October 24th, 2009

What Windows7 could mean for Linux

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Apple, Applications, Development, Linux

Tags: Marketing, OpenBSD, Microsoft Corp., Linux, Operating Systems, UNIX, Open Source, Software, Paul Murphy

I’ve had people using Windows 7 for about three months now, and everything about it so far seems to confirm my first impression that it’s a lot better than Vista: effectively reprising the consolidation and debugging Windows 98 offered over 95.

Once you get past the sheer shock of using a Microsoft OS that doesn’t fail daily, however, you start to fret about the things that aren’t there: as a Mac/Solaris user, for example, I find the absence of multi-screen capabilities and the relative inflexibility of working panes and icons extremely frustrating. Still it is usable; and that’s a long step forward - at least until you get to development work.

Then the frustrations set in: Visual Studio is very slick, but very limited. Specifically, it’s great if your application is going to use a super-computer desktop as a graphics terminal but pretty much counter-productive if you want to sidestep client-server and produce genuinely integrated multi-host applications.

So why? Well, mainly because Microsoft’s inability to transcend its own 90s focus on helping its sales force make money selling client-server into businesses has left the whole .net thing Microsoft promised to integrate into Longhorn and its successors implemented, along with the promised PICK-like file system and security conscious display frameworks, only in marketing documentation.

Organizational disfunction aside, I think the key technical reason for this has been that getting those things done within the underlying memory and process management paradigm Windows NT+ inherited from VMS has proven, if not actually impossible, at least too hard for Microsoft to make a commercial success of.

So now it wants to sell cloud computing and applications rentals but doesn’t have the OS foundation on which the development of these products has to rest - and that’s going to force Microsoft into a build or buy decision.

They’ve been trying to build a network based, vaguely Unix like, OS for PowerPC for about six years now -with no success to speak of, so my guess is that the build exponents will eventually lose the argument - leaving Microsoft with three mutually exclusive choices:

1. get there through a licensing deal with Apple;

2. do it by adopting and extending OpenBSD; or,
3. do it by adopting and extending Linux.

Each approach has pluses and minuses: the Apple approach would cost the most upfront, but drop a leading competitor out of Microsoft’s desktop markets; the OpenBSD approach combines low cost with a high quality code base and a well deserved reputation for security; and the Linux approach capitalizes on the breadth and capabilities of its community while threatening IBM.

You’d think Microsoft could do the Apple deal at the drop of a phone call to Mr. Jobs - who clearly wants to be out of the traditional PC business anyway - but my guess is that the emotional barriers to rational behavior on this will prevent that phone call.

If it comes to shootout between the OpenBSD and Linux options I suspect Microsoft’s techies will line up favoring OpenBSD as offering the stronger foundation for all the neat stuff they dream of doing, while all the marketing types will favor Linux - and in that company marketing trumps technology every time.

So the bottom line for Linux on Windows may be simple: Windows7 is probably Microsoft’s best OS yet and will therefore slow the move the Linux in the short term, but the limitations built into Microsoft’s development stack show it to be a dead end that will leave Microsoft marketing magnificent visions of its unfolding future while quietly figuring out how and when to abandon that code base for something else - and because that something could very logically be Linux it might be time for the Linux community to start paying a lot more attention to legacy interoperability with Windows.

September 26th, 2009

Linux as Wintel parasite

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Apple, Development, Enterprise Policy, General, Linux, Linux Desktop OS, Sun

Tags: Wintel, Register, Linux, UNIX, Open Source, Operating Systems, Software, Paul Murphy

Last week Linus Torvalds told a seminar group at Portland’s LinuxCon that Linux is getting a little bloated - a consequence of the big blob kernel architecture required by his decision to prefer the efficiency of directly using x86 interrupts to the much more hardware independent architecture Tannenbaum developed Minix to teach.

Sun blogger Joerg Moellenkamp said something particularly interesting about this:

Of course it’s a nice sign of success, when people port more and more stuff to an operating environment and into the kernel. Perhaps this is the price of success. But at foremost it’s a problem. Bloat isn’t just about using more memory, it’s about speed as well.

The Register delivers another interesting piece of information:

Citing an internal Intel study that tracked kernel releases, Bottomley said Linux performance had dropped about two per centage points at every release, for a cumulative drop of about 12 per cent over the last ten releases.

…

Should they rearchitect Linux for the future (the SunOS/Solaris moment for the Linux community). And as refactoring, optimization and rearchitecting are tedious and boring tasks: Who will do it? I think, the next few years will be interesting ones for Linux.

Another speaker at the same event, IBM’s Bob Sutter, really needs to spend a few minutes looking at the history of his own company’s VM product line, but other than that came up with another absolute shocker: Linux won’t succeed on the desktop, he said, unless it creates a unique Linux desktop - or, in translation, that Linux can’t lead by following.

