March, 2009

Novell strengthens commitment to Mono

As part of the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Ca. today, Novell announced the availability of MonoDevelop 2.0 and Mono 2.4. MonoDevelop 2.0 is an open source integrated development environment for programming with C# and other languages. Mono 2.4 is the latest release of the open source, cross-platform .NET application framework that powers the SUSE Linux Enterprise Mono Extension.

“By making .NET application development and deployment accessible for Linux, the Mono project is committed to expanding ISV and corporate developers’ options beyond the Windows platform,” said Miguel de Icaza, vice president of Development Platforms at Novell and leader of the Mono project. “With the newest releases for Mono and MonoDevelop, we continue to improve and extend the development tools and framework to deliver on this goal. The features and functionality available in this release are allowing developers to increase the number of .NET applications that are built and run on Linux.”

Mono 2.4 enables ISVs, independent developers, and corporate developers to run .NET client and server applications on Linux across a range of hardware architectures, including the mainframe. Additionally, with the recent introduction of SUSE Linux Enterprise Mono Extension, customers and ISVs can also receive full support, security and upgrades when using Mono in the enterprise. New features available in Mono 2.4 include:

• Performance improvements and runtime innovations – A new code generation engine greatly improves the performance of executing .NET applications on the Mono runtime, while managed Single Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD) extensions enable developers to take advantage of hardware acceleration without having to program in lower-level languages. Additional runtime innovations, such as full ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation, bring Mono-based applications to new platforms, including the Apple iPhone.
• Support for the latest features of ASP.NET – ASP.NET developers targeting Linux can now leverage the latest ASP.NET features, including ASP.NET 3.5 extensions, new web controls, ASP.NET routing APIs, and ASP.NET AJAX. Mono 2.4 can also host applications built using the Microsoft ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC) framework.
• Hosting pre-compiled websites – Mono now hosts ASP.NET websites and applications which have been pre-compiled on .NET. This reduces startup times, enables ISVs to distribute web applications without distributing source code, and improves Mono’s support of ASP.NET sites built with Visual Basic.

“A lot of the effort has been focused on performance, but a lot of that is under the covers,” explained Joseph Hill, Novell product manager for Mono. “We upgraded our JIT engine which enables code to run a lot faster. In at least one real-world use case it meant a gain of 30 requests/sec to 120 requests/sec.”

“On the performance side we built a new technology for generating code on the fly – in some apps the performance only improved 10%, but in others 300%,” de Icaza explained. Part of this improvement relates to allowing granular control over the logs to make sure they wouldn’t log the entire process across the board.

Much of this performance enhancement was caused by receiving customer feedback from the gaming industry.

“We’ve been working with a couple of companies that work with high performance games and 3D apps and they were running into a bottleneck and neither .NET or Mono were able to keep up with the loads,” said de Icaza.

Novell responded, and is looking for new information from other users to determine what other areas could be improved.

“It is interesting because we’re adding new functionality to the .NET run-time that hadn’t previously been exposed,” said de Icaza. “We’re open to getting new information.”

There are a few companies with games on the Web based on Mono. According to de Icaza, the most hyped example is the Cartoon Network’s multiplayer online kid’s game FusionFall.

Data shows down economy spurs Linux adoption

A Novell-sponsored IDC survey reveals a surge in the acquisition of Linux driven by the worldwide recession. More than half of the IT executives surveyed are planning to accelerate Linux adoption in 2009. If that’s not positive enough, more than 72% of respondents reported that they are either actively evaluating or have already decided to increase their adoption of Linux on the server in 2009, with more than 68% making the same claim for the desktop. The study surveyed more than 300 senior IT executives spanning manufacturing, financial services, and retail industries across the globe, as well as government agencies. The survey results are a good update to the fall 2008 Purchasing Intentions survey we conducted that hinted the economy would impact Linux adoption.

Linux has been gaining ground in the enterprise, as was seen with Red Hat’s impressive results from 2008. We said back in January that open source would do well in a down economy, and now there’s data to back up the prediction.

