Posts by Dan JOhnson

IBM fires WebSphere CloudBurst at McKinsey heretics

RE: "IBM was clearly rattled."

"Centralized computing is no longer a valid business model. Get over it."

Another uninformed comment. Cloud computing, which IBM actually invented back in the 50's and 60's under another name, IS centralized computing -- just not necessarily in your center. Most of what we're hearing about cloud computing is nothing more than maketing hype to push cobbled together version of existing solutions.. What most people consider "new and improved" today is really little more than a revisit of past, proven solutions. Cloud, virtulaization, automated provisioning, etc., etc., are all well established mainframe functionalities that have been with us for decades. They're only new to those who got into this business in the days of client-server and afterward.

Dell chases Sparc shops with migration offer

Solaris-to-Linux?

Yeah, right. Get real. Nobody in their right mind would do this, since Solaris is very vertically scaleable and Linux isn't. But then, Dell has always been about horizontal scaling, since you sell more cobbled together commonity boxes that way. QuickTransit is only an interim solution for IBM. They are porting Solaris to both the z series and Power lines. Transitive is doing the work and IBM bought them last summer. You can run Linux on IBM gear, but they don't really support it and they don't really recommend it on anything by their x86 gear. My IBM rep always giggles and rolls his eyes when anyone starts talking about running Linux on IBM iron.

Sun revs VirtualBox to 2.2

"Boy, there are some short memories around here"

Yes, there are. And some of us mossbacks remember that Microsoft's newtorking stack was really nothing more than IBM's LanManager (still is, really). We also remember when NT was codnamed "Chicago" and was being developed as a UNIX variant, but MS figured it out that they were too far behind the market to compete in the UNIX space and abandoned the work. What they delivered was some crap hammered onto Winows and called it NT.

Oracle raises software prices on IBM's Power6 iron

SSDD From Oracle

Oracle is notorious for low-balling you on licensing to get you entrenched and then sticking to you one way or the other on down the road. For this reason, we are now redesigning much of our software to minimize its reliance on the Oracle rear-end. Very soon, we will use it only the RDBMS and only for storage. We're moving all our business logic out of Oracle. They priced themselves almost out of our shop and we've used their products for 10 years.

As we've ramped up business, we've spent $8M on new hardware to handle it. Oracle's response was to slap us with $10M in new licensing costs and threatening us with more. It's ridiculous and it's going to come back to haunt them. A lot of people are sick of Oracle's bullshit and Larry Ellison's greed. Oracle is opening a door of opporunity for IBM to steal enterprise customers and migrate them to DB2 and for MS to steal their low-end and mid-range x86 customers for SQL Server. Oracle's good stuff, thut it isn't that good.

IBM not worried about Cisco blades

This'll prove to be a mistake by Cisco

What can they possibly be thinking jumping into the already crowded and established x86 market? And especially at this time. I think they probably mde the decision to do this a while back and are probably wishing they could put it all on hold until the economy gets better.

Obama releases Dubya's secret anti-terror memos

Meanwhile, over in the Colonies....

The Republican Pary has already started blaming the consequences of Lord Bush's failures on President Obama. And their jelly roll mouthpiece, the blithering Rush "A week in rehab works wonders for your career" Limbaugh is hoping that Obama's efforts to pull the counry's (and ultimately the world's) economy out of a nose dive will fail. Maybe the movers and shakers behind the curtains of the GOP are about to roll out a new chain of posh bread lines. They can call it "Let Them Eat Cake!"

HP and Sun in Solaris bear hug

UNIX is here to stay

I;ve been hearing about the death of UNIX my entire 20 year career. Quite to the contrary, UNIX-based O/S deployments have been steadily growing in all market spaces. When we include Linux as a variant of UNIX (which it is), UNIX is not the O/S running on 50% of the servers worldwide. Linux has its place, but it will not be the end of AIX, Solaris or HP-UX, BSD, etc. as so many young "Linuxiteers" love to claim.

Ditto on mainframes. They are still around, more powerful than ever, and sales are good. High-end UNIX servers from HP and IBM are de facto mainframes. IBM, HP and others understand that big towers are what some of us have to have and they are more than happy to build them for us, because the margins on the gear are huge.

This is a great deal for HP, but...

Contrary to what Sun's execs may be thinking (and it's clear their thinking has been somewhat substandard over the last few years), this deal is yet another nail in Sun's caskets. Who cares how many platforms Solaris can run on? This move is going to prove itself to be yet another strategic blunder by Sun. Sun no longer chages for Solaris licenses, but they do charge a heafty premium for support. They've been cost-centering support in an effort to increase the bottom line and, as a result, their support, well, in a word, sucks. Now they are going to allow HP to distribute Solaris and to sell support for it; they already have a similar OEM wgreement in place with IBM. Sure, it increases Solaris' install base, but Sun won't make any money as a result - beyond fees HP pays to Sun for the "privilege."

I see the board at HP breaking out the good Scotch and cigars on this deal. They just positioned themselves to take significant market share from Sun in the x86 space. Customers can now buy Solaris and support for it directly from HP and run it on their rock-solid Proliant line of servers, thereby avoiding the chaos that has become Sun Microsystems. And when Sun fails - as it appears it will - HP gets to pick up ownership of Solaris for a song. That is, if IBM, Fujitsu, Google or Microsoft down't get it first. This is just another bit of evidence that Sun is positioning itself for sale or a meger.

Google eats social bookmarking sideline

Watch and wait for the Google Bubble Bursting

Google is evidence of what happens when a company run by inexperienced businessmen start reading their own press. They've been spending money like sailors on shore leave and not buying viable companies. Now they see that they've spent too much and their house of cards is beginning to crumble. Their P/E ration is at 25.9 and if there is anything we've learned from the do-com bust, it's that companies in such a position are headed for a crash - especially in an economy like this one and you don't sell things that people can't do without. Google offers nothing that we can't do without.

Unisys threatens Itanium with death

What is with the guy "Matt Bryant?"

Is he for real? Does he actually have a job? It would appear not. I certainly wouldn't have time to post so many long rants. What's worse, he doesn't know what he's talking about.

No doubt about it, Itanium is in serious trouble. Intel has said that all the money made on Itanium so far has been reinvested into the development of next versions. It has become the albatross around their neck. Only HP pushes Itanium these days. It's enough for now to keep Intel building the things, but probably not for long. Sales of Itanium are too low to justify anything after Tukwila, so Intel is going to have to dump the chip. That puts HP in a very uncomfortable position. They are pushing Integrity Superdomes hard. But if customers are faced with a dead-end processor after having invested big bucks into new Superdomes, HP can kiss the high-end UNIX market goodbye.