Personally I think that the SuSe business desktop does lead Microsoft in some areas, but, of course, Mr. Sutter wants to sell cloud computing - and so does Eric Mandel, CEO of a company called Blackmesh, providing managed Linux hosting services. He does a very sad and funny presentation on doing what they did: implementing a couple of open source deployment tools (Puppet and Cobbler) to make it fairly easy to configure and deploy Linux server/application combinations. This can be very important in their business, but I thought the retrograde nature of both the solution and its markets unhappily captured the essence of Linux today.

Basically he’s using an open source evolution of the old Jumpstart stuff to provision gear for customers who haven’t figured out yet that letting other people control both their data and their most critical business infrastructure is a recipe for coming to a quick and unhappy end. Cool stuff, for five years ago - but completely obsoleted for customers by today’s cost/risk trade-offs in doing it themselves and for techies by Solaris zones.

When you look at this kind of thing the contrast with BSD could hardly be greater. That group’s focus, despite their many divergences and disagreements, is always on better, faster, smaller - and Apple’s posture as the anti-IBM in personal computing carries over to its relationship with the BSD community: it’s the world’s biggest producer of Unix personal computers, but it doesn’t try to direct BSD research and it hasn’t tried to build services revenues on its own limitations.

Mr. Torvalds set out to build a “free Unix for the 386″ and succeeded brilliantly in doing so - but both its internal architecture and its market success depend on the peculiar dynamics of the wintel market in which x86 forms the common ground between the huge majority using Microsoft software and a rebel group looking for something to call its own.

Thus looking at it as an outsider, I’d say that much of what made headlines at Linuxcon 2009 was in one way or the other about the chickens associated with the reinvention of old technologies for commercial gain starting homeward -with all of it demonstrating that if the Linux community didn’t have Microsoft both to be against and to prop up their shared x86 foundations, it’d wouldn’t exist.

And that’s sad - but not irretrievable because at this point it’s fundamentally a leadership failure, not a community failure, and therefore something that could be changed.

September 12th, 2009

Pano, Sun Ray, and the Wintel gestalt

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Applications, Development, Enterprise Policy, General, Hardware, Strategy, Sun

Tags: Wintel, Smart Display, PC, Sun Microsystems Inc., Sun Ray, Pano, Desktops, Hardware, Paul Murphy

The latest, most wonderous, hula-hoop to hit Wintel is the zero client - and the process by which a 15 year old Unix innovation finally made it to the Wintel community shared consciousness illustrates both how PC marketing works and something about the consequences of taking the PC press too seriously.

Years ago HP offered the option of putting the keyboard, screen, and mouse on the user desk and the PC on a rack in the data center - but this idea didn’t sell well. In today’s version that physical PC has become a ghost: a virtual PC running in server memory, and quite a few companies are now selling smarter ways of connecting the desktop to it than the traditional Wintel approach in which real licensed PCs run licensed PC emulators accessing licensed virtual PCs.

Right now the company at the leading edge of this seems to be Panologic - makers of the Pano System. The Pano is a neat device: it does no local computing, can provide some cryptology support, and uses the standard network to connect to the host session - now limited to a virtual PC running under some OS like VMware’s.

If that reminds you of the original Sun Ray, it should because other than requiring the server to load and run a 512MB Windows emulation to run a 10K user process, the Pano System offers roughly the same features, costs roughly the same, is managed roughly the same way, and provides roughly the same benefits in terms of cost, heat and noise elimination, manageability, and desktop security.

Lots of PC reviewers love this thing - zdnet’s own Jason Perlow calls it “revolutionary” and sees a big role for future zero clients running Linux.

Now, personally, I’m hoping Pano does extremely well: that Gartner’s projection of 660 million virtual PCs by 2011 turns out an underestimate, because the ideas behind it are both inevitable in the long run and as valuable to business now as they were 15 years ago - but the company’s success in raising its own hype rating raises a question: what makes Pano hot where Sun Ray has long been an untouchable?

The answer, I think, comes in two parts: first Sun marketing refused to sell Sun Ray as what it is: a smart display; and instead insisted on pretending it is what it isn’t: a thin client. Pano’s self description as a “zero client” is lot better; in fact, it’s halfway home because both devices are smart displays and not clients at all.

The second part is more subtle: ever wonder why getting drunk together has been a bonding ritual for thousands of years? It’s the civilian version of playing with the elephant because alcohol, like terror, both cripples and isolates - making getting drunk together a powerful means of forming an Us by imposing the mutual equality of incapacitation on its members while setting up a strong boundary against Them - the sober people outside. Pano’s limitations and marketing are designed, I think, to exploit this phenomenon: to use Pano you have to have Windows, you have to have Active Directory, you have to have VMware (or something similar), you have to have x86, and the sales pitch assumes a whole panoply of popular delusion: from the value of PC style virtualization to climate change guilt - while Sun Ray, of course, presents as the sober opposite: a content agnostic device sold on value.

