Status Interview: James Henstridge and libglade, Gnome Foundation news, Ximian shrink-wrap software, Hacker Activity, more.

SECURITY: NASA secures 802.11b
(Sep 3, 2001, 10:47 UTC) (0 reads) (0 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
"It seems that the inherent insecurities in the Wired Equivalent Privacy protocol for Wireless networks only increased the determination of the boffins over at NASA, who've managed to secure a wireless network with 'an off-the-shelf PC running the OpenBSD operating system, an Apache web server, the Internet Software Consortium DHCP server, the IPF firewall software -- all freeware."

Linux Journal: LinuxWorld Coverage
(Sep 3, 2001, 08:29 UTC) (1244 reads) (0 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
Two from Linux Journal's Doc Searls: - "LinuxWorld Expo just started, and it looks like a neutron bomb went off. The back wall, I am told, used to be booths. They're gone. So is FreeBSD, with their pretty girls dressed up like devils, handing out little devil horns and hugging geeks for cameras all over the floor. So is Lineo, which actually is here, but not as an exhibitor. My colleague Don Marti tells me Lineo just put on a great press conference that featured software for detecting GPL violations, or something like that. LynuxWorks is boothless, too."

Dr. Dobb's Embedded: Industrial-Strength Linux
(Sep 3, 2001, 06:18 UTC) (1276 reads) (0 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
"... One thing that caught my eye this month was a survey by Evans Data showing that Linux is still increasing its share in the marketplace. I can attest to this, since I recently got an inquiry about putting Linux into an industrial battery charger. If Linux is reaching into the industrial arena, it has well and truly arrived."

PR: SuSE invites High Schools Across the US to Participate In SuSE's Free Linux Program
(Sep 3, 2001, 04:29 UTC) (1108 reads) (4 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
"The announcement of the second phase emphasizes the development of open source computing as the IT standard for operating systems and applications worldwide. Initially, SuSE will sponsor 2,000 boxes of SuSE Linux throughout US public and private high schools."

Linux Gazette #70, September 2001, is Available
(Sep 3, 2001, 03:58 UTC) (1871 reads) (0 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
"Linux Gazette...Making Linux just a little more fun!"

Alan Cox: Linux 2.4.9-ac6
(Sep 3, 2001, 02:45 UTC) (2030 reads) (0 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
Links, changelog within.

Gnotices: gdkxft 1.0 released - Anti-Aliased fonts for GTK+ 1.2
(Sep 3, 2001, 01:27 UTC) (2186 reads) (5 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
"gdkxft transparently adds anti-aliased font support to GTK+-1.2. Once you have installed it, you can run any (well, nearly any) existing GTK+ binary and see anti-aliased fonts in the GTK widgets. You don't need to recompile GTK+ or your applications."

LinuxGazette: Homer's Open Source Odyssey 2001: Classical Computing and a Brief History of OSS
(Sep 2, 2001, 23:47 UTC) (937 reads) (1 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
"The realm of open source and "classical computing" may represent a hybrid paradigm, wherein programming is closer in essence to physics and mathematics than it is to inventing the world's first functional airplane, or the first light bulb. One cannot patent scientific laws nor mathematical concepts, and thus physics and mathematics have always been open-source endeavours."

MachineOfTheMonth: Building a monster machine
(Sep 2, 2001, 22:02 UTC) (3112 reads) (15 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
"So what would we define as a monster machine? I defined a monster machine as being one over 1 Gigahertz for the cpu, at least 1 Gigabyte of RAM, at least 40 GB of hard drive space, a DVD-ROM drive so that I can watch DVD movies on my Linux box and the other usual assortment of items like a keyboard, mouse and speakers. The motherboard I wasn't too worried about what type it would be. I just went with the lowest cost one I could find that I felt was a fair quality. Maybe that's a bad decision. I'll find out soon."

TinyPlanet.ca: Debian GNU/Linux for BeOS Refugees
(Sep 2, 2001, 20:20 UTC) (1903 reads) (5 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
"The article leads the user through the installation of Debian GNU/Linux and ReiserFS, security updates, an upgrade to Woody, and the installation of X11, KDE, Koffice, and other applications. The reader will also learn some of the Zen of Debian, and gain an understanding of the routine maintenance that is required."

Linux Magazine: The Guru: Linux Magazine Interviews Dennis Ritchie
(Sep 2, 2001, 20:02 UTC) (3000 reads) (18 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
"I don't really distinguish between Linux and things that are more or less direct descendants of Unix. I think they're all the same at some level. Often, people ask me, 'Do you feel jealous about Linux being the big thing.' And the answer is no, for the same reason. I think they're the same.'"

