For most applications, the storage industry is fairly adept at delivering requisite performance. All, that is, except for large data set processing. Think: Financial market modeling, or digital image rendering, or seismic analysis for the gas and oil industry. For these applications, thousands of servers churn away for days before the job is finished. And when there's a lot of data fetching, the speed of the storage system is critical, and in most cases, currently inadequate. Gear6 thinks it can help.

Citrix buying XenSource is a bit of a surprise, but the real shocker is the price tag. A half billion dollars for a three year old company with a few hundred customers, almost no profits and a part of its intellectual property in the public domain seems like a huge premium to pay. On the other hand, VMware just set its value at $19 billion and counting through its IPO. Snatching up the number two player for a tiny fraction of that might not be such a bad deal. To make XenSource worth it, Citrix must build a data center infrastructure platform that offers significantly better manageability than what's in use today.

A friend of mine IMed me a link to Digg the other day congratulating me on getting voted to the front page. Curious, I checked it out and I was found out it wasn't directly to my article, but to a forum post on Linuxquestions.org.

In our news analysis section, we detail sparring by VMWare and Microsoft over the future of virtualization.

Software licensing is going to have to change in the age of virtualization. Who's got it right, Microsoft or its upstart rivals?

Our tech editors analyze the situation with some surprising results. Read on...

The server business is entering a fascinating phase, with processors that feature power through the roof and energy efficiency unrivaled by older chips; extraordinary hardware options available to you whether you're in a large enterprise or a small business; a growing, stable open-source platform in Linux that's going head to head with Microsoft's forthcoming, exciting Longhorn server and some wonderful legacy platforms; the old reliables of supercomputers or flexible new clustering methods to compete for the high-end; and pretty good pricing on all of it. If you can't figure out a server platform for your company that will increase your business efficiency, save you money and justify your investment, you're not really trying.

I've covered the IT business long enough to be continually amused when companies decide to junk a technology that, a mere few years before, promised to save the world.

AMD always does well when LinuxWorld rolls around, and this week is no exception. The first major upgrade of its flagship mid- and large-market server processor, the Opteron, sees AMD well on the path to quad-core processing. And it guarantees that 2007 will be the year of 4x, as both AMD and rival Intel vie to get you to toss out relatively inefficient and energy-draining single-core machines in favor of quads that will cut your costs in energy and time.

I've got to admit, I've been most curious about Apple and what its server strategy will be going forward from its switch to Intel processors. Now, perhaps we'll start finding out. Apple honcho Steve Jobs used the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference last week to complete Apple's Intel line by unveiling the two most long-awaited items -- the Mac Pro desktop, which fills out the desktop line at its most important point, and a quad-core Xeon-based Xserve 1U server line that goes up to 3 GHz in speed and concentrates on efficient power management.

I really keep waiting for IBM to get around one of these days to licensing the late, great Eddie Kendricks's "Keep On Truckin'" for an ad campaign. Remember that mid-'70s solo smash from the Temptations singer, and the explosion of license plates with the funky steppin' dude that it spawned?

Usually, I hold down the number of news items that I include in the newsletter, as do all of my colleagues--we figure that skimming the cream for you is the best use of your valuable time, and you can always get more headlines at the Server Pipeline news page. But this week was hard: There was a ton of stuff going on, so I tossed in a few more than usual this week.

Having beaten on Microsoft a couple of times lately, for losing its basic business focus in its attacks on Linux and its decision to keep contesting the European Commission judgment against it, I'll now come to praise them as much -- and for keeping its eye on that business focus this time. (Hey, I try to be a fair guy.)

$3.8 million a day?!?!? A DAY?!?!? Do you know what you or I could do with that kind of money?

It's always slow in the U.S. around the Independence Day holiday on July 4, and this week was really no different. But in Europe, life trucks on that week as usual.

The news this week was not "news" in the classic sense -- something that happened that you didn't know about beforehand -- but it was news nonetheless.

Hey, it's our old friend FUD making an appearance yet again! FUD, of course, stands for "fear, uncertainty and doubt," and is a weapon that Microsoft has long been accused of using to stave off competition and try to sow just enough doubt in customers' minds to back them off from using non-Microsoft products.

