November 14th, 2009

An interesting exchange on politics and IT

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Applications, Enterprise Policy, General, Infrastructure, Productivity, Security, Sun

Tags: Information Technology, Strategy, Management, Paul Murphy

Here’s a comment on last Saturday’s blog by “dedmonst”:

OT: squaring your political & technology views…

Paul,

slightly OT, but something that’s been bothering me…

Please pull me up if I’m being presumptive here, cos I confess to only dipping in to your blogs and comments occasionally, but I had you down as a republican - which I would have assumed (yes I know ass-u-me) put you in the bracket of beleiving that “the market will find a way” - i.e. let the market operate freely and the best operating mechanisms etc etc. will float to the top.

However when you talk technology you are constantly telling us “the market has got it dead wrong”. Your so called “data processing” folks, MS windows, what you call “ghosted virtualization” make up a vast and ever growing part of the market…

So how do you square these views? Or what assumption about you do I have wrong?

I wrote a quick response, ran an errand, and came back to replace the first response with this one:

This circle not square - (earlier response deleted - this is v.002)

The essential difference between people on the left versus the right of the political spectrum is that leftists want to tell others what to do and rightists don’t. Thus Pelosi’s health bill has jail sentences for those who don’t buy into her health insurance ideas while Palin thinks you should make your own decisions.

Put this in the IT context and what you have is a bunch of people on one side in IT who think they should tell the business what to do, and others, like me, who think the business users should make their own IT decisions.

Thus they demand central processing with central control, I argue for central processing on cost, security and reliability grounds with decentralized control for business productivity reasons. They want to tell users what to do and how to do it, I want them to figure out what they need to do and then do it.

But how can I see “the market” as wrong given the DP/Wintel majority in place and still defend people’s right to choose? Easy, I see most people as misled, by themselves and others, on most IT issues. DP had a fifty year headstart, the advantage of a position in finance, and the benefit of the high school nerd vs party people differentiation that keeps senior people from questioning them - and, most of all, ensures that few ever figure out that data processing and computing are different things.

So I tell people to smarten up - saying that the people who comprise the market can and should correct their mistakes. That’s a right wing perspective and approach. Most DP/Wintel people, in contrast, say its settled science and the user should shut up and pay - that’s a classic left wing position.

So, bottom line, no conflict.. :)

I thought this exchange worth repetition here because it strikes at the heart of a conflict most IT managers feel nearly every day: we’re paid to provide services to users but they generally appreciate neither the service nor our skills, most don’t understand what we do, many make demands that seem unreasonable, and a few demonstrate increasing irresponsibility with every action - so why not tell ourselves we know more about how tech should be used than they do and use our organizational leverage to insulate ourselves from them?

My answer is that the only really effective way to address this conflict is to remove it - and that you do that organizationally by either making IT the business or by turning IT people into business people: giving them the power to affect IT change but posting them in user groups and making them report to user management.

This is ultimately why I like Sun and Sun Rays - not because I love the company or the technology, but because this combination enables me to have a very small operations group responsible only for keeping the lights on, the machines running, and the IT bills paid while my sysadmins work in user areas to make that central system do whatever their local users want. You need the right people in the trenches, you need to empower your sysadmins far beyond what seems responsible in other organizational forms, and you need a very light but steady hand at the helm - but the end result is that your people cross train themselves, you get very close to 100% reliability on systems that change in some detail virtually every day, help desk and related PC costs disappear, and the productivity killing user/IT differentiation characteristic of most large organizations just quietly fades away to leave your IT people with better jobs and the business with an electronic nervous system that works.

November 7th, 2009

The real pros and cons of server virtualization

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Enterprise Policy, General, Linux, Productivity, Software Licensing, Strategy, Sun

Tags: Data-processing, Server, VMware Inc., Server Virtualization, IBM Corp., VM, System Utilization, Virtualization, Hardware, Paul Murphy

First, lets be clear: this comment is about server virtualization through ghosting - the business of using one OS to run one or more ghost OSes in lieu of applications each of which in turn is able to run one or more applications - it’s not about desktops, not about N1 type technologies, and not about containerization.

The pre-eminent examples of ghosting OSes are IBM’s zVM - an OS that originated in the late 1960s as one answer to the memory management and application isolation problems confronting the industry at the time- and VMware’s more recent rendition of the same ideas for x86.

