Posted by
ryuzaki0
on from the linux-support? dept.
subfarm writes "IBM is picking up Mylex for $240 million. Press release is here. " I hope IBM continues Linux support for the Mylex cards - from what I've been told, they worked extremely well under Linux. In fact, Mylex even has a Linux CD offer on their home page...
and then there were none
by
Chaostrophy
·
· Score: 3
Well, Adaptec owns most of the SCSI card market, with the former NCR/Symbios having a bit, and Mylex/Buslogic having yet another chunk. I do wory about the fate of the cheap end of the Mylex line, IBM knows how to sell the super high end, but not the in a box on the store shelf stuff. Adaptec is stupid (hidden revs on the 2940 meant that at one point not even NT could install with out a suplimental driver disk, let alone Linux) and greedy (like not even ASPI[basic dos scsi drivers] for free if your driver disk went bad for free. Free drivers for every other OS under the sun, but not dos). And of course it took them for ever to get with Linux.
I do not like the looks of this. IBM is still rather dumb, how ever pro Linux they may be.
-- Plato seems wrong to me today
Re:and then there were none
by
edhall
·
· Score: 1
Symbios cards work well with Linux. Both my Alpha and my P-II Linux boxen have 53C875-based controllers, and both perform outstandingly. So even if Mylex/BusLogic were to go over to The Dark Side, there is still a good alternative to Adaptec.
You'll note that IBM has become a pretty big player in commodity disk drives. This acquisition gives them one more piece of the low-end server.
Anyone besides me hoping for something similar to SGI going on here? (If I were to wish for IRIX-Highend->Linux-Lowend vs. AIX-Highend->Linux-Lowend, I think I'd pick IBM before SGI, given the service I have seen both show thier users in the past).
Not to underplay the importance of OpenGL or anything, but it sure looks like thier is a chance they could be positioning themselfs for the same market... Unix from lowend desktop scaling smoothly up to industrial strength servers...
Ok, I am going back to sleep and continue to dream now...
It seems like more than a dream though. IBM's got a buzz about Linux now. Our Infrastructure Group may be installing Linux for dual boot NT/Linux which I am very happy about. It seems that they will be porting most of their software, Lotus Notes/Domino, DB2, and the such, to Linux as well. I know one of these links was posted a while back, not sure which, but the other one is something I found a while ago. Both discuss Linux and IBM's plans for it which include hardware and software development. The second link even has a link to Slashdot....
I guess then that IBM is buying Buslogic, or what is left of Buslogic after Mylex moved them.
They used to be in the S.F. Bay area, and they had such great Linux support becuase they worked with Leonard Zuberoff (I might have spelled that wrong) who wrote the Linux drivers. Back when no other hardware manufacturer wanted to hear about Linux, Buslogic hardware people helped Leonard find problems in their hardware and our drivers, doing such things as connecting up SCSI analyzers and monitoring the bus while he debugged a driver in the presence of the hardware engineer who designed it. Leonard was then running "Dandelion Digital", a company that published Filksong CDs (science-fiction fan music), he now works for VA Research. I don't know if any of the Buslogic folks who helped us out in the early days are still there.
And I bet it's really paid off handsomely for them, too. Every SCSI FAQ/HOWTO that I see prominently mentions Buslogic/Mylex cards. Everyone I know with SCSI under Linux (including myself) uses their cards.
It's getting to the point where hardware manufacturers *have* to support Linux, because if they don't they'll be generating huge revenues for a competitor.
- Jeremy
Re:Buslogic
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
His name is spelled Leonard Zubkoff. He's the reason I bought two Buslogic BT-948's, great cards!
Re:Buslogic
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I have two myself. They have always worked very well. I am so happy with the Ultra 9GB drives that I have on my last one that I just cannot see a reason to go LVD just yet. And yeah, the Linux support was obviously key for me.
Mylex/Buslogic Great Linux Support
by
doomicon
·
· Score: 1
Buslogic(Mylex),
Has always had great support for Linux. They released a Linux Support statement a couple of years back (Linux SCSI HOWTO I Think). I personally think the Adaptec Cards are horribly overpriced(hyped).
