June, 2008

At Usenix ‘08, worker productivity focus a bone of contention

At Usenix ‘08, held in Boston June 22-27, many system administrators bemoaned the newfound emphasis on worker productivity, complaining that their bosses’ attempts to measure their work has in fact hindered their work. Managers are requiring productivity reports on a weekly or monthly basis, and administrators grumbled that it has been difficult to convey the amount of work they had done in such increments.

Some administrators, such as the “Automated Systems Management” session’s moderator and worldwide open source lecturer Æleen Frisch, said the work reports are “painful, but ultimately a good thing.” Another attendee, however, was utterly frustrated with them, saying that he had to take five hours to complete a report, then include those five hours in the report.

The admins in the session suggested that the struggling developer set up a ticket system to keep closer track of his work activity and recommended Request Tracker and Jira for the task. The Best Practical website offers additional task management solutions.

Another suggestion was to engage in more active communication with a boss. There was some widespread grumbling in the session about distrust from managers about what exactly developers are doing with their time. Aside from creating reports, developers and managers need to communicate more honestly with one another. If that fails, they should find a job where their skills and judgment are valued.

The “Automated System Management” session also covered the role of documentation in purchasing decisions. It is difficult for IT managers to know which purchases are necessary and which are not without an accurate inventory of what runs on each system, Frisch said.

To maximize efficiency in an enterprise setting, both IT managers and their developers might establish not only better automation procedures but also a consistent and mutually satisfying method of communication about all work done on company operating system(s).

Fedora 9 LiveUSB: Operating systems on the go

This blog post was written by Matt McDonough, assistant editor.

If the enthusiasm of Fedora Project leader Paul Frields and Red Hat software engineer Jesse Keating is any indication, Fedora 9 LiveUSB Creator will likely be the most popular new feature in the next release. As they discussed LiveUSB at the fourth annual Red Hat Summit in Boston last week, Frields and Keating almost glowed about the prospects for the new offering and provided some hints on new features for Fedora as well.

And the capabilities aren’t shoddy. A user, for example, can load Fedora 9 onto a USB drive in the form of a live image, enabling duplication of an entire OS as a live image, complete with an entire hard disk’s worth of files and applications. That’s impressive, because you can shrink down a complex infrastructure and place it on a USB drive as small as 2 GB. Of course, the more memory you have on your USB drive, the more operating systems you can carry around in your pocket or on your key chain. Another benefit of creating a live image of an OS is that a user can download and integrate software updates, applications and files whenever they are needed.

The best feature by far of LiveUSB is the ability to take the USB drive, plug it into any machine, and then boot that machine off of the USB drive so that users have their entire OS in front of them no matter where they are. As you can see in the video below, the USB key with the live image can boot on any machine with no difference in functionality.

Not surprisingly, this technology has received a lot of attention at Red Hat. “All of the things we’ve talked about today we’re looking to capitalize on in our next version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL),” Keating said. “I can’t tell you exactly what will be in the next version because it’s not my responsibility to know, … but I can say there is a lot of interest in using this technology.”

While it’s questionable how useful the technology will be for enterprise-level IT professionals in its current form, Fedora 9 and LiveUSB could have broad capabilities if modified for enterprise purposes. IT professionals could transfer broad interfaces to a physical or virtual server with just a USB stick. But for IT novices, it’s a cool program that to take your home OS almost anywhere without lugging a tower around with you.

For more on LiveUSB and Fedora 9, check out the Fedora Project homepage. as well as this video, where Frields discusses Fedora 9 in greater depth and where Red Hat plans to take it.

Red Hat/Groundwork faciliate university’s high-performance computing

At the University of Utah, scientists who require access to computational resources rely on the Center for High Performance Computing (CHPC), a facility that maintains 872 nodes across three clusters. To run those clusters, the CHPC relies on open source software, specifically Red Hat Enterprise Linux as an operating system and GroundWork Monitor for IT and network monitoring.

Tom Ammon, a network engineer at the CHPC said that his organization has used GroundWork for nearly two years. The monitoring tool replaced Nagios, an open source network monitoring tool. “Nagios is really powerful and flexible, but it has an arcane syntax and it’s a hassle to configure,” Ammon said. The university’s switch to GroundWork was made with the hopes of reducing the time spent administering the monitoring system.