Back then, IBM was caught between rocks and hard places: lots of people (including IBM’s own research leaders) were developing system resident interactive OSes aimed at using the computer largely as a central information switch, but its commercial customer base absolutely refused to countenance any advance on the batch tabulation and reporting model around which its management ideas had evolved in the 1920s and 30s.

Thus when the Multics design effort started at MIT in 1959/60, most of IBM’s people didn’t even know there were two sides to the argument but the research people lined up with science based computing while those who made the money for IBM almost unanimously choose the data processing side - and ten years later, after MIT’s people had first won their design battles and then lost the war (by letting data processing get control of the Multics development effort), IBM’s own fence sitting solution: VM, ended up roundly hated by nearly everyone.

Nearly everyone, that is, except people limited to IBM 360 class hardware who had no other means of achieving any kind of interactive use (this was before MTS and a dozen later solutions) - and they, essentially over the objections of IBM’s own management, made VM the success it still is.

All of which brings us to the 90s when available x86 hardware mostly wouldn’t run NT 3.51 and Microsoft’s emergency iVMS port, aka 4.0, contained a misconstrued uaf derivative known as registry that effectively limited it to loading one application at a time - thus forcing buyers to choose between a lot of downtime or rackmounts of dedicated little boxes.

The rackmounts won - at least for a few years; but then data processing got took control of the wintel world and VM, in the VMware incarnation of its ideas, soon became the preferred tool for reducing the rackmount count in the name of their professional holy grail: higher system utilization.

Unfortunately there are two big problems with this:

1. first, NT 4’s limitations went away with NT 4 - addressing them today with VMs achieves a level of absurdity no audience would accept in musical comedy -it’s right up there with using a licensed terminal emulation on a licensed PC to access a licensed server running a licensed PC emulation; and,

2. it is very nearly a universal truth that every gain data processing makes in improving system utilization produces a larger loss in IT productivity for the business paying them to do it.

The reductio ad absurdum example of the latter is Linux running under VM on a zSeries machine: data processing can get very close to 100% system utilization with this approach, but the cost per unit of application work done will be on the order of twenty times what it would be running the same application directly on Lintel; and every variable in the user value equation: from response time to the freedom to innovate, gains a negative exponent.

You can see the latter consequence in virtually every result on benchmarks featuring some kind of interaction processing. For example, the Sun/Oracle people behind their recent recent foray into TPC/C, both demonstrated their own utter incompetence as IT professionals by achieving less than 50% CPU utilization and the user value of this “failure” by turning in response times averaging roughly one seventeenth of IBM’s:

The counter argument I usually hear about all this is that virtual system images are more easily managed than real ones - and this is both perfectly true and utterly specious.

It’s perfectly true that VM style virtualization lets you bundle an application with everything it needs to run except hardware, and then move that bundle between machines at the click of an icon; but the simple fact that this applies just as well to Solaris containers as it does to VM ghosts shows that this is an argument for encapsulation and application isolation, not for ghosting.

Worse, the argument is completely specious because it bases its value claims on two demonstrably false beliefs: first that the only alternative is the traditional isolated machine structure, and second that virtualization lets the business achieve more for less. Both are utter nonsense: Unix process management has worked better than VM since the 1970s, and because virtualization adds both overheads and licensing it always costs more to do less than modern alternatives like containerization or simply letting the Unix process management technology do its job.

Again the quintessential example of this is from the heart of the data processing profession: when you take a $20 million dollar zSeries installation and achieve a 60 way split to produce 100% system utilization from 60 logical machines running applications or ghosts, what the business gets out of it is roughly equivalent to what it would get from four Lintel racks costing a cumulative $500,000.

A more down home illustration is provided by VMware itself - their competitive value calculator computes a cost advantage for their products over those from others on the basis of their belief that their VMs impose less overhead and allow you to get closer to 100% hardware utilization. Thus if you enter values saying you’ve got 200 applications running on NAS connected quad core servers, want to manage virtually, and have average infrastructure costs, they produce a table with this data:

All of which should raise a couple of questions in your mind:

1. first, if the consensus that ghosting doesn’t have significant overhead is right, where is VMware getting the third of the box it claims you can recover by getting its ghosting software instead of Microsoft’s?

2. and, second, wouldn’t the money VMware wants you to spend on ghosting ($241K in this example) be better spent on hiring people who can move these applications to free environments like Linux or OpenSolaris?

