Archive for the 'RHEL' Category
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
IDC’s Al Gillen Covers the Red Hat / Microsoft Virtualization Announcement
I just saw Al Gillen covered the news from Red Hat and Microsoft on virtualization. Note the differences between this announcement and the Novell-Microsoft announcement. Two approaches that both achieve the same general customer result – which approach is better is up to you to decide/discuss ;-)
What’s also interesting is that so far, Red Hat has only submitted for Windows certification on KVM and not yest on RHEL/Xen (which is currently shipping).
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=lcUS21686409
The Red Hat and Microsoft agreement simply is about cross-validation/certification and does not have any IP or financial implications.
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009
Red Hat and IBM: It’s been 10 years
With the continuing growth and scale of Linux, you would think it was still early in its lifecycle, but today’s blog post by Alex Pinchev at Red Hat reminded me it’s been 10 years since IBM and Red Hat first partnered. 10 years – so much has changed in that time. I was only around for less than half that time working on the IBM side, but it was always an exciting and dynamic area to work in. I think we’ll see many more years of success ahead.
Today we are celebrating a momentous occasion. Ten years ago today, Red Hat and IBM began our global collaborative partnership to expand the use of enterprise solutions on Linux. It was a small but important start to announce that IBM would run Red Hat Linux on its industry-standard systems. Back in 1999, Red Hat was on the eve of its IPO, and IBM was testing the waters of Linux. Only 10 million users ran the Linux operating system at the time, according to IDC Research quoted in our original partnership announcement.
Thursday, December 4th, 2008
IBM takes on Desktop cost challenges (with Linux)
Interesting news out of my employer today. Here’s the thing, everyone who hears “Linux desktop” has a knee-jerk reaction and thinks of all the things they do on their own PC, laptop, Mac. The reality is you’re probably not the target market for virtual desktops. The market is large desktop environments that have thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of users and who are not doing consumer-oriented work (or shouldn’t be). The cost savings of moving from physical PCs in a 1 user to 1 PC model to a managed model with virtual terminals can be significant. We’ll see where the market goes for this model, but I know of a few very large companies that want to make this model very real. The economic situation and the impact on IT budgets may act as an accelerant.
Oh, I forgot to mention that the IBM solution runs on Ubuntu and can be easily deployed on RHEL/SLED too ;-)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/04/ibm_linux_lotus_virtual_desktop/
IBM is working with Virtual Bridges and its VERDE (Virtual Enterprise Remote Desktop Environment) product to ship a virtual Canonical Ubuntu Linux desktop, with Lotus email, word processing, spreadsheets, unified communication, and social networking software included, to a variety of end-point devices. Virtual printing is also included.
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When we look back several years from now, I think we’ll see this time as an inflection point when the economic climate pushed the virtual Linux desktop from theory to practice. The financial pressures on organizations are staggering; the management of PCs is unwieldy, and traditional office software innovation is paltry. Today’s virtual desktop is delivering superior collaborative software, an innovative delivery method, and an open-source operating system that is demanding clients’ consideration.
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
Red Hat beats estimates and Ohio Linux Fest is Almost Here
I can’t make sense of the “all eggs in a Solaris basket” strategy Sun is on especially when I see Red Hat just launched economic concerns back into the faces of Wall St. analysts by posting 24% growth over last year. Jim Whitehurst seems to be doing just fine in the new role – the Qumranet buy was also brilliant. I have high hopes for what we might see come from the acquisition.
And in other news, Oracle launched its own branded storage hardware product (made by HP) that is based on Linux. All around it’s been a positive day for accelerating growth of Linux.
And for those who haven’t registered, Ohio Linux Fest is coming up soon. I’m proud to say that IBM is once again the primary platinum sponsor (thanks for the funding Alena!). You can sign up here. I can’t say for sure yet, but it looks like Brian Warner from IBM’s Linux Strategy team will be joining me in person. If you’ll be present, send me an email and let’s meet up. There’s a great list of speakers for the event. I’ve never met Joe Brockmeier but I’m hoping to introduce myself at some point.
Thursday, September 4th, 2008
Red Hat Acquires Qumranet For $107M
Red Hat announced today that it will acquire Qumranet, the company behind KVM. Now Qumranet does not make its money on KVM, instead it uses KVM as part of its desktop virtualization solutions. Qumranet is also behind the very efficient SPICE protocol. I think this is a great move on both sides and I’m excited to hear a former IBM colleague’s bold move into a startup has paid off. I knew it would only be a matter of time before Qumranet was acquired, but it’s great to see it finally went through. Great ideas and technology leadership deserve to be rewarded.
I think you can expect to see an increase in KVM usage in RHEL going forward ;-)
I saw the press release here:
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.
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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.
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