Aw, man, do I have to write about blade servers again?

Microsoft has claimed the lead in server software market share for a good while now, and Windows Server is pretty ubiquitous. But one area in which most of us probably don't think of Windows as the logical platform is high-performance server software for heavy, complex calculations.

Bruce Springsteen's lyric from "My Hometown," which I stole for today's note, is about working-class manufacturing jobs evaporating for good. But it's no factory foreman that's delivering the news about a couple of the server market's biggest companies. Rather, it's going to come from the top--and already has in the case of Sun Microsystems, which will be paring its workforce back by canning some 5,000 workers and rethinking its basic business strategy.

You can count me as one of those people who's not always impressed by Microsoft's efforts to dominate markets by stuffing every piece of functional software it can find into its base systems. For instance, how does a media player have anything to do with an operating system? The answer, of course, is "it doesn't"--the OS controls the interaction of the software with the hardware, the media player shows you movie files. Apples and oranges: That media player could easily stand apart from the base Windows operating system, no matter how much smoke Microsoft blows to convince us otherwise.

As I watched the Live 8 concerts last fall (and later the DVD from the worldwide broadcasts), I was struck by a sign being held by a fan in London's Hyde Park site as Pink Floyd played its historic reunion set: "Pigs have flown."

Two weeks ago, I noted the trend toward technology alliances and suggested that you all view each one carefully to see how it worked for you and your company. I was also expecting a heads-up on news from Qlusters, the open-source systems management outfit.

Typically at this week of the year, I'd be in Los Angeles, where I step into a phone booth and emerge as my heretofore-unknown alter ego, Video Games Reporter. (Don't give away my secret, OK?)

Technology alliances around certain products--processors, blade servers, software platforms--seem to be all the rage these days. You have your Itanium Solutions Alliance, your Blade.org, any one of seemingly a zillion Microsoft-related groups, and so on.

Well, my WAFS review went online and to print this week, there are a couple of minor things that I'd like to set straight.

One of the most startling pieces of news I've seen on the tech side recently was the decision by Citigroup last week to rate Dell stock as a "sell." Turns out that in the ever-twisted world of Wall Street, Dell's high margins (a situation that zillions of companies would kill to have) aren't as important as the drop on its sales and market share.

If you think about it, Scott McNealy had an amazing run as Sun's CEO -- one that went for a long, loooong time in this business. He co-founded the company in 1982 and became CEO and chairman two years later; that's 22 years at the helm. In the tech industry, that's several eons.

When everyone on the planet finally realizes that peak oil is already here or just around the corner, they can look to the server industry as one business that got the big picture early on. Of course, this isn't entirely out of altruism (although server manufacturers will be happy to tout that side of the equation, and with no complaints from me). Rather, in the data center, energy efficiency and savings are simply a matter of good business -- and sooner than later, all businesses are going to have to realize that.

How meaningful is it that Sun has canned 200 employees of its Sparc group?

I spotted a piece in EE Times the other day that says Carly Fiorina is taking a seat on the board of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., one of the giants in chip manufacturing. The item went on to note that Fiorina is also working on a book for this fall "about her career and her views on such issues as what constitutes a leader, how women can thrive in business and the role technology will continue to play in reshaping our world."

I had planned to be writing this from this week's LinuxWorld conference in Boston. That was before the flu. But with or without me, the action was indeed in Boston this week -- somewhat low-key, but certainly not without interest.

The answer to the Great Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42 (as Douglas Adams notes in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy series). Apparently, the answer to the Great Question of Server Processor Performance is even greater -- 48, if Azul Systems is to be believed.

So most of the front-line news this week came from Novell and its Brainshare conference, where the company rolled out SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and talked about its timetable for version 11. Company head honcho Jack Messman also spoke with our colleagues at CRN about the company's plans for Linux and its relationships in the sales channel. SUSE 10 is obviously a big step for Novell as it battles for market share against Red Hat, not to mention Microsoft's Windows and the other systems that companies can use for a base server operating system.

Brocade remains true to its core switching business, but finds other avenues are opening up as customers contemplate their next generation data centers.