So what’s the bottom line? Simple: the real ghost in ghosting is that of 1920s data processing - and the right way to see this particular con job for the professional cost sink it is, is to focus on costs to the business, not ideological comfort in IT.

October 17th, 2009

Of snow, rocks, a book, and another partisan attack on IBM

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Defenestration, Enterprise Policy, General, Government, Sun

Tags: Sun Microsystems Inc., IBM Corp., Attack, Oracle 11gR2, Mainframes, Servers, Security, Hardware, Paul Murphy

Merry Christmas!

I’ll be out of town later this week so I’m writing this on Wednesday - between staring out the window at gently falling snow and contemplating the tragic reality that if the present solar minimum leads to massive crop failures around the world next summer, Gore et al won’t be among the two billion or so facing starvation as a result of policies they advocate - policies favoring the conversion of food to SUV fuel, the doubling of fertilizer prices, and the near elimination of critical pesticides and herbicides.

Speaking up for IBM.

Here’s a bit from an article by Information Week’s senior editor Bob Evans about a justice department decision to go after IBM on anti-trust charges:

I was going to say that it’s almost incomprehensible that Justice is preparing to once again mount a vague, circumspect, and generally unsubstantiated attack on one of the most creative, innovative and valuable companies in the world, but that would be unfair. Because there’s no “almost” about it - to anyone outside of the Justice Dept.’s giant-shoe red-nose horn-honking clownish view of the world, this grandstanding effort to attack IBM and teach the company its proper place is completely and 100% incomprehensible.

If it weren’t so pathetically and potentially misguided, it would almost be funny. But it’s not -no, not by a long shot.

Perhaps I’m out of phase on this, and perhaps all of us should sleep more comfortably knowing that our Attorney General’s trust-busting warriors are out there protecting all of us from IBM’s devious schemes to dominate -yes, to monopolize -the mainframe market.

While I think that IBM regularly resorts to non market means (e.g. the courts, the press, financial markets, and politics) to go after competitors they can’t beat in the marketplace and that this often amounts to legal but dishonorable conduct, the reality is that Evans is right here. For the U.S. Justice Department to after IBM on its mainframe business is unfair, unreasonable, and utterly perverse because that monopoly is not sustained by anything IBM does - on the contrary, from the Future Systems project to PowerLinux, IBM has repeatedly and honorably invested real money and corporate goodwill in trying to break customers out of that ghetto - but by the insistence and loyalties of a customer base that’s forty years out of date and absolutely refuses to advance.

The bottom line on this is simple: if the customer demands the right to buy mainframes at dollars to the value penny, then the customer’s bosses should fire him but IBM’s executives owe it to their shareholders to take the money and run - and if Holder wants to prosecute somebody on this, he could perhaps be reminded that most data processing managers are middle aged white guys who pay taxes and vote Republican.

That Sun TPC/C thing

The single best report I’ve seen so far from the Oracle OpenWorld techfest is by Ben Rockwood. Here’s what he says about Sun’s TPC/C benchmark result:

Larry drove the point about synergies between Oracle and Sun home in 2 ways. The first was talking about the previously released Sun/Oracle ExaData v2 product (pictured above). The second was to show that Sun’s technology today, pre-acquisition, is the best platform available for Oracle even against IBM’s monster POWER 595 system which consumes 76 standard racks. Sun’s solution that beat it consumes only 9 racks, is fault tolerant, based on SPARC (Niagara), got 25% more throughput, gets 16 times better response times, and obviously uses a hell of a lot less power to boot.

I had a conversation with the PAE guys there and got a lot of great details on the configuration and how they made it work. Here are some highlights…

So the Sun system that beat out the 595 was based on T5440 (UltraSPARC T2) systems connected to the new F5100 Flash Array. In order to make all this work in a fault tolerant way COMSTAR was used and throughout the process required absolutely no modification! Apparently the biggest “problem” they ran into some some minor tweeking in the mpt and sd drivers because they weren’t designed to hand the extreme number of IOPS coming from the flash arrays. More shockingly, when they got the TPC-C number that beat IBM the CPU’s were 50% idle! And, if you can believe it, during the whole time Sun was working on this benchmark of all the flash modules involved, only a single one failed! Just one!

