Timothy
Parker Consulting Incorporated
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Q Q: I have several DLT tape
drives. I was told that the tapes
made by Imation are not designed for use in the DLT drives, and that future
supply of DLT tapes will dry up. If
any of this true? A: The DLT (Digital Linear Tape)
technology is owned by Quantum. It
is licensed to many manufacturers who can make drives and tapes. Imation was one of the licensees and sold lots of tapes.
Recently, though, Quantum claimed that Imation didn’t pass its
licensing certification process (no details were released) and therefore Imation
could not make DLT tapes or drives. Imation immediately turned around and in the
best US tradition sued Quantum for $450million US.
Imation claims Quantum is controlling the market, fixing prices, and
generally manipulating all licensees by changing the certification process as
they see fit to squeeze out existing, out of favour licensees, or allow licenses
to be issued to companies that are now in favour. Quantum of course denies
everything and the result will appear years down the road in a court decision. Imation, in the meantime, has developed a new tape cartridge
that it claims is compatible with DLT drives, without impinging on the Quantum
technology. Without a doubt,
Quantum will sue over this issue, too. As
for your question, there is not going to be a shortage of DLT drives or tapes,
but the manufacturer’s names may change a little.
Pricing may rise slightly, but there shouldn’t be much effect from all
this fuss except for a few lawyers making a ton of cash. Q: I need to buy a high-powered
Unix box. I know Unix is out of
fashion today, but that’s what we run for many reasons. Is there anything new for Unix these days?
Most of the magazines and on-line resources I usually use for info are
closed down. A: Unix lives! Always will! (Unix
bias slightly showing.) In fact,
two new boxes in the Unix market are very interesting at the high-end of the
market. The Sun SunFire 15K Server
has 106 CPUs possible. This is
simply an extension of Sun’s server technology, but it does push the limits a
little. The more interesting box is
from IBM. The eServer p690 (where
do they come up with these names?) uses IBM’s new Power4 CPU running at 1GHz.
The Power4 is a 64-bit chip. The ePower 690 has “self-healing”
technology that will supposedly reduce system failures by rerouting internally
and can divide the whole device into 16 separate virtual servers. The only other
high-end announcement is from Fujitsu, which has a 128 CPU PrimePower 2000 unit.
Just in case you think any of these units are cheap, they start at prices around
$750,000USD and go well over $10 million maxed out.
Needless to say, this Unix aficionado will have to wait until they drop
in price a little before ordering one. Q: We’re tired of paying huge
upgrade fees to Oracle for databases. Is
there a cheap alternative? A: It depends on the size of your
applications. Oracle dominates the
database market for two reasons: they are reliable and they handle large volumes
of data. Having said that, I still
prefer Informix for my large databases, but that’s just a personal preference
for the scripting language. For
smaller and medium-sized applications, you should check out mySQL.
The mySQL package is an offshoot of the Linux world but has been ported
to many environments. The mySQL system is not a cheap database in terms of features
and performance. It is a full SQL
database with support for SSL. The next release, version 4.1 due in December,
adds nested queries and new procedure calls. The primary advantage to mySQL is
it is open source, so any developer who needs to create a custom engine can
modify it. There is no charge for mySQL. Check out the features and availability
on the Web: there’s a lot to this wonderful package. Q: Is Intel going to release a
Pentium 5? A: According to Intel the next CPU release will be Itanium, the 64-bit chip that is now 2 years late. Current shipping date is supposedly next summer. Q: I want to find some back
issues of this column. They don’t
seem to be readily available from the cbizmag.com site.
Is that the only location? Is there a central database of all the
questions you’ve dealt with? A: The cbizmag.com site should have all the back issues archived away. Failing that, you can get back columns from my site www.tpci.com. There is no central database of questions and it’s far too much effort for me to put one together right now. |
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