Brocade remains true to its core switching business, but finds other avenues are opening up as customers contemplate their next generation data centers.

At times, it seems as if the entire universe will be running on open-source software soon. If Qlusters has its way, that'll certainly be the case for systems management software.

Just when you might have thought Microsoft had figured out how to deal with antitrust issues as a smart, long-term strategy, the company reverts back to its defensive, paranoid tactics--and all because it thinks it somehow can never be wrong. How stupid.

I am on a mailing list for The Evaluator Group.

If you follow my work at all, or have talked to me on the topic, you know that I think most analysis is bogus, as are the firms that sell it. But Evaluator Group is generally pretty on the ball. They have good analysis, and seem to have their stuff together.

So I found it massively amusing when their systems went awry early last week, and my blackberry began buzzing off my hip.

Many thanks for all the feedback on my prior posting on Itanium. While nobody else claimed to have all the answers either (and really, who could yet? Certainly not me), some of the insights you all provided were quite interesting.

I figure it is time for an update, though there's not all that much to say... Yet.

After numerous emails flapping about the globe, I finally determined that the SAS controler I have is not PCI compatible. Note to all you system builders out there, though the standard says PCI-X is backward compatible, most implementations are not.

Is the Itanium market cratering or flourishing? You may think there'd be a clear answer to that, and it's not at all an unimportant question -- the direction in which Itanium is headed is going to influence a lot of big-bucks budget decisions for many of you.

As Microsoft continues to thrash it out with the European Commission over what it needs to do to get the antitrust monkey off its back, reader Bill Flanagan points out that its offer to open up some of its Windows Server source code isn't as munificent as it may appear at first.

Success!

Well, kind of.

I slapped the motherboard into an old white-box case I had laying around, hooked up a CDROM and a 30 Gig drive, and installed Win2K SP4. All went perfectly. I'll hand it to the guys at Via, their stuff "just works". And the VT 310-DP boots faster than most any board I've seen of late.

So since I was having all this success, I thought I'd try installing RedHat onto the Flash disk. I know, I know. RedHat isn't meant for that out of the box, but I figured I could deselect all of the GUI packages and any other unnecessary stuff and be good. After all, if you can get enough to boot, you can mount other disks for actual storage.

It failed miserably. First off it warned me that no, you can't fit the OS AND swap space for all that memory onto that little tiny flash card. Then when I told it "go ahead and install anyway", the lack of swap space caused it to fail.

So the next step is to download a smaller distro - there are a couple out there for embedded I've played with, I'll dig something up. Maybe a larger Flash card is in order too - 128 meg is pretty tiny.

Next I went to install the storage that Adaptec/Maxtor sent me. Pretty sweet system, with a drive bay, four SAS disks and an Adaptec 4800SAS controller. Unfortunately, the 4800 does not appear to be PCI compatible. I tried slipping it in, and the controller won't go in the expansion slot unless I take of the mounting bracket and reverse the card. Due to dimension issues, that would involve rotating the motherboard such that the back connectors no longer face out the back of the box. Bad JuJu. But not an impossible task. This is akin to prototyping, and I've done more ridiculous things prototyping.
But I've also blown a component or two by assuming too much. So I set about researching the card and its interfaces. I also delved into some competitors' cards as reference points.
My research shows that even though the standard says that PCI-X is backward compatible to PCI, most controller vendors have at least one card that isn't. Caveat Emptor apparently, for the vendors I looked at never say "this is not PCI compatible" in an upfront manner. I ended my research with the impression that the card I received - the 4800SAS is not PCI compatible, but the 48300SAS is. I hope I'm wrong, but that's what it looks like.

I've got a note out to Adaptec asking them if my research is correct - is the 4800SAS not compatible. No big deal if it isn't, I've got a machine here with plenty of PCI-X slots, not as cool as "buid your own SAS-based NAS", but still mondo cool IMO.

I'll keep you posted. If it's not PCI compatible, I'm going to either (a) Pick up some SATA disks to string off the motherboard's built-in SATA controllers or (b) get an old EIDE array controller card and string my collection of IDE disks off of it in an attempt to build an array. Either way it should be fun, but I'm hoping that the SAS controller really is PCI compatible.