It will be interesting to see what IBM does with Mylex.
-- Awesome!
Re:Mylex/Buslogic Great Linux Support
by
Corrado
·
· Score: 1
They might have supported Linux in the past, but here it says the "The Linux Installable CD offer has been discontinued".Hmmm...Doesnt look good to me.
Re:Mylex/Buslogic Great Linux Support
by
kzanol
·
· Score: 2
The CD was a (bootable) Redhat 5.2 Installation Cd with the Mylex driver included to ease installation on new systems.
Since the driver is now included in Redhat 6.0 (as well as a few other distributions) the cd is no longer required or usefull.
BTW, the driver for the mylex controllers is not yet part of the stanard linux kernel, it can be downloaded as a kernel patch from http://www.dandelion.com/Linux/DAC960.ht ml.
-- you have moved your mouse, please reboot to make this change take effect
IBM is a good company when it comes to buyouts. I see this as a great step forward for Mylex. Basically IBM will not borgify Mylex, but will leave them a pretty much independent part of IBM. The reason they bought Mylex is because they have money to burn. Of course they will immediatly start incorperating Mylex scsi/raid into thier systems like RS/6000 and even some of their pcs.
My only concern is that the low end may get discontinued or get a price hike. I love my mylex card, great under linux and very cheap.
-- Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human.
common I work for eMicrosoft and we eEverything. Why don't we eDo the right eThing here and not be eStupid. Its completely hilarious how the technology sector gets these funny buzzwords up their ass all the time. Its for shit. I know I will get rated down to -1 for bad language. yeah. PS It wasn't a lame comment. What is he supposed to say something DEEP about mylex being bought by IBM? Is this relevent (sp). Its all about mindshare. nothing more. Linux has mindshare, when people who don't know jack about computers ask me about Linux, it has mindshare. I don't give a rats ass about lame scsi cards. Gimme FREEbsd support for promise cards (really buggy drivers and bios under NT btw, run away while you still have your data, software raid rocks) bla bla bla.
Now that was one of the funniest posts I have read in a long time...
Re:and then there were none(IBM toplevel attitude)
by
aqua
·
· Score: 1
Or another way, "[Big blue] is like a dinosaur kicked in the ass. It takes fifteen years for the experience to reach its brain."
IBM is useful for the OSS community, though; they have tons of money and power of various sorts. They don't maneuver worth a damn, and their response time is pretty poor, but that the OSS people can do -- and do better than most anyone. IBM gets the benefit of our software, which lends our speed to their lumbering power blocs.
Mylex' RAID units have, in my limited experience with them, quite satisfied my expectations, especially for the price. While I don't in general like mergers, if Mylex manages to turn into a wholly-owned company with some degree of autonomy, it will likely avoid getting sucked into IBM's plodding.
Send this to the marketing director: Dear Sir, I've noticed that you have been appending vowels to the beginning of a lot of words that don't strictly need said prefixes. I can only assume that you are a-Moron. e-Nough allready. i-Can't take it anymore. o-Nly brain damage can explain this. I doubt u-Bastards reallize how irritating this has become. y-MustYouDoThis? --Shoeboy
Re:and then there were none(IBM toplevel attitude)
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Oh quit it with the anti-IBM stereotyping already people! In the last 20 years IBM has invented every god damn useful technology you people have on your desktop computers! The only things IBM didn't invent are the things people complain about today, ie: Windows.
Monteray
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Don't forget that Monteray (reference unix on Intel 64bit) is coming soon.
Intel picked AIX as the unix to become Monteray.
Mylex, where is my Solaris driver?
by
hisholiness
·
· Score: 1
I bought a BT-958 and it was great. It even had "Solaris" support on the box. However, the driver broke in Solaris 7 and Mylex owns the driver.
Why won't they open source the sucker!
Praise be to me!