Ok, it’s not ROCK (which technologies by the way, are up for resurrection!) but beating IBM with a production ready, off the shelf system, providing nearly instantaneous response at 50% CPU sure rocks.

Oh, and the most interesting thing at OpenWorld for non Sun users? Oracle 11gR2 has a flash memory extension of the SGA - add:

db_flash_cache_file = /lfdata/lffile_raw
db_flash_cache_size = much more than ram (e.g. 128GB)

to your setup file, mount an F20 Flash Accelerator card in a PCIe slot, and those nasty OLTP transactions that access some enormous working set suddenly go a lot faster. This is dumb in a Solaris/ZFS environment, but brilliant everywhere else because it makes the system’s biggest bottleneck disappear for peanuts.

Blackbelt IT?

And, speaking of opportunities for failure .. things are a little slow right now, so I’m about to dive into the long delayed business of rewriting the infamous Unix Guide to Defenestration series as a single book.

Since it really has two messages and two audiences: a strategic one aimed at senior executives telling them that IT should be delivered by IT professionals but run by user management; and a tactical one describing how Unix can be combined with smart displays to provide the efficiencies of centralized processing with the business value of fully decentralized control; pulling this together is going to be a neat trick - and one that probably requires a new title.

I’m wondering about “Blackbelt IT”, but if anyone has a better suggestion (and no copyright aspirations), I’d sure be happy to hear it.

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 19th, 2009

Rocky dreams

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Database Management, Sun

Tags: Oracle Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc., Sun Sparc, Rock, Sun Solaris, Application Performance Management, Processors, Databases, Operating Systems, Software

Earlier this week I placed the last rock on the last wall to finish my summer landscaping project - well, except for shoveling more dirt next week. Two small walls, one along the sidewalk in the front and a little one along the back patio have embedded wire frames and concrete reinforcement but all the bigger stuff is pure drystack - and boy was I wrong thinking this was going to be easy! Oh well, live and learn right? - and, besides, I have a feeling it’ll eventually appear to have been both easy and rewarding relative to my next challenge: helping take the Alberta Wildrose party from nothing to electoral success and political power.

One of life’s little lessons here, of course, is that thinking or writing about doing something is a lot easier than actually doing it - and on that basis I want to share a hope about Sun’s “Rock” Ultrasparc RT processor.

A few months ago, when Sun’s senior people were getting their marching orders, Rock’s absence from the SPARC road map they got fired off the rumor that Rock is dead, but that’s never been formally confirmed by anyone from either Sun or Oracle.

Now obviously all the senior people involved are living in fear of litigation and keeping their mouths tightly shut accordingly, but the Oracle relationship changes the strategic picture on Rock to the point that it should be very much alive.

Rock is the first large scale processor to support three new technologies on release: transactional memory, hardware scout, and the second generation cool threads stuff. Since that’s big change, and big change tends to be viciously resisted in the market, Sun’s strategic problem with Rock was that the cost of getting it into production couldn’t be met without quick market success and they didn’t see a way to make that happen.

Oracle offers a solution to this: a way to skip the three to five years it usually takes to get new ideas accepted; and because that significantly changes the strategic picture I think there’s reason to hope that the SPARC/Solaris solution they’re planning to show on October 14th at their Openworld conference is based on Rock - not Niagara.

What Oracle can do to make Rock an instant success is simple: convert their own major products to the technology, and sell the combination on an appliance+ basis - with the plus being that these machines can also run any existing SPARC/Solaris binaries, albeit more slowly than they should. As a result customers can combine faster with cheaper at the major applications level while transitioning their IT teams to work with the new technologies - technologies the wintel mass market will be another five to eight years in getting around to copying.

The Oracle/Sun announcement that they plan to beat IBM’s p595/DB2 TPC/C record at OpenWorld lends, I think, credence to this idea because it’s the right benchmark for Rock and the wrong one for almost anything else. Among the reasons for that the most important is simply that only 10% of the transactions defined under the TPC/C standard require SMP, but these constitute the bottleneck for the p595 - the independence of the other 90% is, of course, the reason Sun, which specializes in high end SMP, despises the TPC/C benchmark while IBM, which exploits customer commitment to paying for big machines so they can be partitioned into little ones by building them as tightly interconnected clusters of little four and eight way machines, loves it.

