Archive for the 'RHEL' Category
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008
Bob Sutor goes 100% Linux on the desktop; Mac surges; where’s Windows?
Nice to see Bob Sutor has made the complete switch to Linux for laptop use at work. I remember the day I wiped out my Windows partition on my laptop - it was memorable. I then went an entire year booting Windows in VMWare only about 3-5 times.
It’s great to see the transition starting to happen everywhere. Even if some of the transitions are to Mac, it’s greater choice.
This is all going to be even easier as technologies like Firefox, OpenOffice/ODF and open standards start to permeate the set of options available to users.
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008
The Register Open Season Podcast
This was another interesting podcast. I’m obviously a fan of Mr. Vance (has anyone ever called him “Mr.”?) - maybe I’m the first. I also need to meet Matt Asay at some point… have much to discuss.
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
Red Hat adds more virtualization and KVM into the mix
Anthony points out some interesting news regarding Red Hat, virtualization and in particular, KVM. IBM is also involved in building out these capabilities. If you read my site often, you know I’m already a big KVM fan.
“IBM works closely with Red Hat and the open source community to drive innovation within the Linux kernel,” said Daniel Frye, vice president, open systems development at IBM. “IBM has a heterogenous approach toward virtualization, with KVM one of several options. KVM leverages the core features of the Linux kernel, including paravirtualization interfaces contributed by IBM engineers. By combining Linux virtualization infrastructure with open management interfaces such as CIM and libvirt, we gain a solution that eliminates lock-in and open source community innovations, we are able to offer our customers a solution with outstanding performance, scalability and agility.”
Tuesday, June 10th, 2008
NetworkWorld: “Red Hat Linux pulls as much as 12% less power than Windows 2008 on identical hardware”
URL: http://www.networkworld.com/research/2008/060908-green-windows-linux.html
An amazing story of the value the Linux community development process brings to the table in solving user problems. Now that Microsoft knows there’s a problem, their engineers have to spend months identfying where there’s a problem, months identifying who will have to fix the problem and how, and months fixing the issue. Then the issue(s) may have to wait until the next Windows release, or do they roll out in an update.
Either way, the community developing Linux saw the pain point right away a long time ago and built in “green” features that today show up in the stable RHEL kernel. This is just another example of when community based development can outperform because of the open contact with user communities.
For this test, we examined power consumption as a way to judge whether Windows Server 2008 or Linux is, in fact, the ‘greener’ operating system. As the price of power hits record heights, power reduction mechanisms shipping within an operating system should play a key role in you energy conservation plan.
…
The results showed that while Windows Server 2008 drew slightly less power in a few test cases when it had its maximum power saving settings turned on, it was RHEL that did the best job of keeping the power draw in check across the board.
Thursday, May 29th, 2008
What is real time Linux worth to you?
Justifying investments in a real time Linux platform is perhaps too easy given a new report from Tabb Group (URLs below). Purists may initially point out that the report is more focused on speed of execution which real time is not necessarily intended to provide. I’ll counter that argument right now by pointing out that most real time implementations do increase speed while still providing the benefit of determinism that real time is intended to offer. Besides, how can you ensure speedy execution across thousands of transactions if you don’t have a deterministic platform? Even the fastest drag race cars slow down eventually…
Add in real time Java and you have a fully deterministic stack.
16 percent of all U.S. institutional equity commissions are exposed to latency risk, totaling $2 billion, according to a new report from the TABB Group.
http://www.tabbgroup.com/PublicationDetail.aspx?PublicationID=346
http://www.wallstreetandtech.com/feed/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=208400864&cid=RSSfeed_WST_All
Thursday, May 15th, 2008
NYSE and Euronext are all powered by Linux
Interesting news - Linux powers the world’s economy! If Linux is running the largest stock exchanges in teh world, can anyone still call it “second class” to UNIX?
The New York Stock Exchange and its European subsidiary exchanges are running their trading systems on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat announced Wednesday, as it unveiled a new marquee customer.Linux has been known to be in use at several New York financial services firms, but few have stepped up to the podium to testify on the value of their implementations. As a result of mergers and acquisitions, the New York Stock Exchange has migrated over the last few years from HP-UX to IBM AIX to Sun Solaris to Linux. NYSE Group CIO Steve Rubinow said the conversion to Linux followed the acquisition of the Euronext exchange in 2007. Unlike some trading companies that suggest Linux is running their secondary systems, Rubinow emphasized that Linux is running the NYSE’s mission-critical trading systems.