Re:and then there were none(IBM toplevel attitude)
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2
...from the contacts I have within big blue, Linux has seemed to reach strategic level with the result that the attitude has become: _everything_ must be ported to Linux. Most hardware*1 shall be certified to be able to run Linux. The attitude I've been seing is not one of "we kinda support it...sometimes" but rather, in management'ese, "an embracing of Linux as an important strategic platform". This is the reason why so much stuff (software) has been ported in so little time ( Visual Age, Web sphere etc.). Another indication of their commitment is that they are partnering with not only RedHat but also with SuSe, Caldera and Pacific HiTech. If they were doing it just to show that they weren't "missing the train" they probably would have chosen one partner. Big Blue is like a tanker...it takes a long time to change course - but when it does, nothing stops it in its way.
AdvanSys have been making decent SCSI controllers for a while. More importantly, they've been providing official GPLed drivers for Linux for years. I bought mine solely on the grounds of their Linux support (at the time, the Adaptec cards weren't well supported), and I've never regretted it. I'd recommend them to anyone.
-- "The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Re:Don't forget AdvanSys
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
AdvanSys is very nice, Mylex is cool (and keeping up the old Buslogic stuff was very nice), and I have always had nice experiences with DPT stuff (which now has a full support suite for Linux for the latest LVD cards and will be back-porting it to the last two generations within the next six months). I have friends who swear by Symbios/NCR and Tekram stuff as well. The only horror stories are related to Adaptec.
Aside from Adaptec, any SCSI is better than no SCSI. I have a K5-133 with 128MB of RAM on an old VP1 chipset with a Buslogic Flashpoint PCI controller. I run all 50 pin SCSI-2. I have several old Micropolis 4GB drives, a CD burner, a TR4 drive, and a Pinnacle MO drive on it as well as (on the last one, via a pass-through) a scanner. Not only does all of it work great, making me feel that there isn't much of a reason to replace the old box just yet, but all of it works great AT THE SAME TIME. You can't beat that with a stick. I can back up (excluding the CD image directory), burn a CD, be scanning stuff, while playing Doom (yes, some of us still like Doom), compiling, getting my email and news, and serving files for the rest of the office (I have a small company that does UNIX consulting), as the only time the accountants work is late, when I am playing Doom. The only problem is that the database is taking up some room. Aside from that, I can be blasting Barney with nuclear pies while the A/Rs are being run and I am making bootable Debian disks and nothing misses a beat, and this on a machine that is, by today's standards, slow. SCSI is a very good investment.
My only suggestion to everyone is to use good cables -- use the LVD stuff for Ultra, even be paranoid about the SCSI2 cables, always use active termination, and keep the firmware levels up. And if you do a lot of SCSI work, get a cable tester -- ours cost us $2800 and paid for itself in nine months.
Re:Don't forget AdvanSys
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
I have an onboard adaptec uw 2940 controller. It works great in linux...except for that time the kernel people fucked up and put a very old driver in the latest 2.0.3x kernel...but is that adaptecs fault?
I have a the following on SuSE linux and the onboard adaptec controller and I can use them all simultaneously...so whats the problem?
NEC 24X cdrom Western Digital 9gig uw scsi An IBM 18 gig uw scsi An HP 4 gig narrow scsi HP 4c scanner HP 4p scanner A 24 gig HP DAT Sony 2x6 cd burner NCR 7 disk 2x cdrom changer iomega scsi zip disk Intel PR440FX motherboard with Dual 210Mhz PPro and (not related but) Various IDE devices (a cdrom, and two 8 gig ide disks and an ls 120) A voodoo 2 sli setup (fer quake tf'n of course) A matrox MII with rainbow runner A parallel pci parallel controller (which I hacked the kernel to support myself) Onboard Etherexpress 100B 10/100 ethernet
He said this for some damn reason:
Aside from Adaptec, any SCSI is better than no SCSI. I have a K5-133 with 128MB of RAM on an old VP1 chipset with a Buslogic Flashpoint PCI controller. I run all 50 pin SCSI-2. I have several old Micropolis 4GB drives, a CD burner, a TR4 drive, and a Pinnacle MO drive on it as well as (on the last one, via a pass-through) a scanner. Not only does all of it work great, making me feel that there isn't much of a reason to replace the old box just yet, but all of it works great AT THE SAME TIME. You can't beat that with a stick. I can back up (excluding the CD image directory), burn a CD, be scanning stuff, while playing Doom (yes, some of us still like Doom), compiling, getting my email and news, and serving files for the rest of the office (I have a small company that does UNIX
What do you mean?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
If by, "something similiar to SGI" you mean IBM supporting linux in a big way, well, it's already happened. In fact, IBM are already much more supportive of Linux than are SGI. See this story for proof.