Since Rock doesn’t have this bottleneck and can exploit hardware transaction management on the severable queries, even a two way Rock processor with ZFS disk and a beta Oracle RDBMS with most of the lock management code stripped out, should be able to blow away IBM’s p595 result on this test - something that would otherwise take 8 to 12 T5440s in a rack with at least a half dozen storage servers.

So are they going to do this? I don’t know - but I’d give it perhaps three chances out of ten that they do, with another three going to the proposition that they want to but won’t get the software done in time - and the remaining four on the safer bet that you’ll see some T5440 gear running 800,000 to a million TPM each.

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 22nd, 2009

Save money: buy from the enemy

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Apple, Enterprise Policy, General, Hardware, Linux, Sun

Tags: Car, Dell Computer Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc., Apple Inc., Sun Sparc, Sun Solaris, Processors, Servers, Operating Systems, Software

When Spain opened its passenger vehicle markets to competition on entering the EU, the average new car price fell by about 20%, while the Obama cash for clunkers program, by reducing the availability of used cars, is expected to add about 3% to the value of the average used car still on the market - and significantly more for SUVs.

Those are obvious macro effects of competition. In IT there are similar effects: it’s competition that drives the innovation that drives the cost part of what we see as the operation of Moore’s law: Intel didn’t choose to produce the “nehalem” technologies because it wanted to sell faster processors for less, it got forced into doing this because AMD was eating away at its mindshare within the x86 community and both PPC and SPARC offered more for less beyond it.

As a result of competitive pressure a February 2009 TPC C result posted by Dell shows a per transaction (i.e. per “bang”) cost of just $0.60 compared to the $1.53 the same transaction cost according to a Dell report dated about five years (12/10/04) earlier - a gain of 2.55 times in bang for the buck.

It works the other way too. When Apple dropped the PPC for use in its traditional computer products processor competition declined: in 2002 Apple’s laptops were faster and cheaper than their (comparably equipped) PC counterparts, but today’s Apple laptop is physically indistinguishable from the PC equivalent - and costs more.

IBM has a closed mainframe market and its true believers are almost completely impervious to competitor appeal: thus a 3096 cost $4.5 million in 1982 while today’s version runs about $12.5 million -a larger jump than you’d expect from the consumer price index which grew by only 2.3 times over the period.

I get a fair amount of mail from nitwits rejoicing in what they see as they death of Sun - and particularly of the SPARC/Solaris combination. I don’t know what drives people to hate like that, but here’s a free bit of advice to everybody else: if SPARC/Solaris dies, you can expect to pay far more for your future x86 products than you will if Sun/Oracle gets it together and pushes these technologies as fast and as far as they will go.

Take away competitive pressure from the SPARC/Solaris combination and the rate of price/performance improvement for both wintel and lintel will decrease - imagine that it falls by only 20% (wildly optimistic, in my opinion) and your 2014 cost per “bang” will fall to only $0.29 instead of the $0.23 it’s headed for now. Six cents per “bang” - doesn’t sound like much, does it? The Dell that delivered the $0.60 I mentioned earlier produced 104,492 “bangs” - and that six cents works out to $6,270 for the system.

For you and me that difference won’t amount to much - perhaps a few thousand bucks we could otherwise spend on something else. For big players, however, this can add up to real money real fast - so much, and so fast that people making decisions for thousands of servers every year should be thinking that maybe the best way to get price breaks from the monopoly of their choice over the next few years might be to call their Sun/Oracle representative right now and talk about placing some serious orders.

August 1st, 2009

Reformulating Murphy's law

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Enterprise Policy, Hardware, Sun

Tags: Wintel, Belief, Sun Microsystems Inc., IBM Corp., Murphy, Law, Financial Accounting, Finance, Paul Murphy

As everybody knows, Murphy’s law says that what can go wrong will go wrong - and lots of people will be familiar with the public policy version of this known as the law of unintended consequences: that policy implementation often produces results opposite to those expected.

As normally stated Murphy’s law isn’t really a law as much as it is an observation in that it describes what is seen to happen, rather than stating a principle whose application predicts what happens.

State the law as a law, however, and while you lose the zing you get from the traditional cynical observation about reality, you do get a much broader picture:

If real actions are taken on the basis of beliefs about reality, then their consequences will align with those beliefs to precisely the extent that the beliefs align with reality.

Notice that this predicts Murphy’s Observation: go into something with unrealistic beliefs and you’re setting yourself up for failure.