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
Shameless Plug: IBM Next Generation Linux Event in NYC
If you’re in the NYC area, IBM is hosting a great “Next Generation Linux” event at the Hilton on Church St. It should be a great day of speakers discussing where Linux is heading, what makes Linux unique and “special”, and what workloads are great for running Linux. It’s a packed session from 9-12 (breakfast at 8 if you’re an early riser).
You can register here:
https://www-950.ibm.com/events/wwe/grp/grp017.nsf/agenda?openform&seminar=692H5MES&locale=en_US/
| Time | Description |
|---|---|
| 8:00 am | Registration & Continental Breakfast |
| 9:00 am | Welcome & Introduction |
Linux and Innovation
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| Break | |
Linux for Business-Critical Workloads
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| Break | |
Breakout Sessions
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| A Customer’s Perspective: Linux for Business Critical Workloads | |
| 12:00 pm | Wrap Up & Q&A |
| RSVP for Lunch! Take this opportunity to chat with the speakers and to network |
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
IBM Launches New Approach to Servers (errr… a twist on the Google approach) - and it’s all based on Linux
IBM launched its iDataPlex server systems today - think of it as a “Google” for your datacenter. It’s targeted at web workloads and is insanely dense and power efficient compared to traditional server buildouts. And it uses Linux on commodity hardware so it’s also ridiculously cheap. If you’re a web hosting shop or you have your own web farm that could use a serious overhaul, iDataPlex is a very cool solution.
Did I mention it only runs Linux?
Ashlee Vance cracks me up - it’s clear from this article he’s been talking to vendors for two long (see the last sentence in this quote):
The system itself is quite remarkable. IBM has reworked its approach to rack servers allowing it to place twice as many systems in a single cabinet. This attack centers on delivering the most horsepower possible in a given area while also reducing power consumption. IBM hopes the iDataPlex unit will attract today’s service providers buying thousands and tens of thousands of servers and also big businesses such as oil and gas firms and media companies that will also possibly pursue a grid-ish data center computing model pioneered to some degree by Google.
But the really awe inspiring bit of iDataPlex comes from the fact that IBM is willing to go after this market at all and that it did so without screwing up the hardware design.
Ars covered the details as well over here:
Friday, March 7th, 2008
Red Hat adds strong talent to its legal team
Nice move by Red Hat picking up two well respected attorneys for its team:
http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS5130424739.html
Friday, February 22nd, 2008
NYLUG’s Jim Gleason Presents on KVM
It’s great to see Jim hitting the streets in his new gig at Qumranet. Hopefully my schedule will allow me to travel between IBM sites and make it out next Wed. Note that you will need to rsvp at the NYLUG site.
Wednesday, February 27th, 2008
6:30pm-8:00 PM
IBM
590 Madison Ave, 12th Floor
corner of 57th Street
** RSVP Closes at 4:30pm the day of the meeting (sharp!) ***
Please RSVP for EVERY meeting at this time.
Register at http://rsvp.nylug.org/
PLEASE NOTE: This meeting is at IBM, not Google!
Jim Gleason - on - The Next Wave of Virtualization
Kernel-based Virtual Machine and its impact on the desktop Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is a Linux kernel virtualization infrastructure and open source hypervisor that provides both full and para-virtualization capabilities for Linux on commodity x86 hardware that contain the virtualization extensions from Intel and AMD. KVM is currently implemented as a loadable Linux kernel module. In late 2006, it was first included in Linux kernel 2.6.20 and and first shipped with OpenSuse 10.1 and Fedora 6.
Since KVM is part of Linux, KVM leverages the scheduler, memory management and other key resources in the Linux kernel, unlike VMware and Xen which must create their own custom mechanisms. Thus, KVM development focuses exclusively on the next-wave virtualization, while Xen and VMWare must also maintain these ‘forked’ non-Linux resources.
All of the core KVM developers, including Avi Kavity, work at the firm, Qumranet, which launched a desktop virtualization solution called Solid ICE that leverages KVM. Qumranet is the creator, maintainer and global sponsor of the KVM Open Source Hypervisor Project. Other high-ranking Linux kernel developers such as Rusty Russell and Anthony Liguori of IBM, Ingo Molnar of Red Hat, and Andrea Archangeli formerly of Novell, devote most of their time to KVM development.