So what’s the bottom line? if you’re running an all wintel shop and think that’s your future: I suggest you ignore Pano’s sales pitch to take a close look at the cost, security, and managability benefits products like theirs can bring you - and when you find out for yourself how well the smart display idea works, you should then ask whose bad advice led you to not take this route ten or even fifteen years ago.

August 29th, 2009

Vindications: ah, the week that was

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Applications, Development, Enterprise Policy, General, Government

Tags: SCO Group Inc., IBM Corp., Paul, System, Linux, Open Source, Mainframes, UNIX, Operating Systems, Servers

I’ve been having a great week: no rain, the arguments the rocks I’m working with put up have nothing to do with IT, and lots of gratifying news floating in.

I didn’t notice at the time, but apparently away back in July the London Stock Exchange got some serious press attention for cleaning its executive stables and following that by tossing the infamous TradEelect system to the wolves.

Regular readers will of course remember my comment on Microsoft’s use of the TradElect contract with LSE to hype its technologies over Linux: basically that the decision had nothing to do with Linux, that the subsequent trading shutdowns reflected bad management more than poor technology, and that the people involved should be tossed out along with the software.

All kind of obvious really, but of course this generated a certain amount of off topic fury from the wintel committed - for example, deadwood1 had this to say:

Problem had nothing to do with .net or TradElect

You should do some research before you leap gleefully at any attempt to blame MS technology. The failure was due to LSE attempting to do an upgrade themselves that they screwed up. It had nothing to do with .NET not performing or a failure of the application. You lose credibility when you let your personal prejudices overshadow your journalistic integrity.

Then this week SCO finally got its chance to face Novell in court - and since that whole issue is both an absolute no brainer and the key to either forcing a settlement on IBM or eventually getting the actual claim into court, people like “Wolf_z”, who wrote the comment excerpted below in response to my my comment on the Novell issue are going to be leaving their expertise on the law off their resumes:

You (conveniently) overlook a few things.

5. Paul has some inexplicable need for SCO to win, perhaps he owns SCO stock. happy SCO had no case, never did have a case, and chose the wrong tiger to poke with a stick.

7. SCO isn’t a threat now, and in reality never was. If there’s anything left of SCO once they are forced into chapter 7 (which shouldn’t take too much longer) IBM’s counterstrike will leave SCO a smoking crater.

Given all this, I feel very comfortable making the following predictions:

1. The judgement against SCO will stand, the appeals court will find Judge Kimball decided correctly.

2. SCO will enter chapter 7 involuntarily before the end of the year.

3. It’s my understanding liquidation of SCO won’t stop IBM’s countersuits, so the smoking crater might be filled in with salt. happy IBM probably *will* choose to continue in the face of SCO’s liquidation. IBM will want to make very sure no one else is stupid enough to repeat SCO’s mistake in the future.

And, of course, lots of people, including one Guy Smiley, vent their expertise on threading models and Intel’s halfway house approach to hyper-threading with stuff like this:

Your’e hilarious Murph…

So 1 HBA is bad because you get no parallelism, but 2 NICs is bad because you get bus contention. Riiiiight.

Your problem, Murph, is that you assume what you’re trying to prove. Instead of analyzing anything objectively, you just look for the quickest way to reach the conclusion that Windows sucks. The result is that your arguments contradict each other, ignore the facts, and generally don’t make any logical sense.

So what did AMD do this week? Announce a “new” form of multi threading for its “Bulldozer” x86 cores that’s learned from Sun, optimized for Unix (including Linux), but has backwards compatibility features to support the Windows model.

But, of course, the number one subject on which I have received hate mail (due, I think, to an organized campaign by some data processing people) has long been my position that running Linux on a mainframe IFL rarely makes sense for both cost and performance reasons. So what happened last week? IBM cut its IFL and related pricing by up to 40% - and the redoubtable Timothy Morgan, a man whose editors have not, I believe, been threatened with the loss of IBM’s ad dollars, wrote a remarkable article for the register in which he looks at the cost of the IFL approach.

For this article he postulates that it’s possible to see just how many Intel Nehalem chips IBM thinks each IFL can replace by costing out the IBM approach and then seeing how many x86 Nehalems that same money would buy - an approach that lets him report the numbers without being even the least tiny bit critical of IBM.