The law’s operation is most obvious with respect to the contrary consequences so commonly seen in public policy: where peace policies lead to war, climate hysteria produces economic failure, short term dietary fads produce long term disease, and nationalized health care raises costs, limits access to care, and reduces life expectancies.

The applications to IT are less obvious but equally compelling. If you believe, for example, in the achievability of wintel security, you’ll spend lots of money setting your employer up for an embarrassing loss of customer data; if you believe Wintel cheaper than any Unix you’ll spend lots of money causing your employer to lose the cost and productivity advantages of the cheaper technology; and if you buy into the idea that Wintel empowers employees you’ll find yourself spending lots of your employers money restricting what those employees can do with “their” machines.

Or, more traditionally, if you go into some software project or demonstration hoping it will work; it won’t - but if you align your beliefs with reality through clear thinking, good programming, and rigorous testing, it will.

As one example of Murphy’s law at work, I want to consider one of the things going on with Sun’s market. Both HP and IBM are doing the Sun is dead wink nudge dance with customers and urging them to buy their own, much more expensive, products instead. That’s good for them - but really bad for your employer if you’re eager enough to believe this to fall for the pitch.

The problem is this: they might be right, the financial market attacks on Sun were crippling and customer reaction is hurting as much again, but the bottom line is that the facts aren’t in yet and it’s simply premature to draw conclusions one way or the other.

Thus the guy who sent me an email last week gloating about Sun’s death and proudly attaching a copy of IBM’s press release claiming to have set a new SAP processing record with a p550 was acting out a fantasy - and if he succeeds in getting his employer to shell out for a couple of the things the bottom line on Murphy’s law is that the results are going to align with reality, not his preferred beliefs.

P.S.

The IBM press releaseis carefully couched to limit comparisons to other eight core systems (i.e. to x86) - because the Sun 5440 with Oracle beats IBM”s system by about a quarter on performance, at something significantly less than a third of the dollars.

July 25th, 2009

Thinking about ROCK

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Applications, Enterprise Policy, General, Sun

Tags: Sun Microsystems Inc., Processors, Semiconductors, Hardware, Components, Paul Murphy

Last Friday my wife and I went to Thompson Falls, Montana, to look at a granite quarry and, as it turned out, buy 32 tons of the stuff for some home improvement work I’m really not looking forward to. It was a fun, relaxing, day: we drove the Highway to the Sun across Glacier National Park early enough Friday morning to see virtually no other traffic, were amazed by the lush valleys and enormous vistas on the western side of Montana, got along well with the people we met at the quarry, and had a pretty good dinner near Columbia Falls on the way home.

Still, as frequent readers must know, it’s just not possible for me to drive the Highway to the Sun, stare at trillions of tons of vertical rock all day, wander through a large commercial quarry talking rocks, and not occasionally think about Sun’s Rock processor.

Some people, of course, think this thing’s been canceled; others, including me, dismiss that report as just part of the overall attempt to damage Sun as much as possible; while still others have speculated (correctly, I think) first that the rock processor could really make Oracle’s RDBMS and business applications rock and later that the ideas will survive Sun no matter what.

What occurred to me, however, was this: people have studied the use of transactional memory in the development of security and transactional authorization monitors but, at least to my knowledge, nobody’s linked four core Sun technologies: DTrace, HTM (hardware transactional memory), CMT, and processor based, hardware supported, packet cryptology in this context.

With these you could build an applications environment that automatically wraps transactions inside a TPM, automatically encrypts and “channel hops” all communications, automatically monitors processors for both unexpected results and unexplained activity, and automatically inserts a user defined authorization function into each transaction.

Applications written within environments like that to control many physically separate units acting together could be guaranteed to degrade gracefully as these units fail, guaranteed to warn users if attempts are made to corrupt them, guaranteed to be fully auditable after the fact, and can be made arbitrarily difficult for an outsider to corrupt.

The obvious applications here are offensive: to control, for example, a flock of smart weapons going after a submarine, a sniper, or some particular piece of enemy infrastructure. The more defensive and immediate applications, however, are in work like hardening networks and civil infrastructure (particularly electrical distribution and generation) against both accidental and intentional corruption or subversion.

Both Oracle and Sun sell into those markets now - and because those markets are spending enormous sums on labor intensive, make do, solutions that provably don’t work very well, the bottom line for Rock is that a little imagination and a little courage is all the Sun/Oracle combination will need to make this a mega win - and not just for their technology and companies, but for the country.