What is the Next Wave of Virtualization?
Qumranet has gone beyond conventional server virtualization and application streaming by completely virtualizing end users’ desktop machines. From a browser on a thin client or PC, users access their desktop work environment over the network via a virtual machine running on a centralized server. The end result is a seamless end user work experience, just like a physical PC on a LAN. This is a high-level talk which will focus on the breakthrough Linux technology KVM, and its impact on the virtualization market.
About Jim Gleason:
Jim has been providing emerging technology to early adopters in the Financial Serivces Sector for the past ten years. Widely regarded as the person who brought Linux to Wall Street, Jim sold the first production Linux cluster to Goldman Sachs in 1998. Jim was also an early Internet pioneer having closed deals for the first official web sites of Charles Schwab, VISA, and all of Hewlett-Packard’s original web sites in 1993. Jim is also the Founder of the NY Linux Users Group and currently works at Qumranet in the capacity of Vice President of Sales.
Meeting Location:
Please note that this meeting will be held at IBM, 590 Madison Ave, 12th floor, corner of 57th Street, and not at Google. This is the building with the IBM logo on the front of the building.
Books!!!
Our friends at Prentice-Hall kindly provide us with review copies of various new titles. One of these could be yours, all you have to do is agree to review the book within a reasonable period of time.
Saturday, January 26th, 2008
Coverage on IBM’s Open Collaboration Client Solution with Ubuntu
Saw a few articles today on IBM’s OCCS announcement with Ubuntu.
Satyadas said IBM thinks that this year, it will happen. “All the stars are lining up,” he said. “Everybody has been saying that since 2001 except IBM. We never said that, but we are saying that now.”
It’s easy to overlook IBM’s announcement that its Lotus Notes and Lotus Symphony suites will run on Ubuntu. I think this would be a mistake. IBM is not a dumb company. It’s not in the habit of wasting resources. For IBM to be partnering up with Ubuntu says something about the enterprise mindset on Ubuntu.
By porting key software to Linux, IBM is looking to give businesses one less reason to buy products from rival Microsoft — which IBM said offers “a proprietary desktop model.” IBM’s Linux efforts will “further address customer demands around choice,” said Inna Kuznetsova, an IBM executive with responsibility for Linux, in a statement.
Monday, January 21st, 2008
Ubuntu and IBM bring enterprise collaboration to a user friendly Linux desktop
I read this news release with great excitement and will take a shameless opportunity to plug what I think is a fantastic partnership. The news? IBM’s Lotus group has announced support of its Open Collaboration Client Solution (OCCS) for Ubuntu Linux. OCCS is a layer of rich client communications apps including IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 (Calendaring, Email), Sametime 7.x (Instant Messaging), and Symphony (OpenOffice in an Eclipse RCP form). I’ve switched to Ubuntu for my primary system at home for well over a year now and while I took a very short break to dabble in Fedora 8, I’m back on Ubuntu again. I’ve been using a RHEL5 base at work for over a year as well but now that we have Ubuntu support coming, I’ll probably switch to Ubuntu once the OCCS solution is released (yes, I work in a strategy group in IBM and I don’t use Windows or MS Office - and most people can’t tell). The thing about working in IBM is that everyone uses Notes, Sametime, and ODF is even becoming more popular so there’s very little that prevents anyone from using Linux (or a Mac). Heck, many users can probably get away with an iPhone.
IBM also expanded the OCCS platform support with Red Hat EL Desktop and announced more partners around OCCS on Novell’s Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED).
What makes all this even better? Enterprise applications delivered in a rich client environment. Take for instance SAP, who today announced a joint product set with IBM that will be delivered through Lotus Notes (which we now know runs well on Linux)
The product, codenamed Atlantic, will allow users to access SAP’s Business Suite applications for workflows, reporting and analytics through IBM’s Lotus Notes desktop software.