Remember that just after SNW last year I blogged "The only constant is change, so stay tuned"?

Well change is here.

First off, I'd like to welcome Steve Hill to the full time staff of Network Computing. We've had him freelancing nearly full time, so now he gets benefits too.

Effective the 20th of this month, Steve will be taking over Storage and Servers. Since Steve and I work well together, and will be based in the same lab, you the reader should not feel too much pain from the trasition. And if you've read storage stuff in NWC or Storage Pipeline, then you already know who Steve is. A bang-up writer with an excellent grasp of the space. We're lucky to have him, and I'm glad he took the position.

I will be moving over to fill the (currently empty) slot of Security Editor for Network Computing. I've worked in security, and I'm particularly well versed in the App Dev security space. I'm also keenly interested in security. But I'll be learning non-stop because I've not had reason to play with some security technologies. Good stuff, and I'm really looking forward to it.

In the interim, I will be finishing up my blog series on "Really Build Your Own NAS", as I received an Adaptec SAS controler and Maxtor SAS drives yesterday from the crew at Adaptec. That's the last piece. I've got a gig of memory, the dual CPU Via motherboard, and a ratty old case that I salvaged from a dead machine. Soon, very soon, I will put all the pieces together, set it up to boot from flash, and report back to you.

Please welcome Steve aboard. We full time staff like to hear from readers about what we're doing both right and wrong, so don't hesitate to contact him at shill@nwc.com.

Storage has been a blast, and I'll miss some of it, but I'm vying to keep Storage Security in my baliwick (ie: take it with me from Storage over to Security), so I won't be completely gone.

Until next time.
Don.

Blog coverage by MacDailyNews from the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco this week includes more details of Intel's newest Xeon, code-named Tulsa, which our colleagues at CRN first tipped back in November and which is expected for the second half of the year.

Hang on, folks, that Windows Server source code could end up being more free than we thought. Nobody (me included) thought that Microsoft's offer to make the source code available for inspection, at a price to be determined, would be the last word in its antitrust dispute with the European Commission; the EC has continued to press Microsoft to do things the EC's way, and it still has plenty of hammer to swing to enforce its wishes. But its newest demand of Microsoft is hilariously ironic: The EC says Microsoft can't charge anyone to see the source unless it can prove enough "innovation."

It's always fascinating to watch companies going through the process of becoming behemoths, a path that is usually accompanied by a transition from openness ("Here's our new initiative--will you be writing about that?") to a far more secretive outlook ("Sorry, we can't talk about that thing we were talking a lot about last year").

For the nearly two decades that I've covered this industry, Microsoft has been unbending on one thing -- its source code was the crown jewels, never to be touched or even seen by the commoners. It held that position rigorously, even as there came to be a ton more to keep under wraps as Windows grew into a code behemoth, not to mention all the ancillary apps that got thrown into the basic OS mix.

Yesterday I finally received the Press Release that broke me.

I've been laughing at the storage market for years over their opinion of the size of budget an SMB has, but this one just did me in.

"...the first IP product of its kind geared towards the “S” in the SMB. With the availability of the product XXXX has extended its reach to the entry-level and has broadened its product line from entry level to the enterprise. In addition it provides customers with enterprise- class functionality at a starting MSRP of less than $20,000."

If this is 2006, it must be time to hype blade servers.

As you may know, we are in the process of moving the Green Bay RealWorld Lab. Our current facilities were not meeting our needs, so we are out prospecting new sites. The Green Bay Facility houses NWC Inc., which is open to all of our readers and simulates a business that sells the inimicable widget.

Anyway, NWC Inc. can't go down - we'd lose 'customers', and you'd be upset if you couldn't order caffienated widgets! So I need to know that whatever new facility we choose is going to support us from day one, no questions asked.

Enter Fluent, wanting me to look at Coolsim. This is a service they sell that will allow you to diagram your data center, show where the AC units, baffles, racks, and floor tile cutouts are and will simulate your airflow to determine the adequacy of your cooling.

I went through the demo with them online because this is one of the areas we're concerned about, and one that we know some of you have to worry about.