UnixReview.com: NuSphere MySQL
(Sep 2, 2001, 18:07 UTC) (1189 reads) (0 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
"Overall, NuSphere MySQL is a pretty decent product. What it brings to the table is mainly convenience, but for many folks that's quite a bit. The Gemini table type is really the only thing that differentiates NuSphere's MySQL from the official MySQL release."

Mandrake Linux Community Newsletter -- Issue #11
(Sep 2, 2001, 16:01 UTC) (1377 reads) (0 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
This Week's Summary: Happy Birthday Linux!; MandrakeSoft events at LinuxWorld; Mandrake Linux PPC Final Release available; Awards & Accolades for Mandrake 8.0; Buying MandrakeSoft shares; Mandrake in the News; Business Case of the Week; Security-related Software Updates; Top Headlines from MandrakeForum.

IDG.net: Less traffic and fewer trinkets
(Sep 2, 2001, 14:00 UTC) (2038 reads) (16 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
"This summer's LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco was downsized. There were fewer vendors, much less swag, and the floor traffic was spotty -- sometimes heavy, sometimes light. The show reflected the general downturn in the economy, and especially in the tech sector. Linux is not dead and neither is the Linux desktop, despite the steady beat of its funeral dirge in the tres duh press."

LinuxDevices.com: A walk on the embedded side . . . of LinuxWorld
(Sep 2, 2001, 11:56 UTC) (1150 reads) (1 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
"Despite the disappointing turnout and diminished level of enthusiasm at the show, there was near-universal agreement that one thing seemed to have grown stronger over the past six to twelve months -- Embedded Linux. Although LinuxWorld does not focus on the embedded market, a host of new products, technologies, and strategies catering to the needs of embedded system and smart device developers and manufacturers was unveiled and showcased."

Help Net Security: A Comment on Bugtracking
(Sep 2, 2001, 10:26 UTC) (1042 reads) (5 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
"...if I discovered a bug, I would think very carefully if I should not inform the author before I submit a report to a security-site on the net. For what do you gain - except being first - when suddenly everyone knows the bug, but no alternative is available? Would it then not have been better if the author had had a few days more to work without pressure on a clean solution? "

SECURITY: Five Mandrake Linux Security Update Advisories: fetchmail, xli, WindowMaker, sendmail, xinetd
(Sep 2, 2001, 06:59 UTC) (1077 reads) (0 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
Mandrake has released five updates to fetchmail, xli, Window Maker, sendmail, and xinetd. Full details and download links on each within.

Linux Journal: You Can Get There from Here, Part 1 (the SquirrelMail Web Mail Package)
(Sep 2, 2001, 00:03 UTC) (2693 reads) (5 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
"Billed as "Webmail for Nuts", this is an e-mail package you need to check out. Squirrelmail is written in PHP with full IMAP support. It is themeable, customizable, includes an address book, supports MIME and more. Best of all, it is distributed free of charge under the GPL."

CNET: Commentary: Making the move to Linux
(Sep 1, 2001, 22:00 UTC) (5574 reads) (33 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
"...Microsoft's aggressive pricing is driving the momentum of Linux. Enterprise customers are angry about the larger bite that Microsoft is now taking out of their budgets with its latest Client Access License pricing. If a reliable version of Linux can be used on Web servers at a lower total cost of ownership, it will find enterprise customers ready to listen."

Linux Journal: Vi IMproved--Vim and Happy Hacking Keyboard Lite 2
(Sep 1, 2001, 20:09 UTC) (2906 reads) (4 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
"Vim enhances the original vi so you can edit faster, but the Happy Hacking series of keyboards removes features to achieve the same goal. There's no top row of function keys or anything right of Enter. Escape moves down to just left of the number one, which is why we're mentioning this keyboard in an review of a book about Vim--there'll be no more 'Mom, can you make me some sandwiches? I'm going to go hit Escape today, be back for dinner.'"

Linus Torvalds: Linux 2.4.10-pre3
(Sep 1, 2001, 20:07 UTC) (4394 reads) (1 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
"Ok, there's been a number of small merges, and VM cleanups etc. This should avoid kswapd spending any more CPU time than before, and fixes a number of annoying bugs. ChangeLog appended..."