So the ecosystem and vision is starting to come together. It’s early, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention again that 2008 will be the year of the enterprise Linux client ;-) How many users will we be saying this for? :-) (Note, I didn’t say ‘desktop’ specifically, and I said ‘enterprise’). As we’ve been saying all along, there are certain segments of users that can easily do their work on a Linux client (many won’t even know it’s not Windows). Those companies who take advantage of user segmentation have a lot to benefit from both on pure cost alone, but also in the next round of negotiations on your non-Linux client systems ;-)
Friday, January 18th, 2008
Mike Strosaker Takes on Sun’s Predictive Self Healing Claims
Mike Strosaker has a couple points to make about Sun’s claims of predictive self healing relative to Linux. One thing I’ve noticed is that Sun (and Microsoft) always compare one of their features to Linux on Intel/AMD and ignore the capabilities of Linux on Power, Itanium or Mainframe platforms (which, btw are growing faster than Linux on x86). It’s time to wakeup and realize that Linux runs anywhere and takes on the capabilities of the hardware platform.
Check it out Mike’s comparison here for the details: http://zombieprocess.wordpress.com/2008/01/10/predictive-self-healing-on-linux-on-power/
Sun frequently touts their “predictive self-healing” implementation in Solaris 10. I wonder if that bullet point would be further down the list if they were familiar with the error detection, prediction, and correction capabilities of Linux on POWER platforms. In fact, the Linux on POWER implementation precedes the Solaris 10 implementation by at least a year (Solaris 10 was released in January 2005; SLES 8 had this solution for POWER in 2003, and RHEL 3 had it in 2004 at the latest).
Friday, January 4th, 2008
AP Interview with Red Hat’s new CEO, Jim Whitehurst
I like Jim already after reading this interview.
“We are working to democratize information,” Whitehurst said. “A lot of people don’t see the importance of that. But, ultimately, it is about information freedom and making sure information’s accessible.
“If we don’t fight those battles now, our entrenched competitors will lock up file formats, force you to use their software or force royalties,” he added. “Then the information stored in those formats will no longer be free.”
Tuesday, December 11th, 2007
Insanely scalable filesystem service: SOFS
I just learned that in a Scale Out File Services (SOFS) solution a customer can implement a global filesystem (with clustering/replication) that has a maximum filesystem capacity of 33,554,432 Yobibytes. I actually had to look up Yobibyte. The maximum size for a single file is 16 Exibytes. That’s insanely scalable. Oh, and it’s all based on RHEL5 ;-)
The IBM website that has more info is available here.
Tuesday, December 4th, 2007
Linux continues to evolve adding specialized purpose function into a general purpose OS
The great thing about Linux is that it’s a general purpose operating system that can be molded into a platform for anything from mobile devices, to printer embedded OS functionality to supercomputer and mainframes. Linux can also bring in certain features that may not apply to everyone but which cater to users with very specific needs. Like it or not as a mainstream security feature, SELinux has come quite far as evidenced in the latest RHEL5. SELinux also caters well to specific users with high security requirements. For those users, SELinux is probably easier to use than their other options and it is tailored to the needs they have.
Linux is now heading into another direction focusing on the specific needs for users with very low latency and determinism requirements. This can apply to anything from weapons systems for military applications, to Wall Street customers sell side trading systems, and even to SMS messaging in the telecommunications industry.
And so we’re beginning to see great strides shaping Linux for the needs of these user segments that demand low latency and determinism in both their operating system and applications. Platforms like IBM’s WebSphere Real Time and even Sun’s real time Java are currently running (or in Sun’s case, being ported to run) on a real time Linux operating system. With a real time Java machine, suddenly Java applications can inherit the benefits of a real time system. And so antiquated real time languages are suddenly… antiquated officially because a real time Linux and Java solution can marry a general purpose OS with a general purpose programming language for the best of both worlds. IBM has made great gains in the technology adding both a real time Java garbage collector and Ahead-of-Time compilation to make this a great solution compelling enough for the US Navy’s mission critical weapons systems.
Recently Novell has announced their SLERT product updates with great monitoring tools from Concurrent bundled in (and tighter integration of the kernel community real time patches - now a community standard?). I expect we’ll also soon hear more about Red Hat’s real time plans as well so stay tuned…
Friday, November 30th, 2007
Red Hat wows the CIO office: another #1 ranking in this year’s poll
Mr. Vaughan-Nichols has the coverage of the latest CIO Insight poll here. I think other vendors in the industry in Redmond and Santa Clara (heck, some perhaps in Armonk and Redwood Shores) will have to re-evaluate whether their products are delivering the same consistent business value, reliability and quality. In some respects it’s “easier” for Red Hat as they’re a one-product company and it’s in some sense easier to over-deliver when you’re focused on one product (yes, they have a couple products, but let’s be realistic, the revenue is all Linux). Regardless, this is a great story for Red Hat and hope to see them at the top of the list again next year.