They did an excellent job. Now no modeling tool is 100% correct (except the paint job on my 8th army models...), but I'm certain if you put in quality data you will get a plausible simulation out of it. Knowing where the hot and cool areas of your data center are is just enough information to decide whether moving machines in racks will do the job, or you need more A/C.

They sell it as a service because the actual calculations are run on their servers (they say supercomputers, I haven't seen so we'll take their word for it). I think that it being a service is a negative, but honestly it does the job, so what's the big difference other than a monthly fee?

If you're constantly fiddling with cooling in your data center, it is worthwhile to take a look at their service. After all of the hassles we've been through with AC in the last 18-24 months, I know I'm going to before we move. Modeling our new data center with several different layouts could save me a ton of work down the road. And none of us wants more work with no gain to the organization.

Until next time.
Don.

Centeris has shipped its Likewise Management Suite, which I wrote about back in the fall when the nascent company had announced an open beta period. At that point, Centeris knew it had most of its developmental ducks in order and wanted some final feedback before going gold.

No, I'm not talking about the hot-rods over-romanticized by Bruce Springsteen -- I'm talking about your computer. Whether it's a basic PC or the machine you're using to manage your servers, it may well be messing with your health a lot more than you think. And that's across the board: Physical, emotional, the entire holistic picture.

I don't have pictures yet, but I do have an update for you.

I took the VIA board and dug around until I found a desktop case that would hold it just right. I was going to use the mini-case I had from an old all-in-one webserver Lori and I had years ago but the case is too small, so I settled on a desktop.

I got it mounted and have a pinout of the VIA board to match up with the case and power supply wiring. Soon I will be able to boot to the flash, I hope. I do have an old CDROM to install from, and a couple of known-good hard disks to use to get it running.

After a little fact-checking I realized that most PCI-X is backward compatible to 32 bit PCI, so I may be okay with a PCI-X adapter. I'm waiting to hear back from Adaptec, but now that I've had reason to look it up, I'm hopeful.

This project got a little disrupted by the standard "emergency" issues that everyone has. My workload was a little much over the holidays, we lost a NAS device (see below entry), and we have been having problems with water in the lab - not that there IS water in the lab, but an alarm telling us there could be soon keeps going off. Lori has been handling this, but it does consume time trying to insure that if we go in one morning and everything is a little wet, we'll be okay. Most stuff is off the floor a good six inches, so the entire building will have trouble if any of our critical gear gets fried. Except our Cat 6500, which last I saw was sitting on the floor...

Anyway, things seem to be moving again, I'll get the NAS booted in the next few days and then check back with you about the trials and tribulations of installing an OS on non-standard hardware. Needless to say, I'm hoping that post is short because all went well ;-).

Until then,
Don.

It's been a while since I updated, which generally means there's a lot going on. Yeah, we're busy, makes the days go by faster :-).

Anyway, we lost a NAS device a week or two ago. It was ugly. You see, I asked Lori "Is everything on the network being backed up?" Her answer was "Yes, it's all going to backup." She's like the sys admin, and I'm like the storage admin, so this was cool.

Except I was thinking about the backup machine when I asked that. You see, like most environments we found a device that was easy to get access to and had a lot of space on it - at least a lot of space where word docs and PDFs are concerned. So we used it.

Unfortunately, it was not in the backup system because that was our backup device. And it died. On my birthday no less.

Yeah yeah, laugh at me for using a backup device as primary storage, laugh at me for using a consumer grade NAS device in a mission-critical situation (all of Lori and I's test results and all of our writing, both freelance and for CMP were on there), but it's happening in your enterprise too, and it grew in your environment the same way it did for us. Slowly and nefariously.

In the end most of it was backed up somewhere. Her book for O'Reilly was in her sent mail, our book for another publisher was in my sent mail, etc. We only lost about a weeks worth of work each, and that on freelance stuff. But it was scary.

Infrant Technologies was nice enough to come to our rescue and let us keep one of their ReadyNAS devices we had laying around the lab. That's good news because ReadyNAS is RAIDed, so no fears about the single drive dying and taking things with it.

And while we were at it, I reconfigured the storage so that the machine named "backup" was only used for backups, and all direct storage on that network goes to the Infrant.