The entire article is well worth reading - here’s a longish extract encapsulating the key bit I’m interested in here:

When you do the math, that works out to $323,204 for a five-processor Linux machine with no memory, no disk, and no systems software, including z/VM or Linux. Because there is a big disparity between the cost of Linux on the mainframe and Linux on x64 boxes - excuse me, I forgot to speak perfectly GNUbie there: the disparity is between Linux support costs, since Linux is not an operating system and even if it were, it is free - let’s add Linux to this barebones mainframe.

Given the discounts that Novell has cooked up and its 80 per cent market share on the mainframe, let’s slap some SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 on the System z BC box. It costs $10,200 per engine, with discounts for a one-year standard support contract for SLES 11 on mainframes, so that adds another $51,000. (At list price, this would cost $75,000.)

If customers want to pre-pay for five years of support, they can get a support contract for $37,499, or $7,499 per engine per year. That’s a big price drop, so let’s be generous and do the comparison over five years. The bare System z machine with Linux and five years of support costs $510,699.

Let’s now look at how many Xeon 5500 boxes with Linux and support that gets you, not including memory, disk, or hypervisor costs, as fairly as we can, given the lack of information about mainframe pricing. We’ll take IBM’s own System x servers, and use the System x3550 M2 rack server, the cheapest of IBM’s Nehalem EP boxes. With two of Intel’s four-core, top-end Xeon X5570 processors, the x3550 M2 costs $6,681. Main memory for this x64 box costs $109 per GB, and there is no way IBM is not charging a lot more for main memory on mainframes.

Now, toss on SLES 11, which is priced per machine, not per processor core, on x64 machinery. It costs $799 per box per year, or $3,995 per box for five years of support. So that comes to $10,676 for a bare-bones x64 Linux image.

What these system prices imply is that a fully-engined System z BC with five 3.2 GHz engines should be able to support the same number of Linux images as 48 of those System x3550 M2 rack servers, which have a total of 384 Nehalem cores running at 2.93 GHz.

As in, “Ya - you know, like he said” - pricing parity means either that any performance discrepancies between the 16Ghz delivered by the five IFL engines and the 1,125GHz delivered by the x86 boxes are purely imaginary, or that the mainframe approach is a trifle over-priced.

But hey, what am I doing about it? Nothing - I’m going out to argue with another couple rocks.

July 18th, 2009

Managing IT in desperate times

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Applications, Development, Enterprise Policy, General

Tags: Paul Murphy

It’s hard to get your head around this, but lots of people are doing the impossible right now: revising bet-your-job IT budgets for fiscal 2009/10.

Unemployment in Michigan hit 15.2% last month, in California it’s 11.5%, across the US it’s 9.5%, and New York is set to try out for a new world record job loss rate by raising some tax rates to 58% of income - the only safe jobs in the United States right now are in government, and those have false floors because the tax revenues needed to sustain them once the stimulus monies run out simply won’t be there.

So, some unhappy advice for my American friends in IT management:

• if you can retire, or motivate others to retire, do - but be aware of the risks. There’s nearly two trillion newly printed dollars floating around with nothing in the economy to back them. Covering that deficit will require some combination of significant inflation and vast new taxes: either way some disruption is inevitable, so retire if you can, but think twice first.

• Windows 7 looks pretty good (it compares to Vista like 98c did to 95a). Any “Vista capable” PCs you may have can run it, and users will thank you for what they’ll see as real and positive change.
• On anything else to do with Windows, stop digging the hole. If it works, do any Win7 compatibility changes needed and leave it alone. Freeze anything you can that involves outside expenditures, especially for evergreen support, systems software, and consultants. If you previously brought in specialized expertise to help with something, find a way to train some of your own people to handle it instead.
• If anything that costs non staff dollars or invokes risk looks avoidable, avoid it. This is not the year to move to DB2, experiment with network virtualization, merge some SQL-Server DBs, implement system wide identity management, or do anything else that’s risky and expertise intensive. Have your people do what they do, focus on helping them keep their jobs, talk long and loudly about improving performance and reliability, but don’t undertake anything that’s new and avoidable.
• If you absolutely can’t avoid doing something, maximize your own staff involvement, incur hardware costs in preference to outside expertise costs, and be prepared to abandon previously ironclad corporate standards if that’s what it takes to bring in cheaper and more functional stuff like Linux, open source applications, and Solaris.
• Remember that the IT budget is part of the organization’s expense portfolio and if you can get some of your people, paid for from your budget, working as users in user departments, everybody will be better off. The employees will have jobs, user management will have reasons to support your budget, your resume will show a smaller budget drop, and you can get those people back quickly if you need them.

  A good place to look for opportunities to do this is the user side dream projects list - look at the people you’d like to keep but can’t protect in a budget crunch, match them up to user dream projects, and sell having your guys working for user management to user management and the staff involved by arguing that they’re developing the expertise they’ll need to really understand those dream projects.

