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.

Secunia is a well-known Danish company that tracks security vulnerabilities and viruses for thousands of software programs and operating systems. Vendors will often use information from Secunia to show how robust and secure their software is.

Check out this comparison of vulnerability advisories from Secunia for the major Unix operating systems — AIX, HP-UX and Solaris.

The twice-yearly TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers released November 12 is dominated by IBM in number of systems and performance.

The TOP500 list was released at SC07, the international conference on high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis, in Reno, Nevada.

The top spot is held by reigning world champion Blue Gene/L System. Pictured below, the system is a joint development of IBM and the Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and is installed at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. The system was upgraded recently and now achieves a Linpack benchmark performance of now 478.2 teraflops (TFlop/s) — or trillions of calculations per second.

Coming in at No. 2 is a brand-new installation of the same type of IBM system, albeit a newer version. It is a Blue Gene/P system installed in Germany at the Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ) and it achieved performance of 167.3 TFlop/s.

It’s not before No. 3 in the TOP500 list that you find a non-IBM system. That honor is reserved for the New Mexico Computing Applications Center (NMCAC), which has a Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) system built on the Altix ICE 8200 model that posted a speed of 126.9 TFlop/s.

In the latest list, IBM regained a solid lead in the total number of systems with 232 (46.4%) over Hewlett-Packard (HP) with 166 systems (33.2%).

By Alex Barrett

Maybe its to keep up with the times, maybe its to prove to its detractors that AIX 6 really can do what IBM says it can, but for the first time, Big Blue is opening up its AIX beta to the general public, including its competitors (Hewlett-Packard and Sun).

“Traditionally, the beta program has been available only to existing customers,” said Scott Handy, IBM vice president for worldwide marketing and strategy for System p. “But it’s a different ballgame now. Instead of having thirty or forty beta customers, we’re gearing up to have maybe 1,500 – we don’t really know, actually, but the more the better.”

Between Monday and Wednesday morning, IBM had already seen over 200 downloads of the AIX 6 beta code – and the program hadn’t even been announced yet.

Some of the features Handy hopes beta testers will play with include Live Partition Mobility, in which an entire Power 6 partition can be moved, including the OS, and Live Application Mobility, in which an application can be moved to a separate operating system instance resident on physical box, or on an entirely new machine.

IBM believes both these AIX 6 features are unique. “We definitely have something that neither Sun nor HP have in the Unix space,” Handy said. He also emphasized that all these features are designed for high-performance, production workloads. “We guarantee no transaction loss,” he said.

By opening up the beta to the public, Handy said he hoped that it would put AIX 6’s detractors’ doubts to rest. “Frankly, a lot of our competitors were somewhat disbelieving we could do live partition and workload mobility; they were also suspicious that we might not have binary compatibility with previous releases,” he said. Handy maintained that applications compiled for AIX 5.2 and 5.3 will run on AIX 6 unmodified. Similarly, he promised that AIX 6 is hardware-compatible back to Power 4 processors.

The AIX 6 beta is available here. IBM is hoping to launch AIX 6 in November of this year.

Timothy Prickett Morgan has a good AIX roadmap story over at IT Jungle. The bottom line is that the next version of AIX will likely be available around October, no matter what it’s called. Morgan is calling it AIX 5.4 in the article (as it is in the presentation image), but on the conference call regarding the Power6 news yesterday, IBM folks said it would be AIX 6. In keeping with the apparent trend to follow the naming convention of the Power processor, IBM also said on the call that the next version of i5/OS for its System i servers would likely be i6/OS.

No matter. Morgan’s article gives a good summary of what AIX versions will be supported and back-supported on what platforms, which is always a key issue for users:

…the natural thing for IBM to talk about along with Power6 hardware advancements is how it plans to advance the AIX operating system. Customers don’t just want roadmaps and assurances about the hardware. They want them about the operating systems that run on it, too.

You can also see on the graph that AIX 5.5, which would be called AIX 7 if the current naming convention is kept (which is never a slam dunk with IBM), will be available in October 2010.

IBM Corp. announced today that its Power6 processor will appear first in its System p servers running AIX Unix, as expected.

In its press release, IBM is touting the dual-core Power6 as a 4.7 GHz chip, which is more than twice the speed as its predecessor, the Power5, but not as fast as the 5 and 6 GHz IBM was boasting of last year. The thumbnail-sized chip will generate less than 100 watts of power, according to Big Blue. It has a total cache of 8MB per chip - four times that of the Power5 - and IBM says it is capable of downloading the entire iTunes catalog in one minute.

The first server running the Power6 will be the System p5 570, which IBM claims is the No. 1 performer on four Unix server benchmarks: SPECint2006, SPECfp2006, SPECjbb2006, and TPC-C. System i servers using Power6 chips are expected late this year or early next.

There’s a conference call on the release later today and I’ll be writing a story that will go live tomorrow. In the meantime, here are some more photos (you can click on all of them to get larger versions):

cross-section of the transistors

the silicon wafer

the System p5 570

According to Computer Business Review, Hewlett-Packard Co. has finally surpassed IBM Corp in taking over the top spot on the TPC-C online transaction processing benchmark test. Timothy Prickett Morgan said HP worked hard to squeak by with its HP Superdome configured with 64 dual-core Montecito chips. IBM’s best result to date is on its System p5 595 configured with 32 dual-core Power5+ chips. Morgan expects HP’s dominance to be short-lived, assuming IBM’s Power6 doesn’t hit major delays.