While GroundWork has been successful in terms of streamlining administration tasks, Ammon said that the tool has also brought greater functionality than he anticipated. “GroundWork is open enough so that we’ve been able to integrate it with a lot of open source packages,” he said. For example, the CHPC has integrated GroundWork with Cacti, an open source networking graphing tool. According to Ammon, combining GroundWork’s network status information with Cacti’s graphing capability enables CHPC to look at trending data. “We use trending data in the data center to monitor things like temperature and humidity,” Ammon explained. “It’s not that helpful to know what the temperature is right now if you didn’t know what it’s been like for 24 hours,” he said.

With Red Hat Linux running on clusters and open source tools helping to monitor and manage the operational work involved in providing high-performance computing resources, open source, said Ammon, “has really revolutionized the way we are accomplishing our mission.”

Red Hat Summit draws record crowds; attendance up 50%

This post was written by Pam Derringer, news writer.

Red Hat Inc. attracted about 1,500 attendees to its fourth annual Red Hat Summit in Boston.

According to Leigh Day, senior director of global corporate communications, the record-breaking attendance is about 50% more than last year, which also was a record-breaker.

“Red Hat is pleased at the turnout,” she said.

So is this year’s 500-number boost because of Red Hat’s growing popularity? Or did the techies come to Boston for the Celtics, the Sox or (cough) the weather? Only the attendees can say for sure.

Support booth a hit at Red Hat Summit

This post was written by Pam Derringer, news writer.

Business was brisk at Iain Gray’s support booth during the fourth annual Red Hat Summit this week in Boston.

Offered for the first time, the highly visible red and white booth was staffed by Iain Gray, Red Hat’s vice president of services, and a team of technical experts to answer user questions from the basic to the complex.

“Volume was much higher than I expected,” Gray said.

The booth’s technical staff said it fielded queries from those on basic installation to those concerning live migration and other features as well as questions about virtualization features and the newly released Red Hat Enterprise Identity, Policy and Audit (IPA) ) security product.

The advantage of offering the booth at the Summit was that the technical staff could refer directly to the development staff that wrote the code if there was a question they couldn’t answer, he said.

Based on its popularity, Gray predicted that the booth will be a recurring feature at future Red Hat Summits.

Red Hat previews virtual management tool

At a mid-morning session during the Red Hat Summit in Boston today, a standing-room only crowd of more than 125 attendees got a preview of oVirt, a “next-generation open source virtualization management solution.”

Currently in beta, oVirt comprises two components: oVirt Managed Node, which is an embedded hypervisor based on a Linux kernel and KVM; and oVirt Server Suite, an administrative console that includes a Web interface and has functionality for tasks related to virtual machine management, such as status monitoring, performance monitoring and visualization and authentication.

With oVirt, IT administrators get a picture of “what’s going on in your server room from a virtualization perspective,” said Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens. The current generation of virtualization management tools, contends Stevens, fall short for customers because they are proprietary and do not integrate into the enterprise.

The oVirt infrastructure integrates with several open source projects, including libvirt for virtual machine management, FreeIPA for directory services, Cobbler and Koan for provisioning, and collectd for performance data collection.

Currently oVirt enables IT administrations to collect data from managed hosts; eventually Stevens said that oVirt will include automation capabilities to allow IT administrators to establish service-level agreements around physical and virtual machines and migrate machines accordingly based on those levels.

Intel executive asserts commitment to open source

During the partner keynote presentation at the Red Hat Summit today, Boyd Davis, the general manager of server platforms group marketing at Intel Corp., reiterated the hardware company’s commitment to open source.

“Open source software is fundamental to Intel’s business success,” Davis said, who added that Intel is among the top four corporate contributors to open source software.

Davis then outlined the three trends shaping the enterprise computing market, namely optimization – which he defined as the ever-increasing control users want over their environments – virtualization, and energy-efficient performance. For each of these trends, Davis said, Intel, in conjunction with open source software providers, is at work on the underlying silicon components.

Davis also mentioned the LessWatts initiative, Intel’s project to make Linux more energy efficient. The aim of project, said Davis, is to ensure that software can work with Intel’s more energy-efficient hardware components.

Davis concluded his 20-minute presentation with a pledge of commitment to the Linux community. “Our goal is to maintain a close relationship with the community, to ensure[that] the underlying value Intel is building in the silicon is taken advantage of by the end user.”