  If next year’s economic situation improves, everybody wins - and if it doesn’t, well you kept them employed another year and helped them diversify their skills.

  And, bottom line? with today’s economy the very best you can hope for is keeping most of your people while more or less holding the line on services - so focus absolutely on doing that, and let everything else go.

June 5th, 2009

JavaStation Reprise?

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 1:13 pm

Categories: Applications, Development, Sun

Tags:

A couple of weeks ago I contacted Craig Bender (”Thinguy”) to suggest that he and I work together to put some Sun Ray demonstration projects on the table for the developing Oracle display computing band wagon. He hasn’t responded - but I just got off the phone with a guy who’s pretty plugged in on the other side of this and don’t like the implications of what I heard.

The threat, I think, is that they’ll put a lot of weight behind the Windows java client for Oracle apps - basically resurrecting the ill fated 1990s java station idea without the MAJC hardware to pull it off.

The Java Station originally ran the 110(?)Mhz microsparc in classic thin client mode: download the app, run it locally, upload results. To say that it sucked is to be overly polite: a version of the WordPerfect suite customized for it was so slow it made Windows 95 look good, and the set up was extremely (ahem, cough) “network sensitive” - i.e. network congestion or slowing caused lots of hard to trace client failures.

I know no one at Sun listens, but here’s a heartfelt prayer from a frequent user: kill this idea before it gets up a head of steam and buries the best opportunity that’s come along since NCD for real network computing to succeed in the marketplace.

May 30th, 2009

Golf, Intimidation, and co-opting the boss

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Applications, Development, Enterprise Policy, General

Tags: Wintel, Information Technology, Recommendation, Boss, Professional Development, Sales Strategy, Sun Solaris, Strategy, Career, Sales

One of the great frustrations of working in IT is that you very often know lots of things the bosses don’t, but they still get to review and possibly override any recommendations you make - even if those recommendations are directly in your area of expertise.

One result of this is that people who want to keep their jobs don’t repeatedly make recommendations they know the bosses are going to turn down - and that reality, in turn, affects how people trying to sell to your company behave.

Thus one of the things big, well established, sellers do is to play this out against both you and your boss -often meaning, in practice, that their mid level sales people go golfing with your bosses, and some juniors come round to your shop to listen attentively to your every need while quietly guiding you to issuing just the right purchase recommendations at just the right times to meet their boss’s quotas and expectations.

So, assuming you actually know better than to want the stuff you’re buying, how do you beat this strategy without prematurely ending your budding career in IT management?

One approach involves applying IT marketing’s 80:20 rule (bearing in mind that the numbers used in the 80:20 rule aren’t remotely point estimates - just magical stand-ins for comparing an assumed overwhelming majority to whatever’s left after that majority is accounted for - this rule states that 80% of new sales are made on the basis of the 20% of product claims that cannot be realized through your use of the product) by finding the intersection between the 20% that can’t be realized, and the companies your bosses want to buy from.

Imagine, for example, that you want to put a couple of your people to work with some new gear to develop and prove out some magical new application for the organization; think the right infrastructure for this is SPARC/Solaris and open source; but your bosses golf with some locally senior people from IBM and a guy who used to represent HP locally when that meant something positive, but now runs a consulting services company making its money by promising Wintel reliability and security.

Remember, when thinking about this, that there are two main reasons your bosses golf with these guys:

1. first, there’s social re-assurance: hanging out with these guys confirms to your bosses that they’re entitled to be your bosses and can understand the business of IT without having to deal with science, numbers, or facts; and,

2. second, they’re reacting to the same career threats you are - because their bosses; whether board members, appointees, or major shareholders; golf with more senior people at the bigger suppliers.

In this situation the dynamics are clear: the right technical proposal is a career limiting move for you, while one based on buying wintel gear from IBM and having the ex-HP guy front some people to work on them will cost the company much more to produce much less, but some of the instant and enthusiastic support this will garner from your bosses will rub off positively on you.

So what do you do? Try splitting the project into multiple pieces with the biggest chunk committed to the 80% you can achieve and the remainder divided in ways designed to gain senior executive support.

In the example, therefore, you would format your proposal to minimize the importance, value, risk, and cost of the 80% of the project you’re going to do internally on Solaris/SPARC, hype the skills and risks associated with the remaining 20%, list price it, and then carve it up between the Wintel wizards and IBM.

In doing this you’ll rely on part of the sales dynamic: the fact that the sellers will be perfectly aware of what’s going on and will adjust prices accordingly with the no hope seller cutting things to the bone, and the guys with the sure thing padding things out where ever possible.

