Gabriel Consulting Group, based in Beaverton, Ore., has finished its annual survey of Unix users, and found that IBM narrowly topped Hewlett-Packard in customer satisfaction.

Last year, IBM had a little more breathing room. But Dan Olds, a principal at the consultancy, said that Big Blue and HP are practically in a dead heat, with IBM leading in technology factors but HP winning on system quality and overall data center issues. That represents a decent jump for HP, which had slipped into third place behind Sun Microsystems last year on customer satisfaction.

The Gabriel survey quizzed 290 users in the fourth quarter of 2007 on dozens of Unix issues such as system performance, ease of integration, and operating system quality. Some findings from the survey:

• IBM won 14 categories and tied five, doing best in “Overall Technology,” “Raw System Performance,” and “Processor Performance.”
• HP won 10 categories and tied five, winning on topics such as “Easiest Integration,” “Best Initial Quality,” and “Operating System Quality.”
• Users picked Sun as being the most committed to Unix and driving Unix innovation the most.

Olds said that although Sun came in third, they did beat IBM and HP on topics such as customer loyalty and energy efficiency.

Three Hewlett-Packard user groups — Encompass, ITUG (International Tandem Users Group), and HP-Interex — are consolidating into one big one called Connect.

The groups announced their intention to merge earlier this year, and just recently the membership of all three voted to do so. The new merged group will have more than 50,000 participants and will be led by Nina Buik, who was the former president of Encompass. The launch of Connect will take place at the HP Technology Forum & Expo in Las Vegas next month.

At least one of the reasons for the merger is to have a larger voice.

“One of the issues that’s at the top of the minds for all of our members is advocacy,” Buik said in an interview earlier this year. “You tend to get heard a lot more when your numbers are greater. When you go to HP or your vendor partners, they’re going to listen.”

That’s not to say they haven’t been listening; Buik said HP and other vendors have thus far been supportive of the merger.

“It can be looked at from two standpoints,” said Scott Healy, the former president of ITUG. “It can provde greater value because HP really does want to know what users are thinking.”

Buik said that IT folks in the trenches can no longer hunker down in the confines of the data center; they will also need new, non-technical skills, which Connect aims to help them obtain. “IT people really have to know how to pitch ideas to high-level business people,” Buik said. It goes without saying that communications skills free of technical jargon are increasingly required, as are project management skills and the ability to make oneself more visible to an organization’s decision-makers.

Through local, regional and national meetings, one of Connect’s primary goals is to educate members in regard to the brave new world of IT. For Buik, one of her personal interests is to help members safeguard their careers by engaging in some “recession-proofing” practices. “Yes, you should have green IT and virtualization current in your skills,” Buik said. “But don’t emphasize your technology knowledge; instead show how your skills can help reduce costs.”

Buik added that she didn’t think there would be a lot of overlap between the three groups, saying that each catered to different sets of HP customers. The groups’ board members will also be able to learn and share from one another — Encompass, for example, has conducted some webinars, while ITUG has more experience running shows internationally. The combined group will look to increase its online presence and add forums so that HP users can log on and talk to each other about IT issues they’re dealing with.

Features Writer Megan Santosus contributed to this report.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. has updated its Solaris 10 operating system (OS) today, The Solaris 10 5/08 OS, which is now available for free download.

Larry Wake, product manager for Solaris, details the new features in a video blog. Some of the features include new hardware support for systems based on AMD, Intel and SPARC processors, and increased performance and power management features for existing systems. In addition, a new feature called CPU Capping lets users set a limit on CPU usage for better management of system resources.

The new Solaris 10 also includes the ability for Solaris Containers to support virtualized environments based on earlier versions the OS - Solaris 8 and 9. This allows users running a physical instance of Solaris 8 or 9 to move those instances to containers running on a Solaris 10 system, according to Sun.

The Solaris 8 OS was originally released in February 2000, superseded by Solaris 9 OS in May 2002, and the Solaris 10 OS was initially released in January 2005.

More details on the updated version of Solaris 10 are available on Sun’s blog.

AMD announced today that Dell Inc. is now offering five server platforms based on AMD’s quad-core Opteron processors. This news follows last week’s announcement that quad-core AMD Opteron processors are generally available, and brings the number of available global OEM platforms based on the new processors to 13.

Additionally, VMware Inc. has completed qualification of Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors for use in VMware ESX and ESXi hypervisor deployments.

This is important because the erratum that impacted earlier versions of quad-core AMD Opteron processors was particularly relevant to virtualization environments. This certification signifies that AMD’s processor as compatible with virtualization environments, an AMD spokesperson said.

Dell servers supporting Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors include the PowerEdge SC1435, 2970, M605 blade server and 6950 platforms, all two-socket systems, as well as the new PowerEdge T605 tower server.

For more information on the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors visit AMD’s website . Information on Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor pricing can be found at http://www.amd.com/pricing.