In the IDC survey, the leading reason given for migrating to Linux was an interest in lowering ongoing support costs. More than 40% of survey participants said they plan to deploy additional workloads on Linux over the next 12-24 months and 49% indicated Linux will be their primary server platform within five years. (Is anyone else surprised by that number?) Among those hesitant to adopt Linux, lack of application support and poor interoperability with Windows and other environments was cited as the primary concern, indicating the key areas that need more work. Companies have made great strides where interoperability is concerned, but clearly more work needs to be done before Linux can gain more ground. We have covered Red Hat’s recent interoperability agreement with Microsoft, Canonical’s effort’s toward certification on HP servers, and reviewed the leadership of Novell in interoperability efforts. But, clearly the market needs more assurance that Linux will meet their critical business needs.

Key to the recent interoperability efforts has been virtualization. This is a good move according to the survey results as nearly half of respondents stated that moving to virtualization is accelerating their adoption of Linux. A notably high, 88% of those surveyed plan to evaluate, deploy or increase their use of virtualization software within Linux operating systems over the next 12-24 months. An increase in virtualization uptake was seen in our 2008 Purchasing Intentions survey, which revealed that virtualization interest was influencing server purchases.

In our recent newsletter, we asked readers to tell us what’s missing from all of these agreements. We encourage you to share your thoughts here. What would you like to see in terms of specific application support or capabilities? What’s missing from the interoperability landscape?

Are you innovative? Tell Red Hat

Red Hat has opened submissions for the company’s third-annual Innovation awards. The winners will be announced at the 2009 Red Hat Summit in Chicago Sept. 1-4, 2009. Nominations will be accepted until May 31st.

The 2009 Innovation Awards will consist of six categories including:

• Management Excellence: Recognition of the impressive use of management tools, including Red Hat Network and JBoss Operations Network, to drive down TCO and increase ROI.
• Optimized Solutions: Recognition of striking performance, scalability and/or usability enhancements delivered with open source solutions.
• Superior Alternatives: Recognition of the most successful migration from proprietary solutions to open source alternatives.
• Extensive Ecosystem: Recognition of the use of Red Hat or JBoss’ expanding partner ecosystem to create innovative architectures based on open source solutions.
• Carved out Costs: Recognition of customers who have leveraged open source solutions to significantly cut costs and extract added value from existing systems.
• Outstanding Open Source Architecture: Recognition of the use of Red Hat, JBoss, and partner offerings to create innovative architectures based on open source solutions. (Both Red Hat Summit and JBoss World registrants may compete for this award)

Nominations for each Innovation Award category will be judged by a panel of representatives and industry leaders including: Lee Congdon, CIO of Red Hat; Craig Muzilla, vice president, Middleware Business for Red Hat; John R. Rymer from Forrester Research, Inc.; Dana Gardner, a principal analyst from Interarbor; Jay Lyman from The 451 Group; Steven Vaughan-Nichols, editor-in-chief of Practical Technology.

Software company unifies rival OSes, benefits war victims

This blog post was written by Bridget Botelho, a news writer.

When I get pitches from companies that are rife with marketing bull, I am quick to hit delete. But when Likewise Software sent me this goofy press release to promote its products, I couldn’t bring myself to send it to the recycle bin.

Likewise Software is promoting peace between rival operating systems Linux, Unix, Windows and Mac by raising money for real-world victims of war with T-shirt sales.

The connection is that the Bellevue, Wash.-based company’s software enables users to integrate rival operating systems into one unified Windows environments. Its open source offering, Likewise Open, lets mixed data centers integrate Linux, Unix and Mac systems with a unified directory such as Microsoft Active Directory. Likewise Enterprise Edition does that as well but also includes features for migration, group policy, auditing and reporting modules.

“To commemorate the ending of the OS hostilities, Likewise has released two t-shirts, which people can proudly wear to demonstrate their commitment to the hope, and to the peaceful co-existence of heterogeneous systems (that, um, means Windows, Mac OS, Linux and Unix.).”

Silly, I know, but all proceeds from sales of the $20 T-shirts are being donated to organizations that help both civilian and military casualties of real war.