Evild3D.net: A Look At VectorLinux 2.0
(Sep 1, 2001, 18:10 UTC) (2313 reads) (0 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
"...VL has almost become the defacto distribution for evil3D gaming boxes. Why? Small, quickly installed, and the ability to take on any sort of package you want to throw at it. Version 2.0 has recently been released by the VL team and has all the earmarks of being an even better distro. But, can the new edition keep up the trend of massive improvement over the last?" {

Linux.com: Setting Up a Home Computer Lab to Learn Linux Networking
(Sep 1, 2001, 16:04 UTC) (3781 reads) (3 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
"All you need are the space, hardware, and the software. In this article, I'll discuss each of these so that you too can set up your own lab."

IBM developerWorks: Words of wisdom from one of Linux's most vocal supporters [Jon "maddog" Hall]
(Sep 1, 2001, 14:09 UTC) (2553 reads) (0 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
"The problem is really that more traditional companies are not working with a clean slate; they have legacy systems that they want to integrate Linux into, but they can't just sweep whole systems aside during installation, because they need to maintain uptime availability. It's quite a bit different from building a whole new bank of Web servers and being able to plan from square one. In the future there will be a huge market for established companies who say 'My software is doing 90 to 95% of what I want it to do, and I'll pay someone to get that last 5%.' Well, it might cost 20 or 50 thousand dollars, but it'll be cheaper than retraining 100 people."

Why should open source software be used in schools?
(Sep 1, 2001, 12:07 UTC) (2851 reads) (9 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
"...throughout many school systems, the software in use on computers is closed and locked, making educators partners in the censorship of the foundational information of this new age. This software not only seeks to obscure how it works, but it also entraps the users' data within closed, proprietary formats which change on the whim of the vendor and which are protected by the bludgeon of the End User License Agreement. This entrapment of data is a strong, punitive incentive to purchase the latest version of the software, regardless of whether it suits the educational purposes better, thereby siphoning more of the school's limited resources away from the school's primary purpose. The use of such closed software in education may be justified only where no suitable open source solution exists."

CNET: Chipmakers angle for Linux support
(Sep 1, 2001, 10:10 UTC) (2449 reads) (2 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
"'Linux gets software into market more quickly than waiting for support from Microsoft,' said Mercury Research analyst Dean McCarron. 'Linux is a wonderful operating system for rapid deployment. The Microsoft operating systems ultimately get used in very large volume, but when (a chip) is first coming out, those operating systems aren't typically available.'"

PCWorld.com: Linux Desktop Products Grow
(Sep 1, 2001, 10:06 UTC) (3484 reads) (7 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
"Reports of Linux's death on the desktop have been greatly exaggerated. So says a small group of vendors at LinuxWorld Expo this week. Surrounded by scores of booths hyping everything from a "secure server-side Java platform" to "parallel supercompilers," we found several offerings proving that the dream of an open source desktop is nowhere near dead, and that users are not about to be neglected by the open source community."

2.4.9 Based x86-64 Linux Kernel Snapshot Released
(Sep 1, 2001, 05:19 UTC) (3027 reads) (1 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
A new x86-64 Linux kernel snapshot is available.

ZDNet Closes AppWatch
(Sep 1, 2001, 05:03 UTC) (2946 reads) (17 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
"It's been nearly a year since CNET Networks acquired John Rowell's directory of Linux distributions and other open-source software. We're proud to have brought this excellent site to our ZDNet audience during a time when open source became a key consideration for IT decision makers everywhere. It is with regret, therefore, that we announce the closure of AppWatch.com."

Roundup: Microsoft's European Antitrust Problems, an Arizona Protest, Marked XP Betas, and more
(Aug 31, 2001, 23:53 UTC) (4599 reads) (4 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
More reader-contributed Microsoft miscellany gathered up over the past week: Fred Mobach writes in regarding how the European Commission believes Microsoft violated European antitrust laws; the Phoenix Linux Users Group is planning to protest Arizona's purchase of Microsoft Office licenses for each public school student; and a brief consideration of embedded tracking information stored on Windows XP beta discs; plus notes on Hailstorm (Jim Allchin isn't sure how it'll be used to make money), bad priorities in the open source community ("...The primary problem is that most people are mistakenly comparing Linux to Windows"), and more.

LinuxWorld Expo: Some Links to Roundups and Video Clips
(Aug 31, 2001, 23:21 UTC) (1708 reads) (0 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
Here's a collection of links, roundups, and video clips from LinuxWorld Expo, including video of Linus Torvalds discussing the future of the GPL and MP3's/Real streams of Lawrence Lessig's interesting hour-long talk on the importance of political activism on the part of open source developers.