It's the little things - like a little consumer grade NAS with a single disk that can die, or miscommunications between admins - that can get you.

Beware, it's scary out there.

Next time we'll chat about the progress I'm making (and not making) on the "Build your own NAS" project. It's moving along, I may even post pictures.

Oh Yeah, and Happy New Year!

Until then,
Don.

So, Apple, that company we usually dare not name, has crossed over into the world of Intel processors with its speedy introduction at Macworld Tuesday of an iMac and a new laptop bearing Intel inside.

Before I could even get to a prediction for the coming year (check back tomorrow), I'm diverted into speculation...but such speculation! First, though, I will predict that 2006 will be the Year Of Google, and of Microsoft's inevitable reaction to its continued market forays.

In the midst of a normally slow holiday week, I've been pondering some predictions for next year, which I'll roll out next week. But I'll toss one out now: Just a hunch, but the onslaught of malware next year is likely to be worse than ever.

Microsoft is peeved with the European Commission's move to impose daily fines for, among other things, not moving fast enough to make server source code available to other companies so that their apps can work within Windows Server. To which one is almost forced to say, "C'mon, already, just quit kvetching and give them what they want."

Just what you always wanted to find under the tree -- a brand-spankin'-new 2U rack-mount Sun Fire T2000 server!

On Wednesday, I ended up posting news, and writing my weekly Server Pipeline newsletter, from a mobile backup location (OK, it was my town library's wireless network) after my home office broadband went down for more than a day. That's my Plan A, and I do have Plans B and C to fall back upon should anything bad really happen to my setup.

Stressed out? Maybe more of your colleagues throughout IT are, but life on the server front is getting simpler -- or trying to, anyway.

Well, it's been too long since I updated in general, and way too long since I let you know how my little project with the NAS is going, so here comes...

I dug up the VIA specs and started rounding up parts. From previous embedded projects and trashed servers I have disk and memory laying all about so I figured "this is no big deal".

As it turns out, it is a big deal in some respects. I dug out a flash card with an IDE adapter for the boot image. Easy enough to hook up. I then found some varying size EIDE disks I can use if I can't get the flash up and running for the install (just playing it safe!).

Then I went looking for memory. I've got no less than 20 sticks of memory lying around the house that are not being used. This should have been easy. It wasn't. All of the memory I was able to dig up was either Dell laptop memory or ECC server memory. Nothing DDR1, non ECC.

So I thought about hitting up memory chip vendors to help with the cause, and decided "to heck with it", popped out to NewEgg and ordered the memory I need. It's currently sitting in a UPS warehouse in DeMoines Iowa. Darn Christmas shipping traffic.

Meanwhile I'm working with Adaptec and Maxtor to get SAS drives and a controller for the project. The problem I'm running into is that it sounds like they are looking forward and producing PCI-X and PCI-E, while my VIA motherboard uses plain old PCI. I'll keep you posted on this one, it could cause a major speed bump that causes me to build two NAS devices - one with SAS, one with SATA. Or might just cause me to round up all of these old drives laying around and use them to build my NAS instead of shiny new SAS drives. Either way, the crowd over at Adaptec has been great trying to help me along here.

Steve Schuchart and I are writing a "He Says, She Says" (I'm the She, I guess, since Steve is definitely a manly-man :D) Build vs. Buy NAS article, I'm hoping to get this done in time to write a "Really Build your Own NAS" sidebar.

Until next time,
Don.

Before we leave The Week Of Sun Coverage entirely, I want to take a brief look at the announcement that was in some ways the most interesting news of the week -- its plans to open-source some of the chip specs and instruction set code for the multi-core, multi-thread UltraSPARC T1, under the auspices of a new effort called the OpenSPARC Project.

Ah, that devilish Microsoft. It may not be at war with Sun Microsystems any more; they may even be partners of a sort on several initiatives these days. But it's still first things first, and Microsoft managed to steal a little of Sun's shine from its Tuesday announcements when it revealed that Windows Server 2003 R2 has been finalized and shipped to manufacturing.