The Linux Installable CD offer has been discontinued. The DAC960 driver is now included in these commercial distributions: Red Hat 6.0 SuSE 6.1 Caldera Open Linux 2.2 All requests for CDs as of 5-12-99 have been received and will be shipped. For international orders, please allow 3-4 weeks for customs and delivery.
Uhhh, Adaptec allows you to DL the driver disks
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
and has for about a year now...and they support linux heavily...so whats your gripe now?
Guess HP wont be using mylex cards in theyre netservers anymore. =)
IBM and Yeast infections?
by
GoodDoug
·
· Score: 2
Dang man, I thought IBM was going to stay out of feminine itching products, but now that they've bought Mycelex (the 3 day cure for yeast infections) what does this mean for the rest of us? I expect to see an ad with Kim Alexis selling us an RS/6000 along with other feminine products. Whats next? A joint Tampax/Adaptec venture with new USB enabled feminine hygiene products? What are the implications for plug and play with this stuff? It's all just so confusing!
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about anybody else, but here are two things IBM can do to make me feel better about their purchase of Mylex:
eLOL
This must be completely related to this, right?
Well, Adaptec owns most of the SCSI card market, with the former NCR/Symbios having a bit, and Mylex/Buslogic having yet another chunk. I do wory about the fate of the cheap end of the Mylex line, IBM knows how to sell the super high end, but not the in a box on the store shelf stuff. Adaptec is stupid (hidden revs on the 2940 meant that at one point not even NT could install with out a suplimental driver disk, let alone Linux) and greedy (like not even ASPI[basic dos scsi drivers] for free if your driver disk went bad for free. Free drivers for every other OS under the sun, but not dos). And of course it took them for ever to get with Linux.
I do not like the looks of this. IBM is still rather dumb, how ever pro Linux they may be.
Plato seems wrong to me today
Not to underplay the importance of OpenGL or anything, but it sure looks like thier is a chance they could be positioning themselfs for the same market... Unix from lowend desktop scaling smoothly up to industrial strength servers...
Ok, I am going back to sleep and continue to dream now...
You neglect the other two marketroid prefixes, i and v!
eGarbage! vCrap! iGibberish!
s/[BW]ill(y|iam)?( H\.?)?( G(ate|8)(s|z))?(,? ?v?(III|3)(\.\D)?)?/Girly-man/gi
They used to be in the S.F. Bay area, and they had such great Linux support becuase they worked with Leonard Zuberoff (I might have spelled that wrong) who wrote the Linux drivers. Back when no other hardware manufacturer wanted to hear about Linux, Buslogic hardware people helped Leonard find problems in their hardware and our drivers, doing such things as connecting up SCSI analyzers and monitoring the bus while he debugged a driver in the presence of the hardware engineer who designed it. Leonard was then running "Dandelion Digital", a company that published Filksong CDs (science-fiction fan music), he now works for VA Research. I don't know if any of the Buslogic folks who helped us out in the early days are still there.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Buslogic(Mylex),
Has always had great support for Linux. They released a Linux Support statement a couple of years back (Linux SCSI HOWTO I Think). I personally think the Adaptec Cards are horribly overpriced(hyped).
It will be interesting to see what IBM does with Mylex.
Awesome!
IBM is a good company when it comes to buyouts. I see this as a great step forward for Mylex. Basically IBM will not borgify Mylex, but will leave them a pretty much independent part of IBM. The reason they bought Mylex is because they have money to burn. Of course they will immediatly start incorperating Mylex scsi/raid into thier systems like RS/6000 and even some of their pcs.