New York Times: Russian Programmer Enters Plea (Sklyarov Pleads 'Not Guilty')
(Aug 31, 2001, 20:22 UTC) (2108 reads) (11 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
"Dmitri Sklyarov, the first person to be indicted under a 1998 digital copyright law, pleaded not guilty yesterday in federal court in San Jose, Calif., to four counts of trafficking in illegal technology and one count of conspiracy."

AnandTech: The State of Corporate IT: A case for Linux
(Aug 31, 2001, 18:09 UTC) (5929 reads) (40 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
From a case study involving a Washington NT shop of 7,000 employees at its primary site that decided to make the transition to Linux: "...Red Hat had proven to be a helpful ally. Instead of trying to push a whole-scale replacement of the infrastructure, they had worked to supplement it. Over time Linux brought more security, improved load balancing and an overall reduction in the growth rate of IT spending. Point of sale terminals were reliable, easy to manage and did not incur additional transaction costs. Their remote access and VPN configurations handled an ever increasing load with a higher degree of reliability and a lower cost. Their intranet had been transitioned over to Linux, and as a result cost less to maintain. It also eliminated interference with IIS based consumer and vendor systems accessed from outside of the company."

Salon.com: The Worst Law Ever? (Two on the DMCA)
(Aug 31, 2001, 17:31 UTC) (3800 reads) (20 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
"...the 3-year-old law passed a major test on Wednesday: To the dismay of critics, the U.S. Copyright Office evaluated the effects of the DMCA without calling for a complete revision."

"EnviroLink Network , a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit Internet service provider, took offline two Web sites belonging to the animal-rights activist group Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty... Although no charges have yet been filed, under the terms of the DMCA, Envirolink was forced to remove the sites to avoid potential legal liability."

KDE: KMail - Important announcement for users of KMail 1.0.x / KDE 1.x
(Aug 31, 2001, 16:39 UTC) (3505 reads) (6 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
Daniel Naber sent us a reminder of the message he sent out some time ago regarding a bug in KMail 1.0.x that will cause it to stop working correctly after September 9, 2001 (an unhappy result of the passing of the 1 billionth second since the Unix epoch.) We pass it along for readers who haven't updated yet.

XFree Developer Clarifies Trident Issues
(Aug 31, 2001, 15:00 UTC) (3841 reads) (4 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
Egbert Eich has written a mail explaining his perspective on the situation regarding Trident's policies on the documentation of its chipsets: "Trident appearantly didn't accept a 'source code exception clause'. We therefore assumed that Trident Microsystems has modified its policy of providing technical documentation. This assumption may have been incorrect."

LinuxPlanet: LinuxBiz: A Daring Rescue, and Plans, Finally, to Make Money
(Aug 31, 2001, 13:06 UTC) (2996 reads) (23 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
Welcome to LinuxBiz, a new regular feature from Dennis Powell appearing on LinuxPlanet every other week, bringing readers a look at the business of Linux. This week's edition reveals some of the questions we'll have waiting as Linux and Open Source business people return from LinuxWorld Expo: what's up with SuSE? Where's Ximian headed? Can Progeny make its services orientation work? And how's VA Linux going to survive its change in focus from hardware to software?

ConsultingTimes.com: A Distribution is (Re)born (Xandros Outlines Plans for Corel Distro)
(Aug 31, 2001, 11:30 UTC) (3756 reads) (16 talkbacks) (Posted by mhall)
"...we are really focusing on the desktop market and the different verticals within the desktop. So we're not trying to be something to the server community as well. We have learned a lot from the strategic partnership with Corel. The people that we picked up from there know what users need on their desktops, what they don't need, and how to put a solution together that will make people very happy. Corel Linux went through two releases and won the PC World award for the best new technology for the year 2000 off their 2.0 version. We're basing our distribution on version 3.0, so we're excited about that."

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Linus Torvalds: And oh, btw..2.4.0 is out
"In a move unanimously hailed by the trade press and industry analysts as being a sure sign of incipient braindamage, Linus Torvalds (also known as the "father of Linux" or, more commonly, as "mush-for-brains") decided that enough is enough, and that things don't get better from having the same people test it over and over again. In short, 2.4.0 is out there."
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"Out of all the ways IBM is backing Linux with its considerable resources, the just announced drive to Linux-enable its channel partners is perhaps the most important part of Big Blue's strategy to push Linux into wider business use. But if the IBM initiative succeeds in creating a much larger Linux market, it's not clear how much Linux companies will benefit."
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Enterprise Linux Today: In Context: Interview with Akopia's CEO on the Red Hat Acquisition
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Enterprise Linux Today: CollabNet Helps Investment Banking Software Go Open Source
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GNU/Linux on timothy's mother

[Anonymous Coward]

That's nothing; I'm running GNU/Linux on timothy's mother. She has multiprocessing capabilities no one has ever seen before; she can process 37 guys at once! And she's cheap too; instead of paying a quarter million dollars, I only paid five dollars for her!