As a result your 80:20 split can often be proposed as much closer to 20:80 in both costs and risks with your hacks limited to the 80% in boring low risk work they’re capable of and the 20% suppliers delivering the high risk, high cost, high excitement, stuff - and when you apply the same rates to cost out what the high price guys would want to do the 80%, your bosses can intuit huge cost savings from splitting the deal: meaning that approving the thing gets them what they want:

1. the social quid pro quo they deliver by hiring, or buying from, the guys who golf with them;

2. the frisson of well discharged executive responsibility they get from saving the company a few bucks on the boring, low risk, stuff; and,
3. the personal reassurance they get from having you agree that their outsider friends are smarter and more capable than you.

Obviously the hows and whats of this strategy are going to depend on the situation, but in general the bottom line on bosses who override technical recommendations on non technical grounds is that they’re usually reacting to either/or choices by preferring group and personal reassurance and emotional support over the possible corporate benefits associated with a decision they can see as technically risky - and that you can generally beat this by breaking each half of the either/or into the 80% that’s common between them but cheaper your way, and the 20% that’s sufficiently risky you’d rather have somebody else be responsible for it anyway.

April 25th, 2009

A question about Linux

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Development, Enterprise Policy, General, Hardware, Infrastructure, Linux, Strategy, Sun

Tags: HP-UX, IBM AIX, Intel X86, Data-processing, Linux, UNIX, Operating Systems, Open Source, Sun Solaris, Software

Every once in a while I get email like this one:

I’m interested to get your opinion on Linux and how it compares to UNIX and other UNIX-like operating systems. The desktop distributions I have tried have all had their issues, but most of those problems are cosmetic in nature. However, I’m wondering how Linux compares with the other operating systems from a kernel and design perspective. To me it seems like Linux has a lot of backing and buzz, but I also hear rants from people such as Theo de Raadt who say things like “Linux has never been about quality. There are so many parts of the system that are just these cheap little hacks, and it happens to run”. However, the same could have been said about Unix 30 years ago. Personally I prefer FreeBSD due to its simplicity and cohesiveness. I also think that AIX/HP-UX/Solaris are much more capable but will eventually disappear because they cost money (except for Solaris) and Linux doesn’t.

If Linux really is crap and it’s going to kill “better” operating systems, is it a bad operating system in the long run? Thanks for your insight.

To which my typical response runs something like this:

1) kernel comparisons take a lot of time - time I don’t have, sorry.

2) however, Linux is NOT crap. It works -and it works well. Compare Linux to Windows in terms of its failures and susceptibility to attack and it’s insanely great.

What de Raadt and others (including me) mean when we say Linux is a second rate Unix is that Solaris is better for users and OpenBSD is more secure - but remember that the gap between Solaris and Linux is quite small relative to the gulf between Linux and Windows.

The biggest thing both for and against Linux is that it has always been heavily optimized for x86 - it started as a minix kernel hack aimed at making it run better on x86 by replacing object messaging with x86 interrupts. On the ++ side, it’s very efficient and reliable on x86, on the - side the internals can be seen as a collection of appeasements aimed at x86 design weaknesses.

3) and please keep a sense of perspective: Linux works - and if kernel designers like de Raadt get excited about a competitor’s bad choices - well, they’re right, but that should only really matter to people who share their interests. From a user perspective, the weaknesses built into Linux can be seen as operational strengths (provided your hardware is x86).

Notice, however, that this response doesn’t address his last paragraph:

I also think that AIX/HP-UX/Solaris are much more capable but will eventually disappear because they cost money (except for Solaris) and Linux doesn’t. If Linux really is crap and it’s going to kill “better” operating systems, is it a bad operating system in the long run? Thanks for your insight.

And, of course, it’s the claims he makes here, and the question he raises, that I want to address today.

First he postulates that free Linux will kill AIX and HP-UX while hurting Solaris.

HP-UX was always another Unix that sucked horribly but worked extremely well on PA-RISC machines with the memory and bus architecture the 10/11 kernel was designed for, but like Linux with respect to x86, isn’t efficient when ported to other architectures. As a result it scales well on Itanium, but everything runs well below processor potential - and even on the N-Class machines (which had PA RISC CPUs in boards designed for Itanium) performance never rose to two thirds what it should have been based on cycle for cycle comparisons to the predecessor K class.

Thus HP’s slow strangulation of the HP-UX golem on Itanium is simply collateral to their decision to kill PA RISC in pursuit of a strategic role as the service supplier in an HP, Intel, and Microsoft computing world triopoly.

Linux had nothing to do with this - it’s HP’s executive, not Linux, that’s killing off x86 competitors; and, correspondingly, it’s the opportunity to sell x86 against SPARC, and Power (along with Alpha and PA RISC) that powers the company’s support for Linux.