For the fifth year, CIO Insight polled IT executives on how well their major vendors deliver business value, reliability and quality. This year’s winner? The No. 1 vendor? None other than Linux distributor Red Hat.
Perhaps even more impressive than Red Hat beating such name brand companies as Google and Hewlett-Packard was that Red Hat also earned a remarkable 97 percent loyalty rating.
Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007
Ohio LinuxFest 2007 was a LinuxSuccess
The crew organizing Ohio LinuxFest in their spare time… must be glad to have their spare time back this week! What a show, and what an effort by the regional Ohio LUGs that put on this event.
It’s been a few years since I last attended and at that time, I don’t believe I even registered - I just popped in, went to a few talks and left. But at that time there were maybe a couple hundred people there. I heard estimates that over 1,000 were in attendance although that figure seemed to underestimate the full number of people there. A couple of the speaker hall sessions were absolutely packed (and they were big halls). Ohio LinuxFest gives LinuxWorld a pretty big challenge. It was great to see all the regional corporate supporters but I was a bit surprised by all the “big IT” vendors with booths. There were sponsors from Google, IBM, HP, Novell, Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu, Vyatta and even Sun (although they seemed to be using Linux to try getting visitors to listen to their Solaris story).
Some of the sessions were fantastic, others less so but on the whole, it was an outstanding lineup of speakers. “Maddog” was a speaker and did a great talk on computing off the grid. Grega… wow, what energy for usability. Somehow I ended up being an impromptu speaker at an “IBM Virtualization” session. I was followed by Alena from IBM who did a great job covering the details on how NationWide uses Linux on an IBM System z mainframe with z/VM for their mission critical web based systems. Alena had a last minute “laptop issue” (ahem… Windows) but we were able to copy her presentation onto an USB key and present from my Linux laptop (Linux saves the day… again).
The special prize for those who made it was the untold number of great ideas, best practices, and partnering or finding others in similar situations that these networking events create. I actually met someone with a similar background who went to law school and passed the bar, he moved to D.C. as an attorney and he’s now managing IT systems for the federal court systems. He was looking to start consolidating some of the applications they run in every court onto a central system (mainframe most likely).
Anyway, here’s an obligatory picture from the show (apologies for not having my good camera with me). I encourage anyone who will be near Columbus next year to check this event out - it was a great show, a great place to meet others working in the Linux/FLOSS arena, and overall a great time. And somehow this whole event is put on by volunteers - truly amazing.
Note the body density in this picture - this place was packed.
Wednesday, September 26th, 2007
ComputerWorld: “Novell’s Linux business climbs since its deal with Microsoft”
“The affect on sales year over year, for Novell’s first three quarters of our fiscal year, which ends Oct. 31 — our Linux business was up 243%,” said Justin Steinman, director of marketing at Novell, who, along with executives from both companies, spoke at a program hosted by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council.
Oddly this comes out just the day after Red Hat’s earnings which seem to have impressed investors:
Shares of Red Hat Inc. rose more than 4% Wednesday, one day after the company reported that its second-quarter profit rose 59%, and sales slightly beat Wall Street analysts’
The bottom line conclusion I see in these datapoints is Linux is flying off the shelves (or is that off the wires with downloads…) and growing quite well no matter what other companies try to do to impede its growth. The state of Linux is strong.
Wednesday, August 8th, 2007
Information Overload at LinuxWorld
So much news at LinuxWorld, so many discussions, and far too much to capture within a few minutes right now. I’ll dump more of my thoughts here later this week. It took a while for me to actually make my way to the show floor and once I did… shock took over. While I suspected LinuxWorld had “matured” meaning less interest in a Linux-specific event, there were a TON of people present. The show was packed. I haven’t seen official attendance numbers, but I’d say today was a healthy turnout. The IBM reception was absolutely packed. There were far too many parties going on to attend them all - I missed Vyatta’s unfortunately. There’s always tomorrow :)
Some things I have to write about soon: SystemTap (see LWN), OpenMoko (cool, but guys, the resolution is way to high), OLPC, IBM announcements, Desktop Linux, ODF, OIN and Google, Ubuntu (multiples here), POWER6 benchmarks, LSB thoughts, and more.
On another interesting note, I met Craig of Craigslist fame today.
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