Re:GNU/Linux on timothy's mother

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey stop that!

Timothy is the only good editor Slashdot still has left.

TCO

[abe ferlman]

That's a hefty pricetag, but the companies they hope to sell to ("market--financial-services companies and service providers") aren't shy about investing in tools. Of course, an S/390 isn't cheap either, no matter how many GNU/Linux images it's running ;)

This must be what microsoft is talking about when they say that Linux has a high total cost of ownership ;)

Bryguy

Not A New Idea

[GeekSoup]

Check out www.rlxtechnologies.com. They have had the same technology available for almost a year now. The 'blade plane' for reducing the number of cables needed... etc... etc... And you can get three blades in a 3U case for $5k.

Re:Not A New Idea

[HeUnique]

No - those are different "beasts"

The RLX machines are specifically for ISP's - (look at the blade card - you'll see a Transmeta processor + hard disk) - so when you get a new client - you put an image on it, PHP, MySQL/PostgresSQL, Front Page extension, IP - and let the client do what it wants to do..

withi this case - it's a different thing - you'll definately connect a SAN to it, you'll have Xeon processors who can crunch numbers much better then Transmeta's one - and this machine doesn't give a damn about power saving...

Re:Not A New Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the RLX stuff was only announced back around May, right? Hardly a year. There are a lot of companies working in this area. Just because one pushes a simple version out first doesn't mean they 'thought of it'.

By most accounts, the Transmeta CPU is a toy. The RLX stuff is perhaps okay for some tasks (dedicated hosting of mostly static content), but completely unsuited to many others.

Where are the benchmark results? I still can't find industry standard (or *ANY*) benchmark results for any Transmeta CPU.

You've no doubt noticed that adoption of the TM CPU's has been very limited? Ever wonder why? My contacts tell me privately that the numbers just aren't there. Of course they can't talk about it because they had to sign all sorts of NDA's to get access to TM, Intel, AMD, etc.

I've checked a few places for Transmeta benchmark results - google, transmeta.com, rlxindustries.com and spec.org. I'm probably just too hungover on a Sunday, but can someone point me to some results?

Thanks!

Hardware business

[WildBeast]

well then I better get into the hardware business.

*sigh*

[Afty0r]

Nice to see the old "BSDLicense/Windows" naming convention creeping in there.

Can we not drop this? For those who haven't realised yet, the fad is over.

Obviously

[WildBeast]

Obiously, this machine is worth more than I am :)

What does Richard M. Stallman think of this?

[Macaw2000]

Software should be free and hardware should be $250,000, right? Does that mean I should be a hardware engineer not a software engineer?

Re:What does Richard M. Stallman think of this?

[Anonymous Coward]

At this point, yes.

Thanks, RMS, you cocksuker - you've cost a whole bunch of programmers their jobs with your free software bullshit.

Re:What does Richard M. Stallman think of this?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it means you should rake leaves and do and think whatever Stallmans tell you to do and think.

Labor Component of TCO is what's important...

[ClarkEvans]

The labor component of TCO (the biggest) is inversely proportional to the population of people who know about and can support the system. As more and more programmers/sysadmin get "on board" with Linux, TCO goes down.

This is also called "lock-in", the primary value of a software product is not intrinsic, it's how many people know about and use your system. It works very much like rock music... the more well known it is, the more popular it becomes (even if it is god awful). Of course, in software it's double powerful beacuse people familar with the software make other software that is dependent on the base software, thus creating a multiplier to this effect which is so very powerful.

NT and Office have a "low" TCO, since one can *hire* people off the streets to administer and use these products without additional raining. Hopefully Linux will be the TCO leader by saturating the sysadmin market from the bottom up. If sysadmins perfer Linux over NT, then Linux will eventually have the lower labor component of the TCO.

ibm

[Anonymous Coward]

isn't that what IBM always wanted, "making money off the hardware"

it's not GNU, just Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, an S/390 isn't cheap either, no matter how many GNU/Linux images it's running ;)

Jeesh--looks like Timothy sold out to the GNU crowd. The article didn't say anything about GNU Linux, but it did mention Red Hat Linux.