Hewlett-Packard has updated its HP-UX 11i v3 Unix operating system again, this time rejiggering the pre-packaged “operating environments” so customers can focus on high availability and virtualization.

Previous operating environments from the company included Foundation, Enterprise, and Mission-Critical. Each came with the HP-UX operating system kernel plus some HP middleware to accompany it, and were built like Russian dolls. Foundation was the smallest, Enterprise had everything Foundation had and a little more, and Mission-Critical had everything Enterprise had plus a little more.

Users don’t have to buy the pre-packaged deals; they can just buy the operating system and then add on middleware products a la carte. But HP claims customers can save thousands by buying the packaged deals, as well as the time in not having to buy and install each separate feature they want.

With the new update, the operating environments are a bit more like different looking dolls sitting next to each other. They include Base, High Availability, Virtual Server, and Data Center. High-Availability and Virtual Server both have everything Base has, but with unique features to one another. High-Availability, for example, has HP Serviceguard, software that helps clustered server environments prevent downtime.
The Virtual Server OE, meanwhile, has Virtual Server Environment, HP’s virtualization environment for its Unix servers.

Data Center OE encapsulates everything.

“It’s about as good a direction I can think of as any,” said Tony Iams, an analyst at Ideas International. “Virtualization is clearly an important development in the industry, but not everyone is ready to fully embrace that yet. So for users that just want to keep running the same workloads in the way they have in the past, the High Availability operating environment makes a lot of sense.”

The update is one of a regular string of updates (about every six months) that HP plans to make between major versions of HP-UX. An update this fall made it easier for users to add and subtract resources to hardware partitions using HP-UX. Along with the most recent update, it’s clear that HP is focusing its Unix operating system on virtualization, which is pretty much what every Unix operating system vendor — actually, every OS vendor, Unix or not — is doing.

Sydney, Australia based-Ideas International Inc. has launched an open source-style website to compare and rate the functional capabilities of blade servers on Monday, April 7.

The IT research and analysis company’s new site for Collaborative Product Evaluation looks at medium-sized blade servers and will include enterprise-level blade server data by mid-summer, said Jim Burton, the vice president and senior analyst for entry-level servers and blades at Ideas International.

The site lets users compare various components of the servers that fall under the umbrellas of platform functionality, environmental footprint, virtualization functions, reliability, serviceability and manageability, and deployment considerations.

The information is based on the hardware specifications, interviews with end users, and performance data, Burton said.

“We establish the appropriate ratings, but it is an open source-style website, so users can affect these ratings too,” Burton said. Of course, Ideas International give the user feedback a credibility rating, so only statements supported by concrete data can actually bring a rating up or down, he said.

The site is pretty handy if you are on the market for blade servers, especially because the site allows you to make comparisons based on your priorities. If you need power efficiency, you can compare boxes based on that alone. Same goes for factors like “green-ness,” cost, networking and so forth, said Burton.

Ideas International also has evaluation sites for x86 virtual machine platforms and plans to create evaluation sites for Unix-based systems and Linux in the near future, so keep an eye out for those.

Intel Corp. introduced two low-voltage 45 nanometer (nm) quad-core Xeon processors today that run at 50 watts, or 12.5 watts per core, and frequencies up to 2.50 GigaHertz (GHz).

The Intel Xeon Processor L5400 Series is built on 45nm manufacturing and a transistor formula that, combined, boosts performance and reduces power consumption.

The Quad-Core Intel Xeon L5400 processors are as much as 25% faster and have a 50% larger cache size than Intel’s previous-generation low-voltage Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors introduced last March, while maintaining the 50-watt thermal envelope. The quad-core L5420 and L5410 processors run at 2.50 GHz and 2.33 GHz, respectively, and have 12 megabytes (MB) of on-die cache and dedicated 1333 MHz front side buses (FSB).

Vendors supporting the L5400 and L5210 series include Asus, Dell, Fujitsu, Fujitsu-Siemens, Gigabyte, HP, Hitachi, IBM, Microstar, NEC, Quanta, Rackable, Supermicro, Tyan and Verari.

Next quarter, Intel will also begin shipping a new dual-core low-voltage processor with a 40-watt rating and clock speed of 3 GHz, with a 6 MB cache size and a 1333 MHz FSB.

The Intel Quad-Core Xeon processor L5420 is $380 per 1,000 units and the Intel Quad-Core L5410 is priced at $320 per 1,000 units.

Intel Corp.’s Senior Vice President and General Manager, Digital Enterprise Group, Pat Gelsinger previewed Intel’s upcoming processor technologies this week, including details of a six-core processor due out later this year.

Gelsinger also detailed Intel’s new Itanium processor, codenamed Tukwila, as well as Nehalem and Larrabee, a future processor slated to have eight cores.

I’ll interrupt the oohing and ahhing here to note that Sun Microsystems Inc. has had an eight-core processor, Niagara, since 2006 and came out with an updated version, Niagara 2, or UltraSPARC T2, in August of 2007 for commodity servers.