AIX, in contrast, probably has a future simply because Linux on Power hasn’t been a big winner for IBM.

It’s my belief, by the way, that the reason for that has little or nothing to do with technology or applications lock-in and almost everything to do with mindset. Look closely at AIX and what you see is two intermingled, but very different, kernels: the core NCR/AT&T Unix that makes it all work, and twenty years of encrusted competitive and authoritarian enablement making it saleable to data processing people.

Thus what makes it both possible and necessary for IBM to upsell its adherents to AIX from Linux on Power is largely that Linux lacks the control orientation inherent in the data processing mindset - think of it this way: the AIX default on just about everything is Deny, the Solaris default is generally Allow, and lots of data processing people get very uncomfortable around Linux because it falls closer to the Solaris standard than theirs on trusting users.

If, for example, you wanted to migrate a Sybase ASE 12.51 ERP instance running under HP-UX 11i to 15.1 on both Solaris and AIX, you’d find that the Solaris port takes about two hour’s work with a day’s worth of waiting around for things to happen, while the AIX one takes six to ten days - with most of that spent getting disk storage issues resolved (volume management and network storage are performance killers; the job boundaries imposed by the typical IBM data center mean that even trivial changes require meetings and memos; and, of course, the smart thing to do - working directly with AIX local devices - is a lot like hanging wallpaper in the dark) and making sure that both user and system processes have all the right authorizations - because they never do, and you don’t find out until things blow up.

So while I agree that HP-UX appears headed for the scrap heap, I don’t see the data processing mindset relinquishing all the controls and procedural detours they’ve managed to get into AIX any time soon - and in that context IBM’s efforts to get their cell based processors working properly without Linux have something of the slow motion train wreck about them that’s deeply reminiscent of their 1972 decision to can the “future systems” project.

So what’s the bottom line answer here? Linux is a pretty good Unix, and contrary to popular wisdom it’s not killing any other major Unix variant:

• It’s HP, not Linux and not the market, that’s killed PA-RISC and killing HP-UX;

• Linux isn’t killing AIX either because IBM’s decisions about AIX are likely to reflect data processing preferences - and their struggles with Power7 are really about keeping those customers buying.
• Contrary to Red Hat, Linux isn’t killing Solaris either.

  You hear about this all the time, but it’s mostly just FUD being spread by people who want to sell you a free Linux - when you look at the actual decisions people who replace older SPARC/Solaris installations with new Lintel stuff are making, it turns out they’re generally doing it because x86 is now performance competitive at the loads those machines carried, easier to get approved by senior managers who read drug store ads for PCs, and preferable to actually going Wintel.

The second part of his question was whether the role he sees Linux playing in the deaths of HP-UX, AIX, and Solaris makes choosing Linux counter-productive in the longer term. The answer to that, I think, is No - because Linux isn’t killing any other Unix; it’s giving people who want to move to x86 a better, and often cheaper, alternative to Windows.

April 18th, 2009

What Sun can do now - and why you should help.

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Applications, Development, Enterprise Policy, General, Strategy, Sun

Tags: Paul Murphy

The new problems Sun’s executive faces now include:

1. Southeastern’s attempt to sell the company out from under management has given at least IBM and possibly others unprecedented access to Sun confidential information - information a competitor should not have and which must now be devalued.

2. The publicity accorded the leaked information about the discussions has caused significant damage to Sun’s long term credibility as a key infrastructure supplier - creating considerable FUD, delaying customer purchase decisions, and causing a lot of “market analysts” and “journalists” to prove their commitments to the more powerful advertisers by presenting unusually vitriolic and uninformed commentaries attacking Sun, its executives, and its customers - this one, by Computerworld’s Thibodeau , for example, ingratiates itself with just the right people to look objective while managing all three forms of attack in only about 360 words.

   Since the marketing organization fundamentally focuses on making large discounted sales to a small group of big customers and, unfortunately, these are the buyers most likely to make long term changes in response to precisely the kind of FUD loosed by this debacle, there’s a real risk the impact will be amplified across the next few customer budget cycles.

3. a lot of valuable Sun people, and not many deadweights, are updating their resumes and talking to friends about new opportunities.

And, in addition, none of the old problems have gone away:

1. quarterly performance pressure drives many executive decisions, forcing short term responses -like the volume customer focus in sales and announced layoffs- sabotaging long term strategies;

2. the Wall Street shell game in which players sell blocks of Sun shares at a small loss per share to drive up the value of a collaborator’s investments in competitors, continues - and, of course, the only guarantee coming out of the “indigo” mess is that, absent significant change, variations on this will happen again.
3. most of the market, and many among Sun’s own staff, have no idea how the SPARC products line up against x86; no appreciation for the differences between Solaris and Linux; and no interest in learning how unloved products from Sun Ray to the CMT cryptology processors can produce huge savings and/or productivity improvements for customers.