Re:it's not GNU, just Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

flamebait--

what the fuck is this? (note this says fuck not fsck. This poster knows his shit--ed) Timothy sells out and this post is marked as flamebait. Why isn't Timothy's editorial marked as flamebait?

High "TCO" of Linux is only a short-term thing.

[ClarkEvans]

If indeed NT has a lower TCO than Linux, it is only a short-term item. For every person that learns how to use $500 NT advanced server there are two who can't afford the $500 and learn $0 Linux instead. Eventually this change-in-mindshare will catch up with Microsoft and the TCO table will shift; with Microsoft on the higher end... since those who know Microsoft NT Advanced Server will be in shorter supply.

So... Microsoft may be right about their price in the short term; the market is quite inelastic. But in the long term the market is quite elastic... and it certainly notices the value proposition Linux provides.

bah

[Anonymous Coward]

i bet once they realize how inferior linux is to any real os they will dump the servers.

Designed for current-day applications

[McDee]

This box looks to be designed for current-day applications. Think about it: a normal 'application' these days consists of

• A number of front-end or presentation servers, often web-based
• A set of middleware/application servers
• A number of back-end servers, normally running a database of some sort

In addition you might see a load balancer in there as well for more complex systems. This box allows you to put all of these things in a single physical unit, with a nice high speed interconnection between them, along with the ability to add servers as required.

A single server with many CPUs like the Sun E10K is great but very complex and really expensive. It doesn't give you the freedom to separate out components. That's why people moved away from monolithic boxes and on to the distributed model. This machine is trying to combine the best of both worlds, with modularity of servers but a much better sense of locality for a single application spread across multiple systems.

Sharing interfaces to the real world makes sense, too, as most of the traffic can stay internal. Think of the cost of $2-3K per fibre channel interface and $1k per GigE interface, not to mention the relevant switches, and suddenly this box doesn't seem to be too expensive after all.

I imagine that this will ultimately stand or fall on the TCO, the biggest part of which is bound to be management...

Re:Designed for current-day applications

[autocracy]

Sun's StarFire machine (the E10K, the code name sounds cooler) does let you seperate out components. That's one of the major selling points. Press button, wait for clear, remove card. That's the seperation of components - in the same for as these blade thingys. As for software, everything runs in a virtual machine, with one really freakin' simple OS to partition them.

Re:Designed for current-day applications

[McDee]

It's not really the same thing. The StarFire was really designed to be a large SMP server; the domaining was secondary, but required to sell the thing. Last time I checked, the StarFire didn't have things like hot-swap of one domain for another, sharable FC interfaces, and the like. That said it's been a while since I last took a look at it, so it might have evolved a bit since then.

Anyway, the 10K was always designed as a really high-end server, rather than a simple-to-administer cluster, which is where the BladeFrame is aiming at being.

Oh yeah, and there's about an order of magnitude in the price difference between the two systems...

Re:Designed for current-day applications

[autocracy]

No, it's not the same thing. And there is hot swap according to my Sun contact. And that's 3 orders of magnitude - or 750k in US dollars!

Servers are like Rolls Royces

[tapiwa]

Servers are like Rolls Royces... they cost a bundle but are as reliable as hell.

Like Rolls Royces, servers tend to stay away from bleeding edge technology, instead focusing on tried and tested stuff built with only the best components and only the best craftsmen.

Re:Servers are like Rolls Royces

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously never owned a Rolls Royce.

Sad News...

[Anonymous Coward]

I just heard some sad news on TV, apparently Slashdot website creator, Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda, was rushed to the hospital this afternoon after having his penis sliced off. Authorities say the accident involved Rob's penis, his computer, and an illegal computer device imported from China that was designed to stimulate the penis during cyber-sex. The authorities aren't releasing many details yet as to how it happened, but they suspect that the device malfunctioned which caused his penis to be sliced off. However, there is speculation among the Slashdot community that the Open Source Operating System "Linux" is to blame, for its faulty structure and lack of professional development. There is no word of whether there was any foul-play involved from hackers amongst the Linux community.

What price???

[jnessen]

The only time price matters is when you are talking about recouping your investment. I have worked with a few financial companies, and if this thing can give them a bit better performance, than the cost will be made up in days or weeks.

I look at this product as akin to Windows 2000 datacenter, a product which costs at least 500k on a 32 way system (from Compaq).