IBM makes the case for cloud computing at Red Hat Summit

This post was written by Bridget Botelho, news writer.
The first hour of keynote addresses at the fourth annual Red Hat Summit at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston wrapped up with Jim Stallings, the general manager of enterprise systems division of IBM.

Stallings talked for about 30 minutes to a packed house about the ways in which data center infrastructure must change over the coming decade to handle increasing power costs, security issues and user demands for information.

“The new enterprise data center is greener, is open and is virtualized. It is much more dynamic and uses shared resources,” Stallings said.

Stallings made many mentions about cloud computing, which IBM refers to as dynamic computing, and said IBM will collaborate with companies to help them adapt their software for use in a managed cloud environment.

“Dynamic computing is the idea of not paying for peak capacity until you are at peak capacity. It is really a utility model, and industries are transitioning to this model today,” he said.
Stallings likened the evolution of the data center to that of businesses like banks, which have shifted from face to face to ATMs and Web-based enterprises. “With banking, you used to have to interact with a human, … then it moved to ATM machines, … and now we can electronically access our assets via the Web, and the software may be run from [some foreign country],” he said. “The physical bank as we used to think about it has changed completely.”

Many data center managers question the stability and security of cloud computing, but companies like Google, HP, Amazon.com and VMware Inc., use and advocate cloud computing environments.

Recently, VMware President and CEO Diane Greene said that VMware’s focus is on cloud computing.
Cloud computing appears to be the destination for enterprise data centers, and many are in the evolutionary stages today, Stallings said. “You don’t buy an enterprise data center, you evolve towards it in stages, starting with consolidation,” Stallings said.

Stallings threw out a lot of factoids and expectations about data center infrastructure but, oddly enough, did not use his pulpit to push IBM products.

Stallings’ only product mention involved a quick case study demonstrating how Volkswagen recently took 76 Unix systems and consolidated them onto six IBM mainframes to decrease its energy footprint.

Given that IBM appeared at Red Hat’s event, Stallings ended his presentation by flattering Linux. He said IBM uses Linux in its data centers, and expects Linux to be the standard operating system in cloud computing, where the OS is heavily used.

Red Hat Summit heats up with fire alarm

Fire alarms blared and barely audible announcements urged Red Hat Summit attendees to evacuate the Hynes Convention Center at about 10:15 a.m. but no one heeded the call and left the building. Can’t beat open source for really hot stuff! So far, it’s agenda as scheduled.

Great planning coincides Red Hat Summit, Celtics victory, CEO says

Red Hat CEO and President Jim Whitehurst began his opening keynote of Red Hat’s fourth annual Summit today by crediting event organizers for coordinating the Summit event with last night’s Celtics victory over the Los Angeles Lakers.

“We got everyone tickets for Game 7,” Whitehurst joked. “I wish we could get the Celtics red hats to wear in the parade.”

Whitehurst said that open source really is a business model where everyone wins by sharing innovation, which spreads the benefits of innovation and spares originators the cost of maintaining proprietary technology. He cited several examples where companies contributed innovations to the open source community that have led to major improvements. For example, a Canadian insurance company contributed what became JBoss’ Enterprise Service Bus and the U.S. government shared the development of what is now known as SELinux, he said. In addition, an innovative messaging protocol developed by JPMorgan is being tested now as part of Red Hat’s MRG [Messaging Real-time Grid] product, he said.

Contributions of innovations is a win-win proposition; the whole open source community benefits by incorporating and building on the improvements. But the contributors benefit too from lower support costs, he said.

The problem is that these are only a few examples; the vast majority of private development enterprise software is wasted, Whitehurst said, in urging attendees to promote open source and participating in community development.

Red Hat will launch more new products than ever this year, ensuring that its software and support will be better than ever, Whitehurst added.

“We are the leader in open source,” he said. “It’s who we are and what we do.”

However, leadership involves not just good software but also behind-the-scenes work to improve open source interoperability, like a recent lawsuit settlement that Red Hat negotiated to protect not only Red Hat but past and future users from litigation.

In his travels around the globe, Whitehurst said the most frequent customer complaint is that Red Hat isn’t always easy to work with when it comes to communications and recordkeeping. And Red Hat will be addressing that issue in the weeks and months ahead, he said.

So after a perfect Boston day of sunny skies and refreshingly cool temperatures, Red Hat attendees will be celebrating their adoption of open source software at a party in Fenway Park. Go Sox!