My only concern is that the low end may get discontinued or get a price hike. I love my mylex card, great under linux and very cheap.
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human.
Maybe if Mylex didn't proclaim themselves the eRaid company, IBM wouldn't have bought them.
I wish companies would eStop that already. It's eAnnoying.
Or another way, "[Big blue] is like a dinosaur kicked in the ass. It takes fifteen years for the experience to reach its brain."
IBM is useful for the OSS community, though; they have tons of money and power of various sorts. They don't maneuver worth a damn, and their response time is pretty poor, but that the OSS people can do -- and do better than most anyone. IBM gets the benefit of our software, which lends our speed to their lumbering power blocs.
Mylex' RAID units have, in my limited experience with them, quite satisfied my expectations, especially for the price. While I don't in general like mergers, if Mylex manages to turn into a wholly-owned company with some degree of autonomy, it will likely avoid getting sucked into IBM's plodding.
Send this to the marketing director:
Dear Sir,
I've noticed that you have been appending vowels to the beginning of a lot of words that don't strictly need said prefixes. I can only assume that you are a-Moron. e-Nough allready. i-Can't take it anymore. o-Nly brain damage can explain this. I doubt u-Bastards reallize how irritating this has become. y-MustYouDoThis?
--Shoeboy
Oh quit it with the anti-IBM stereotyping already people! In the last 20 years IBM has invented every god damn useful technology you people have on your desktop computers! The only things IBM didn't invent are the things people complain about today, ie: Windows.
Don't forget that Monteray (reference unix on Intel 64bit) is coming soon.
Intel picked AIX as the unix to become Monteray.
I bought a BT-958 and it was great. It even had "Solaris" support on the box. However, the driver broke in Solaris 7 and Mylex owns the driver.
Why won't they open source the sucker!
Praise be to me!
...from the contacts I have within big blue, Linux has seemed to reach strategic level with the result that the attitude has become: _everything_ must be ported to Linux. Most hardware*1 shall be certified to be able to run Linux. The attitude I've been seing is not one of "we kinda support it...sometimes" but rather, in management'ese, "an embracing of Linux as an important strategic platform". This is the reason why so much stuff (software) has been ported in so little time ( Visual Age, Web sphere etc.). Another indication of their commitment is that they are partnering with not only RedHat but also with SuSe, Caldera and Pacific HiTech. If they were doing it just to show that they weren't "missing the train" they probably would have chosen one partner.
Big Blue is like a tanker...it takes a long time to change course - but when it does, nothing stops it in its way.
*1: Netfinity servers, Thinkpad Laptops, Intellistation workstations, Commercial Desktops, RS6000 43P Models 150, 260, RS6000 F50.
My mother was the head lawyer behind the deal. Nice job.
-Nicholas Blasgen
AdvanSys have been making decent SCSI controllers for
a while. More importantly, they've been providing official
GPLed drivers for Linux for years. I bought mine
solely on the grounds of their Linux support (at the
time, the Adaptec cards weren't well supported), and
I've never regretted it. I'd recommend them to anyone.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
If by, "something similiar to SGI" you mean IBM supporting linux in a big way, well, it's already happened. In fact, IBM are already much more supportive of Linux than are SGI. See this story for proof.
The Linux Installable CD offer has been discontinued. The DAC960 driver is now included in these commercial distributions: Red Hat 6.0 SuSE 6.1 Caldera Open Linux 2.2 All requests for CDs as of 5-12-99 have been received and will be shipped. For international orders, please allow 3-4 weeks for customs and delivery.
and has for about a year now...and they support linux heavily...so whats your gripe now?
Guess HP wont be using mylex cards in theyre netservers anymore. =)
Dang man, I thought IBM was going to stay out of feminine itching products, but now that they've bought Mycelex (the 3 day cure for yeast infections) what does this mean for the rest of us? I expect to see an ad with Kim Alexis selling us an RS/6000 along with other feminine products. Whats next? A joint Tampax/Adaptec venture with new USB enabled feminine hygiene products? What are the implications for plug and play with this stuff? It's all just so confusing!