This is the time to look at a product like this and say "Wow, if they can sell it to companies who have traditionally run mainframes, MVS, VMS or some "Big" unix, than it is good for Linux"

-Jeff

Not a server

[Wesley Felter]

It's a cluster, not a server. It's hard to tell how this is that different from a rack full of 1U servers, but I didn't read their Web site carefully.

s/390 not cheap? REALLY.

[gelfling]

The actual benchmark machine for 'Charlie' was a rather low end machine, probably 1 million total cost. With 40,000 images that's 25 bucks a server. Let's say that in practice that's off by a factor of 20. That's right let's say the benchmark understates the actual cost by 95%. That ends up $500 bucks a server. Still too much?

Re:s/390 not cheap? REALLY.

[Wesley Felter]

How much horsepower does each of those virtual servers get? It can't be that much. $500/server would be too much if it was only 100 MIPS.

Re:s/390 not cheap? REALLY.

[slim]

How much horsepower does each of those virtual servers get? It can't be that much. $500/server would be too much if it was only 100 MIPS.

That depends on the application. Lots of servers spend most of their time idle. If you expect to be doing CPU intensive work a lot of the time, then no, a VM on a partitioned server is not for you. If however you want cheap, reliable, high availability for the kind of applications that do not tax the CPU, this is ideal.

In this market

[The Mutant]

these guys are toast.

Sun and IBM are gonna do anything for a sale. When business gets slow is when these firms really get nasty. The pie (IT budgets) is shrinking fast and most firms plan to continue to reduce spending.

A few years ago when there was plenty to around they probably could have carved a niche. Now, no way.

I give them less than two years.

Right on

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is a toy, financial service companies are serious about their computers. They should put BSD on these things instead.

Per seat licensing and upgrades...

[TonyGreene]

can make a significant difference in TCO. In medium sized company with in-house IT staff, the difference could allow you to hire a junior admin.

selling free stuff

[StandardDeviant]

RedHat is the best at making you pay for something you can get for free.

That's the only way most corporations will ever accept the use of (Free || Open Source) Software. I work as an IT consultant to @BIG_OIL_COMPANIES, and you wouldn't believe how hard it is to get them to accept things like perl. Hell, I think the only reason they did eventually let us use perl is because ActiveState is around so an actual company is out there that we can point to. Sad? yes. But that's the way it is out in the trenches.

Re:selling free stuff

[fishbowl]

> Sad? yes. But that's the way it is out in the
>trenches.

I too have worked for a Big Oil Company.
The real problem in IT that leads to this type of complaint is something more fundamental.

People with knowledge, experience, and skills are rarely, if ever, placed in positions of authority to make decisions.

lightbulb analogy is a good one

[StandardDeviant]

At (workplace - 2) I was the PFY at a place that used a horde of PCs in a compute cluster. Horde as in north of 150. Probably half of our time was spent simply running around fixing dead or dying machines. I think we had an average of one total machine failure a week, with lots of lesser events
thrown in to make life interesting. The most common failure mode was just a power supply crapping out (not unsuprising becuase these guys were running at 90+% system load 24x7x365).

Cnet Got the Founder's title wrong

[brassrat77]

Vern Brownell was CTO at GS. He's CEO, not CTO, at Egenera.

Can you sell this to your CTO/CEO?

[helloRockview]

I'm not sure that this would be an acceptable solution for a real business that has the $250K to spend on a server of this class. I purchase a large amount or enterprise-level hardware and I know I would have a very difficult time selling a solution by some unknown company name Engenra.

I've always believed that supportability was one of the most important "-ilities" when evaluating hardware and software (i.e. scalability, reliability, supportability, etc.). I would have great concerns that the company who manufactured my $250K refrigerator wouldn't be around in a couple of years to support it.

While it is exciting to see new Linux-based platforms emerge, I know that I would have a very difficult time getting my CEO to cough up $250K for this box. Even the technically un-savvy would have to ask "What about solutions from IBM or Sun?".

We've already seen several examples of high-end boxes that have the capabilities to run Linux from more established manufactures. We're familiar with the S/390 and the Sun E10K. There are also lesser-known high-end solutions from other behemoths like Unisys. It may be unfair because Engenra's technology may be far superior to any of the others (but I couldn't even make a premature judgment...their website doesn't give too much detail).

But there's one thing I do know: spending $250K on mission-critical hardware from an unknown startup is a tough pill to swallow for the people who sign the checks. (Remember back in the late 90s when companies used to do things like that - we used to call it venture capital ;)

Re:Can you sell this to your CTO/CEO?