Trolling the Net today, I came across an interesting strategy description from Sun Microsystems honcho Scott McNealy. Seems McNealy is employing one of the oldest marketing analogies on the books. He told Business Week that in terms of Sun's server strategy going forward, Sun's software -- more of which became free last week -- is the razor, while servers are the blades (no pun intended, I would guess).

Has there ever been a better time for small businesses to move their IT center onto a powerful server?

With the release of a couple of recent reports on the server market, a few trends have become quite clear.

Whoops, my mistake--that should be "Servers and turkeys." The server market is doing fine, according to a new report out from IDC: Windows and Linux are still up against each other for seemingly every customer out there on the planet at this point, and the migration to 64-bit is rendering 32-bit machines quickly obsolete. It's a healthy market out there, folks.

Something else that's obsolete is the many thousands of turkeys that are about to be consumed here in the U.S. on Thanksgiving Day. Since it's time to help get ours ready, I'll wish all of the domestic readers here a fine and safe holiday; for those overseas, have a nice weekend, and we'll see you back here on Monday.

Has it really been that long since Microsoft unveiled Windows? Yes, and there's a good chance I could have cared less about that at the time, toiling away as a rookie reporter in Concord, Massachusetts, on a TRS-80 from that grand old computer maker Tandy that I thought was the coolest thing I'd ever seen.

The crew over at Byte and Switch are running an article on a possible merger between SonicWall and Lasso Logic.

I'm vaguely familiar with both companies, I figure this might be a good move. Both service smaller offices, and their markets are slightly different. Could be very interesting.

The SOHO market could see introduction of CDP and firewall all-in-one. Not bad, particularly with disk sizes going up and disk prices going down.

I wonder if soon we'll have storage and security that looks like printer adds - "Print Copy Scan Fax..." Only we'd be going "Replicate, Backup, Virus Scan, Phish block..."

Interesting times, that's all I can say.

In the world of blade servers, IBM has probably been the most aggressive company in touting the idea of a blade as a machine that can do far more than simply route your data around the office or back to central IT. That notion, in fact is the underpinning of the company's "In A Box" approach to bringing blades into specific industries, pre-tooled to handle a variety of functions that make the server the IT shop on the spot.

I was on the phone with Network Appliance, talking about their "Uncompromised Security" initiative, which I chose not to blog on the assumption that you're hearing this type of news elsewhere, but I got some interesting other information from them.

They have reorganized their business to reflect the very issues we face in the Enterprise. I think it's a solid move, and I think it's about time someone did it.

You know how it goes in the enterprise, things move slowly because you can't afford make changes that will bring business systems down. This is particularly true of big infrastructure items like mainframes and storage. My experience with Storage Administrators is predictable "I'll upgrade when it breaks, not before". Understandable, don't fix what isn't broke.

But then we get the security people, who work on the motto of "if it's got a known vulnerability, it's broke." Another valid viewpoint that must be balanced against the Storage Admin to come up with the plan that works best for your organization.

It is safe to say though that the security guy wants about 100x the amount of change that the storage guy wants. They are on completely different ends of the spectrum. And neither is really wrong.

NetApp has built their organization up to reflect these divergent needs. They have moved security and select other non-infrastructure, high change groups into a separate unit, and are encouraging them to go nuts with updates. Quality isn't skipped, but they're diverging from the storage industry release cycles, which are traditionally very slow. They're calling this group "emerging markets".

I think it's cool. Nimble like a startup where it's needed, steady and only updating you when it's absolutely necessary elsewhere.

Other vendors that play in both storage and security, take note. I think you'll see this setup working well for NetApp, I hope you follow suit.

My colleague at InformationWeek, Darrell Dunn, is a little more curious than I was in his blog today about those AMD processors on Dell's website and what they mean, if anything. Darrell's a real smart guy and anything he writes is well worth reading, so I'd suggest clicking on over and getting his take as well.

...for now, anyway. It's tempting to make much of the story that Dell is offering some packaged Athlon 64 processors through its website, but it sounds as if the company is simply dumping some acquired assets. That hardly represents a strategy, much less one that would matter in the server market.

Am I writing as Richard Bachman today? (That was Stephen King's nom de plume for a freaky little novel of the s