But back to Intel’s big news; Intel plans to release its first 6-core, 45nm processor, code named Dunnington, later this year. The processor will feature a single-die with six cores and will be socket-compatible with the Caneland platform. Intel’s first 45nm processor, announced in November 2007, was a quad-core.

Dunnington will support FlexMigration technology, which supports live virtual machine (VM) migration across both 65nm and 45nm high-k Intel Core microarchitecture-based servers, so users who invested in 65nm quad-core Xeon processors recently won’t lose their investment.

Tukwila, meanwhile, is Intel’s next Itanium processor. With four cores, 30MB total cache, Quickpath interconnects, a dual Integrated Memory Controller and Remote Access Service features, the silicon holds 2 billion transistors and is expected to hold more than double the performance potential than current Itanium processors.

As for Nehalem, future versions will have from two to eight cores, with Simultaneous Multi-threading, resulting in 4 to 16 thread capability. Nehalem also supports four times the memory bandwidth than Intel’s highest-performance Xeon processor-based systems of today, with up to 8 MB level-3 cache, 731 million transistors, and QuickPath interconnects up to 25.6GB per second, Intel reported.

Meanwhile, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Advanced Micro Device’s (AMD) 65nm quad-core Opteron processor, code-named Barcelona, will finally begin shipping in April after coming to a major standstill. The company told the world to expect shipments in September 2007, but discovered an errata and put off mass shipments of the processor.

AMD announced its plans for 45nm processors, code-named Shanghai, earlier this month and expects those quad-core processors to begin shipping later this year.

In the server OS wars, Linux has been consistently gaining on market leader Windows and stalwart Unix. Thanks to powerful commodity x86 boxes, many organizations that have traditionally run enterprise applications such as SAP or Oracle on more expensive RISC-based boxes now have the option of moving to x86 servers. For such organizations, it would seem logical to conclude that hardware price is the No. 1 reason for moving from Unix to either Windows or especially Linux.

The hardware price differential may have been significant four years ago, but it’s not the main reason that organizations are looking to x86-based systems to run their enterprise apps. So says Richard Jones, vice president and service director for the Data Center Strategies at Burton Group an IT advisory firm. The x86 64-bit systems have matured to the point where organizations have gained some institutional knowledge to effectively administer them, Jones asserts. Plus, IT pros like the fact that x86-based systems are standardized; if you are running Dell and you don’t like the support, it’s relatively easy to switch to IBM, for example. There are options to switch vendors that don’t require much if anything in the way of retraining, Jones said.

What about costs? Well Jones gives Unix vendors some credit; they have lowered prices to the point where the differential between a Unix box and an x86 box isn’t five to 10 times more as was the case three to four years ago. “Compare some Sun Sparc hardware with x86 hardware with similar processing, and the price isn’t that much more to sway many organizations away from Unix,” Jones said.

A quick visit to the Sun Microsystems makes comparison shopping easy. Take a high-end Sun Fire X4450 Server with four dual-core Intel Xeon E7220 processors, 8 GB memory and plug in a few upgrade options for 292 GB 10000 rps SAS storage. Price tag: $14,252. Then price the low-end Sun Sparc Enterprise 5520 with the UltraSparc T2 processor and 4 core 32 threads, 4 GB of memory and 292 GB 1000 rpm SAS storage. Price tag: $14,995.

Of course software is another story, and Jones said there are still dramatic differences in OS costs between the traditional Unix and x86 systems — except for Solaris 10. Maintenance costs are also still divergent, again except for Solaris 10. Jones went on to say that the cost of applications tend to be all over the map: Some applications are much more expensive initial cost and ongoing maintenance when running on traditional Unix compared to x86 systems while others are comparable.

So for some organizations, the bottom line isn’t really about the bottom line after all, at least according to Jones. It’s his contention that most organizations are moving away from Unix because they want the flexibility and have the internal know-how to handle the switch. The cost differential just isn’t big enough alone to sway people anymore.

Does this reflect your reality? Or have you found that the cost difference between RISC-based systems and x86 systems still wide enough to drive your mainframe through?

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Hewlett-Packard Co. is pressuring Sun Microsystems Sparc users to abandon their aging platforms and move onto commodity HP ProLiant and Integrity servers, a strategy that has generated HP an estimated $1.5 billion in server revenue since 2004.

As part of that strategy, HP announced a new distribution agreement with Transitive Corp. today under which HP and its channel partners will be certified resellers of Transitive’s QuickTransit virtualization software. The software lets users migrate their applications from Sparc-based servers to other servers without making any code changes to applications.

HP first partnered with Transitive back in February 2007.

Transitive is currently offering QuickTransit for Solaris/Sparc-to-Linux/Itanium on HP Integrity servers. This allows users to migrate enterprise applications from SPARC-based hardware to HP Integrity servers running either Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Novell SUSE Linux.