Posts by Jabro

Empires of the mind: Oracle digs deep on cloud

Spark

Apache Spark ...

http://spark.apache.org/

Remember that Xeon E7-Itanium convergence? FUHGEDDABOUDIT

History repeating itself?

Reminds me of when Carly was still at the helm of HP and controlled the final years of Alpha processor development. Rather than come out with a true successor to the EV7 that was manufactured on a next-gen process, HP just bumped the EV7 clock speed by a few dozen MHz, slapped a "z" at the end of the product name, and called it a day.

ARM server chip startup gets big backers

TI quit making chips entirely

"Other Smooth-Stone backers include chip maker Texas Instruments (which used to be the foundry for Sun Microsystems, but lost that job to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp) ..."

TI did not "lose" the job of making SPARC chips to TSMC, they quit. TI exited the semi-conductor fab business, as they judged that it was too expensive to go past the 65nm process. In fact, I believe The Register wrote about it.

Fujitsu, Oracle ironing out Sparc server deal

Oracle and Fujitsu's silence is so damaging

I cannot imagine why Oracle and Fujitsu are not being more open and aggressive about spelling out what their plans are for the high end SPARC64 product line. Their silence just confirms customers' worst fears, and plays into their competitors' hands.

If they don't come out soon with an aggressive, credible roadmap for SPARC, then they might as well announce the SPARC EOL in 2010 and get started trying to transition everyone they can over to Solaris x86 as soon as possible. Good luck.

HP's Palm buy was all about WebOS

True, but ...

While it is true that WebOS is joining HP's collection of proprietary OS's, WebOS is not _quite_ in the same category as HP-UX, Tru64, Non-Stop, and don't forget VMS. I really wonder how HP will capitalize on WebOS and Palm's other patents. I'm not sure I feel the need for a WebOS enabled printer or laptop.

HP-UX, VMS, and Non-Stop look to be around for years to come, and I'm sure there is plenty of money to be made servicing their substantial installed base. We'll see how they fare against Lin/Win on x86 and AIX on Power going forward. Current signs do not bode well, unless HP/Intel really get their act together, but that is a topic for a different discussion..

As for Tru64/Alpha, sales of new systems stopped several years ago, though support looks to carry on until at least 2012.

http://h30097.www3.hp.com/pdf/Tru64%20roadmap%20march09.pdf

Novell seeks rich suitors

Does Novell have a valuable patent collection?

I assume the "networking" the poster was referring to was application and OS networking technology, which is where Novell made all of its money in the Netware glory days, rather than networking hardware like Cisco's routers and switches.

That is an interesting question - does Novell have a lot of (relevant) patents, networking or otherwise? And, if so, has Novell incorporated those patents into its OSS products and released them under GPL like licenses, thus rendering them worthless to would be patent trolls?

Flash! Enterprise SSD looming at HP

TRIM on RAID seems iffy at the moment

It seems that TRIM support, at least for for Intel RAID volumes, is not available at the moment.

"Intel® Rapid Storage Technology 9.6 supports TRIM in AHCI mode and in RAID mode for drives that are not part of a RAID volume."

http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/sb/CS-031491.htm

Can enterprise SSDs really be given multi-year warranties?

I'm not sure about the cost of the SSDs ($1400 for a 60 GB SSD sure seems high to me), but I'm not surprised by the limited 1 year warranty. I assume that the inherent limitations on the number of writes a NAND cell can handle prevents the vendor from guaranteeing the drives for a longer 3 to 5 year span, which are usually seen with traditional HDDs. If a customer uses an SSD in a write intensive environment, the drive life span can be dramatically shortend through no fault of the SSD vendor - this is just the nature of the technology at the moment.

Ellison slams former Sun CEO for blogginess

Too bad he didn't mention specifics on the future of SPARC

How can customers contemplate a future with SPARC if Oracle has no specific, credible, public plans for its future? Sun botched US5 at the beginning of last decade and Rock at the end of the last decade - now what? If Fujitsu does not have something great up its sleeve, how can Oracle expect to produce a viable SPARC processor in less than 3-5 years?

As for the T series, from what I can see that is where customers relocate non-performance critical, legacy Solaris/SPARC apps until a transition to a new architecture is feasible. I'm sure there are new deployments of T series here and there, but for the most part that is where old apps go to die.