   There’s a vicious cycle here: as quota pressure drives salespeople to sell what’s selling, and mass media support drives customers to favor dumb solutions, the people who should be explaining the cost, security, and productivity advantages that go with SPARC/Solaris become increasingly unwilling and unable to do so - and so more and more SPARC sales go to fewer and fewer large customers whose technical strengths lead them to demand the product - and whose technical people are under pressure from within data processing to buy IBM and from the executive suite to buy Wintel.

The basic bottom line on strategies to date is that appeasing Wall Street doesn’t work, that selling to a diminishing number of ever larger customers invokes enormous business risks, and that having great products doesn’t count for anything if neither the customer nor your own sales people want to know about them.

So what to do? How about:

• spin off the x86 business as a separate company - tied to the original through agreements on early technology access, OpenSolaris, and big customer marketing;

• look into the feasibility of setting up the open source software businesses as a charitable foundation;
• take the rest of the company private via a leveraged employee buyout;
• build a new marketing division aimed at selling in ones and twos to smaller customers:
  • work with the tens of thousands of “joe’s computing” shops run by capable people around the world to sell directly to smaller companies looking for precisely the savings, power, reliability, and security offered by the combination of SPARC/Solaris hardware, open source software, and local support;

  • train up “local joe” by providing extensive business and technical support;
  • motivate “local joe” by helping him build pride in his work while selling more support and services to the customer - paid for by the customer’s savings over the default Wintel decision.
• develop a couple of longer term, high visibility, showcase projects for both the technology and the company; and,
• launch one other, major, initiative I don’t want to discuss in public.

And one more thing: a lot of people don’t share my interest in Sun technologies and tell me they’d just as soon see the company go under. Setting aside those with personal motivations (usually some form of fear of competence) for that position, most of the people I’ve talked to who believe this won’t affect them simply haven’t thought it through.

The big reason you should be working to help Sun survive and prosper even if you never want to use any open source product it contributes to, or any product it sells, is that competition is good for the industry.

Witness, for example, Intel’s “new” Nehalem line - it’s great right? By Wintel standards, it is - but if Sun hadn’t lent AMD some people to design x64 and then supported the company by building its own motherboards to demonstrate what x86 multi-core could do, you’d be paying HP’s prices for Itanium desktops - Itanium performance, and Itanium security.

If Sun dies, a lot of innovation dies with it - and you’ll be paying a lot more for a lot longer to Intel, IBM, and Microsoft.

So what’s the bottom line? Simple, Sun can get its act together - and you, whoever you are, should help because their success, even if you never buy from them, forces others to lower their prices while increasing the value you get from the people you do buy from.

March 24th, 2009

Wolfram Alpha: A model for data jobbing?

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Applications, Database Management, Development, Enterprise Policy, General

Tags: Kind, Computer, Productivity, Storage Management, Storage, Hardware, Paul Murphy

In yesterdays’ blog I suggested that the biggest impediment to getting something working that usefully connects us directly to some kind of world wide information web is going to combine data storage with information personalization. The problem, of course, is that I couldn’t care less what your puppy’s name is if I don’t know you - but do care that my neighbours all know where Rain (42 pounds of eeerie Malamute at 17 weeks) belongs.

The guy who created Mathematica, Stephen Wolfram, is about to unleash the results of something else he’s been working on: something that perfectly fits the multiple automata model he developed in A New Kind of Science. Known as Wolfram Alpha, it’s partially an attempt to do better at search through the repeated application of small bits of knowledge.

Here’s his challenge statement:

Fifty years ago, when computers were young, people assumed that they’d quickly be able to handle all these kinds of things.

And that one would be able to ask a computer any factual question, and have it compute the answer.

I’d always thought, though, that eventually it should be possible. And a few years ago, I realized that I was finally in a position to try to do it.

No matter how Alpha gets built it has to have three broad components:

1. one dedicated to data collection and storage;
2. the primary NKS engine intended to bridge the data || information gap in the query context; and,
3. some kind of natural language interface.

Replace that slow and clumsy natural language interface with whatever the kind of personal information link discussed yesterday will need for high speed, high reliability, queries; and what you have is the beginnings of an easily distributed cloud architecture for all those putative data jobbers.

And will that work tomorrow? probably not - but come back in twenty years and I think people will be pointing at NKS and Alpha as the foundations for a whole new kind of cloud: one that identifies Rain to a passing cop, and lets me, on arriving at some airport somewhere, ask the lost baggage clerk how his dog is, by name.