Latest Articles From LINUX.SYS-CON.COM

Making Linux and Windows play nice together isn't easy, but it's essential to the continued growth of Linux in the enterprise, according to Likewise engineer Michael Szymczak. He will discuss that topic at this year's Ohio LinuxFest 2010 September 10-12, 2010 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center. It might sound odd if you're not from the area, but Columbus is indeed one of the hotbeds of the Linux community in the U.S. and home to one of the powerhouse annual Linux get-togethers, Ohio LinuxFest.

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Eucalyptus Systems was expected to update the eponymous open source private cloud project Wednesday improving the free GPL-based widgetry's scaling. Eucalyptus 2.0, described as a major rev, is supposed to be able to support massive private and hybrid clouds. Its performance has also been enhanced and it should deploy without modification on existing IT infrastructure. The company can't quantify exactly how scalable the thing is but its notion of scalability includes both front-end transactional scalability and back-end resource scalability. Eucalyptus 2.0 provides increased back-end cluster as well as node controller scale improvements.

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As Dell and HP slug it out to capture 3PAR, Cisco may be adopting a quieter acquisition style and attempting - according to TechCrunch anyway - to acquire Skype. Citing someone it refers to only as "one of our more reliable sources," the Silicon Valley-based site claims Cisco has already made an offer before Skype has time to complete its recently announced IPO. It is five years now since eBay famously acquired Skype for $1.9 billion.

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IT must innovate - it's the new clarion call in this looming recession. Given the cost pressures required just to keep the lights on, how would IT be able to convince business to let IT innovate beyond a datacenter clean-up focus? The answer lies in the basic principle for any IT investment: Intelligence is king, only now IT needs to be that king in real time. Here are some scenarios to illustrate the power of real-time information correlation that makes IT a sales enabler: A standard insurance company function is to have a service center accept calls about changes to addresses, it is likely that call center is off-shore. The real question is whether anything is done besides registering the address for billing purposes. A new move might mean a new zip code. There are statistics available about the demographics of zip codes, could the people moving be going to a wealthier zip code, a retirement zip code, moving from the city to the suburbs, or empty nesters moving from the suburbs to the city. There is a likely chance that the move is the result of a life event change. It would pay for the insurance company to have an idea about that and reach out to that consumer. It would be an opportunity to upgrade service, cross-sell, etc.

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SafeNet examines virtualization, its advantages, and why it is such a hot topic in the world of software licensing, digging deeper into the options available to ISVs and presents best practices for handling software licensing in virtual environments.

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The OpenSolaris governing board fell on its collective sword Monday and resigned en masse after Oracle continued to ignore its ultimatum to appoint a liaison guy to work with it on the future of the open source project. The move was anticlimactic to say the least. Oracle last week leaked an internal e-mail into the wild effectively saying OpenSolaris is dead.

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Remember that score of alternate sales leads Novell was supposed to have after it blew off Elliott Associates’ $2 billion bid to buy the company back in March and repair it privately? Well, according to the 451 Group, Novell’s alternatives have dwindled down to three which it describes as “a private equity-backed company, a UK-based PE firm and a joint bid between a publicly traded tech company and a buyout shop.” And it warns that “it’s not clear that any of the three will actually close a deal for Novell. (The process has already run past two deadlines, we gather.) Without a deal, shares of Novell would be left to trade on the company’s own merits, which probably wouldn’t do much for shareholder value.”

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Novell has squeezed into Cinderella’s glass slipper. Amazon EC2 is going to offer by-the-hour pricing and support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10 and 11. Novell says the OS will be available in all instance sizes and in every AWS region worldwide. Customized instances are also possible complements of widgetry like SUSE Studio. Novell is supposed to provide a maintenance service on Amazon so customers can keep their SLES instances current with its security patches, bug fixes and new features. Users will be able to buy maintenance subscriptions for their Linux instances on EC2 without signing a separate license agreement with Novell.

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In the spirit of David and the bone-crushing giant Goliath, ARM has gotten itself a Smooth-Stone to hurl at Intel, hoping to at least put out its eye. Smooth-Stone is a little Austin, Texas start-up that got organized in January of 2008, apparently on a nickel from ARM and a couple of other angels like the former head of Intel’s Communications Infrastructure Group Howard Bubb. It means to turn the ARM chip, loved by cell phone makers, into the kind of low-cost, ultra-low-power, high-performance server chip capable of the density that hyper-scale cloud players and huge web server farm would fancy.

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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Texas Memory Systems has become its newest member. Texas Memory Systems designs and builds solid state storage systems for accelerating enterprise applications. It uses the industry's leading storage technology, PCI-e Solid State Drives (SSDs), to provide solutions to the IT industry that allow for scalable, low latency messaging with high throughput. These requirements are found today in financial services, social networking and other High Performance Computing (HPC) environments. Instead of a rotating mechanical disk, SSD uses memory chips (typically DDR RAM or Flash Memory) to read and write data. These drives eliminate the mechanical limitations and latency of hard disk drives and allow storage speeds to catch up with the speed of today's processors, thereby improving performance and productivity. With SSD, applications can accommodate more concurrent users and simultaneous transactions and can be more economical than adding monolithic RAID, servers, RAM, or constant application tuning.