July 11th, 2009

Pigeons roosting and doing what pigeons do

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Applications, Security, Sun

Tags: PC, Sun Microsystems Inc., Sun Ray, Desktops, Servers, Hardware, Paul Murphy

I was just wondering what I was going to run on about for today’s blog when the phone rang…. a guy I haven’t heard from in this century.

“Bill XX? Really? Wow, I haven’t heard from you for awhile, where are you working now?

“Still at XX eh? that’s a long time - so, what’s up?”

“Ya I heard about, according to the news about 6,000 affected PCs - really, closer to 15,000? and for how long? (surprised snort) you’re kidding, and no one noticed?

[He explains that some top level executives want him to report to them about the problem]

“Well, If I know anything about how they work, they won’t care much about the actual security issue, just about how the press got wind of it - trust me, talk to them about shutting down outside access to confidential data and that’s how they’ll hear you.

[He asks if Sun Ray would solve the problem].

“Well, I can try to answer that, but why call me, I don’t work for Sun - ”

[Turns out he talked to a client I helped install Sun Rays - and called Sun last week, but the guy said someone from Toronto would have to call him and that hasn't happened yet.]

“That’s probably because you guys kick lots of tires but only buy from IBM”

[He argues that they buy from HP and Dell too]

“That’s low bid PCs, Sun doesn’t sell those - But on the specific issue of whether Sun Ray will solve your problem: sure, in terms of what to say when they ask you this afternoon what alternatives exist and how you’re going to ensure this never happens again - but not in deployment, no.

[He rises to the bait, asks why if Sun Ray is a high security device using them wouldn't prevent future data losses to internet attacks.]

“Because Sun is selling more and more Sun Rays into PC environments where the buyers are looking for better control over what their users do: using PC servers to deliver PC software to those users -and that kind of server proliferation means you lose security control. Sure your exposure shifts a bit from the desktop to the server racks, but you still have the same people problem, the same x86 problems, the same garbage networking, and the same crappy software.

What’s worse, the current product works well for PC apps, but that market is now driving design decisions with the next generation being prepped to be operationally indistinguishable from a desktop PC with DP style lockdowns in place - moving from smart display to some kind of half assed thin client. It’s bad news for users, but just the kind of DP idiocy guys like your old boss; what was his name, bruce something? used to love.

“He’s still there!? Are you serious? the guy barely made it through highschool and he’s kept a senior IT job for like, what 20 years! it’s no wonder you’re stuck in 91 and trying to rediscover 1975. Look, Sun Rays are great - and if you’ve got national security class issues they’re the only way to go. But you don’t you’ve got a bunch of PC users who desperately want to believe that their PC empowers them do things for themselves - and Sun Ray’s greatest strength is that it will let you give them the freedom to do exactly that, but its greatest weakness is that it will also let people like Bruce do the opposite, what you just said: more controls, less user freedom.

“You want to succeed with Sun Ray? use it to give users what they want - you want to fail with Sun Ray? use it give data processing people what they want. The technology works both ways, but if you do the DP thing you’ll limit organizational flexibility and users will eventually sabotage you in all possible ways - until Sun Ray becomes the worst mistake you ever made.

“Don’t do it - an architecture combines management with technology, it’s not just hardware and software. Either change your departmental management style to something that works for users, or stick with the client-server crap - it doesn’t work for them either, but they don’t know that because everyone tells them how wonderful it all is, and they’ve never seen an alternative.

He wasn’t happy with me - but what’s truly shocking about this is that when I talked to this guy last, in mid 1998, his concerns were almost exactly the same: he had a few thousand PCs running Windows95 and wanted to know if Sun’s acquisition of NetDynamics made buying into their identity server a good idea. Now here it is over ten years later, and he’s still buying from the same vendor, still looking wistfully over the fence, and still fighting the same losing battles, with the same tools, and under the same restrictions - so, besides putting his kid through college, what’s he achieved?

Professionally, I think, nothing. The buzzwords have changed. He’s worked hard, cashed a lot of salary cheques, paid his dues to lots of other people, and probably sometimes learnt something - but what he’s achieved in terms of contributions to his employer is nothing: every day has been a different day with different words but pretty much the same [four letter word] - for close to 15 years now.