[dohcvtec]

Yeah, most people would have a very difficult time, since the company is not named "Engenra." The company is actually "Egenera," but if you can't even spell it, and management probably can't spell it, then maybe I see your point.

No, S/390 is not cheap (in price/performance)

[Sun Tzu]

Don't confuse a large number of 'logical' machines with physical ones. If a Pentium III had the ability in hardware to subdivide itself into thousands of functionally identical logical processors you would be able to run thousands of Linux instances on that one CPU. You probably see the problem that you would immediately encounter: each Linux instance would have only a tiny fraction of a percent of the PIII's processing power. Yes, you'll have thousands of distinct running instances of Linux, but they will be very slow when several of them tries to do something cpu-intensive at the same time.

A mainframe CPU is not dramatically faster than (any other) microprocessor anymore. In recent years I've only been able to indirectly compare the benchmarks; it seems that IBM isn't interested in submitting it's mainframes for industry standard benchmarking these days. Bottom line: a 12-CPU mainframe is still a 12-CPU box, even if running 1,000 or 10,000 instances of Linux.

The mainframe's value is no longer in being a honker of a computer. Reliability, the ability to run existing OLTP workloads, and manageability are the big reasons people still buy mainframes.

Move along now; there's no magic going on here.

Why are they toast? Did you read the article?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that many tech people don't get business (but feel like they can bitch about it), and you've just demonstrated that. Business, especially finance, is about relationships. These "guys" have received funding from the financial industry, to build a product for the financial industry, which will be used by the funding parties (including CSFB and Goldman Sachs). If this product works to their satisfaction, nobody will be toast.

Sorry Dave....

[MrBlack]

But if the part that the computer thought was defective turns out to be O.K. will it go on a murderous rampage?

"More than 16"

[Penguinoflight]

The Linux kernel documentation states that you could use 16gigs, or more, by using high memory, of course, you can only access 1gb at a time, but that's all done at the kernel level, so unless it's being used for something like dma, it won't really matter.

Moderators note

[Penguinoflight]

Score 3 (Funny)

Linux is good

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that Linux is the best. I hope that everyone uses Linux. It is the best.

You know....

[Chanc_Gorkon]

Even though the system in question was not a mainframe (intel based blade plane type system), I do want to say a few things about S/390...or whatever IBM is calling them now. Everyone thinks when MS or Linux adds support for a new fangled thing (say the new buses on the PC that are supposed to be mainframe channel like....), well, the mainframe has been doing it for years! When the PC folk added virtual ram via paging stuff out to disk, that came first on the mainframe. Almost every type of PC technology that comes down the pike has it's roots in the mainframe world. PC's need better I/O buses....in comes channels and so on and so on. Our mainframe support consultant that I work with used to call PC's pretend computers because they didn't have half of what the manframe did. Now servers are starting to get these I/O things and we are supposed to gasp because it's new. Well, it isn't new and it's been around for 15 years on the mainframe. Mainframes are solid so long as your network stays up and you don't have students hammering on the thing! :)

Re:Why are they toast? Did you read the article?

[The Mutant]

I work for an Investment Bank, and have for almost twenty years.

I've a Masters in Finance, in addition to Undergraduate Math / Computer Science.

IBM and Sun already have extensive relationships with Investment Banks - they very market these guys are just trying to enter.

And, as I previously pointed out, will do anything to protect it. I've dealt with both firms, and they will cut almost any kind of deal - in a good market.

Every firm on Wall Street and in The City in London is simplifying tech, cutting back on the number of vendors and relationships.

In this market, its a really bad time to be a tech startup, and especially one that is selling a commodity product.

Ha!

[ikekrull]

This thing has got nothing on my cluster of 3 12MB 486DX266's hooked up with fat 10Mbps ethernet to a screaming 16MB P-75 controller running Slackware with IPVS kernel patches and giant 800MB IDE disk.

But it doesn't have that ability

[gelfling]

Nor does it have ESCON adapters or OSA's or virtual routers or WLS or RACF all of which if they were functionally implemented on PC would tend to eat it alive. The point is that while the CEC itself maynot execute more 'ticks' than a Pentium the system architecture is designed to provide efficient performance.

Oh, great segments:offsets again!

[orionpi]

That's why I started programming in Linux!

I stand corrected.

[Perianwyr Stormcrow]

Well, it sounded good, anyway. I think you get the idea.

But...

[Anonymous Coward]

if they're gonna spend so much on the hardware, why don't they buy a decent expensive OS? I mean, more expensive must mean better right? (anon for a reason)