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Cloud computing is changing the expectations on IT and the opportunities for IT to create value. End users feel they can circumvent IT to get what they want and so are asking IT to deliver more cost transparency and agility. At the same time, the cloud provides unique opportunities for IT to roll out services more quickly and better manage costs, while delivering services that truly differentiate the business. In his session at the 7th International Cloud Expo, Jay Fry is Vice President, Strategy & Business Development for CA Technologies’ Cloud Customer Solutions Unit, will talk about how the cloud will evolve the roles of across IT operations and application development teams, as well as how the relationship with business users is changing.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Rackspace Hosting, the world’s leader in hosting and cloud computing, has been named “Gold Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 7th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 1–4, 2010, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Rackspace Hosting is the world’s leading specialist in the hosting and cloud computing industry. The San Antonio-based company delivers enterprise-level hosting services to businesses of all sizes and kinds around the world. Rackspace integrates the industry’s best technologies for each customer’s specific need and delivers it as a service via the company’s commitment to Fanatical Support.

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Unable or unwilling to come up with an offer that betters the $2 billion acquisition bid that private equity house Elliott Management Corporation put on the table back in March, Novell cut its fiscal Q3 revenue guidance Monday and attributed the downgrade to “customer uncertainty” associated with its board’s “ongoing review of various alternatives.”

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HP chairman, president and CEO Mark Hurd, 53, the buttoned-down golden boy the company brought in to clean up the mess left by his ousted predecessor Carly Fiorina, the guy who delivered on that charter beyond the company’s wildest expectations, quit suddenly this evening after a weeks-old company investigation by outside and inside legal counsel of sexual harassment charges.

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Oracle said Thursday that Dell and HP will sell Oracle Solaris, Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM on their x86 platforms, which will presumably come as some relief to customers uncertain of Oracle’s intentions. HP said in a canned statement that many users “have hardwired stacks of applications and infrastructure that can’t rapidly change.” Oracle will do the support. Meanwhile, things on the OpenSolaris side of the house are in a tizzy with the widgetry’s governing board issuing ultimatums and threatening to disband if Oracle doesn’t pay it some mind while a breakaway movement is believed to be in progress because Oracle, while committed to Solaris, has reduced its support for OpenSolaris as a distribution.

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Open-Xchange, a provider of business-class open source e-mail and collaboration software, announced today an agreement with LinuxMagic, the developers of MagicMail, which supplies e-mail, messaging and spam protection products to ISPs, telcos and enterprises across North America, as well as protecting and servicing millions of e-mail accounts worldwide. LinuxMagic will incorporate the Open-Xchange software in its MagicMail offering that is designed as a turn-key solution for ISPs and telcos with 2,000 to 200,000 users. MagicMail comes with integrated anti-spam protection and support from LinuxMagic, one of the foremost experts in e-mail and spam security, as well as a stable redundant infrastructure built on Linux technology.

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Novell and Tencent, reportedly China’s biggest Internet service portal, have set up a research lab in Shenzhen, China, to jointly develop an Internet Data Center (IDC) cloud computing platform. Tencent, which is supposed to have 480 million active users and 568.6 million IM accounts, is going to use SUSE Linux and PlateSpin Orchestrate as its auto-deployment system. It’s also suppose to use Novell’s intelligent workload management solutions, including PlateSpin Workload Management, to create an IDC cloud platform that users can use to build, purchase and run business apps. IDC vendors typically lease resources from solution providers and resell them.

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Novell and Tencent on Thursday announced the establishment of a research laboratory in Shenzhen, China to jointly develop an Internet Data Center (IDC) cloud computing platform. Tencent, China's largest Internet service portal with more than 480 million active users, is adopting SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server and PlateSpin Orchestrate as its auto-deployment system. As part of the agreement, Tencent will also utilize intelligent workload management solutions from Novell, including PlateSpin Workload Management, to create a flexible and easy-to-expand IDC cloud platform that will allow users to build, purchase and run business applications in a faster and more convenient way. "Tencent has recognized the value of our solutions to its business," said Dr. Sen Ming Chang, managing director of Novell East Asia. "This cloud computing laboratory will create a powerful IDC cloud platform that will not only promote IDC industry development but also help companies improve productivity and reduce costs. Our collaboration with Tencent further proves Novell's leadership in cloud computing and the intelligent workload management market. We spare no effort to provide customers with excellent solutions and services, and hope more companies like Tencent will adopt our virtual solutions."

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University of Salamanca in Spain selected Linux-based Open-Xchange for e-mail and groupware at its nine campus facilities. More than 30,000 students use Open-Xchange for e-mail and 2,700 faculty and administration use the Open-Xchange premium groupware package for e-mail, calendaring, information management and document sharing. The implementation was handled by Quer System, an Open-Xchange Business Partner based in Spain. "The Open-Xchange collaboration software is the ideal solution to provide our students, professors and administration with complete groupware and webmail," said Reyes Hernández who is responsible for the e-mail services within the university. "After having evaluated other products, Open-Xchange Server 6 has been the only one that offered everything that was needed for our users, including connections to the most frequently-used clients (Outlook, Thunderbird, Mac), as well as synchronization with mobile devices. Plus, we're able to integrate Open-Xchange in our complex IT infrastructure."

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Wind River Linux Secure, a secure embedded Linux that should be available in 1H11, is in evaluation by the National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP) to be certified to Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level 4+ (EAL4+). If it passes, it’ll be the first commercial embedded Linux operating system accepted by NIAP. It will initially be available on some Intel, Power and ARM chips. Wind River also has a framework to automate the testing of Android apps.

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