IBM

IBM POWER Systems focuses on Linux

In light of the global economic situation, IBM is putting a greater emphasis on the Linux market. This was an obvious shift that I noticed today while attending the COMMON User Group Annual Meeting and Exposition in Reno, Nev. I sat in on a panel discussion with Ian Jarman, IBM’s Power Systems Software Manager, and he plainly stated this fact. Jarman shared the Linux focus of IBM’s recent announcements, including increased focus on the PowerVM Lx86 product, which was created to help combat x86 server sprawl. PowerVM Lx86 creates an x86 Linux application environment running on POWER processor-based systems by dynamically translating x86 instructions to Power Architecture instructions.

On the exhibit hall floor, Anirban Chatterjee, IBM IT Specialist in the Executive Briefing Centers Systems and Technology Group, demonstrated how the tool works along with the PowerVM Live Partitioning Mobility feature.

Jarman also touched on the fact that IBM offers full support for SUSE 11, a move we have reported previously, with a focus on the cloud computing emphasis.

I’ll be keeping my eye on the Linux on Power activities at IBM throughout the show, and we’ll be following up with some end users who are willing to share their experiences. If you have any questions you want to ask IBM about Linux on POWER, leave a note in the comments below and I’ll work on getting you an answer.

Should VMware buy Red Hat?

A recent Business Week article said that Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat Inc. is ripe for a takeover bid because its pockets don’t bulge as quickly as those of proprietary vendors and suggested Palo Alto, Calif.-based VMware Inc. as a promising buyer. VMware has a heftier cash flow and doesn’t have an operating system, a gap that Red Hat would fill, the author argues.

But three IT analysts panned the idea for multiple reasons. Richard Jones, the vice president and service director of Burton Group in Midvale, Utah, and Charles King, a principal analyst of Pund-IT Inc. in Hayward, Calif., don’t think Red Hat’s relative flat stock price makes it vulnerable.

“I don’t think it’s a risk,” King said. “The players within the industry and those in investment live in separate realities. If Red Hat can’t be a success as the clear leader in the market, what could VMware do to make it more successful?”

Jones doesn’t think Red Hat is vulnerable either. Red Hat has only its brand to offer (since open source software is free) and the company would be too expensive to buy, he said. Instead of VMware, Jones thinks that Oracle Corp. would be the more likely buyer.

Joe Clabby, principal at Clabby Analytics in Yarmouth, Maine, said a VMware/Red Hat merger doesn’t make sense because the addition of an operating system would put Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC Corp., VMware’s parent company, in conflict with the other major hardware vendors who distribute VMware.

“I don’t see Red Hat making a ton of money,” Clabby said. “‘But I don’t think anybody’s at risk.”

But Clabby admitted that his crystal ball is sometimes a bit cloudy. “I didn’t think EMC Corp. should have bought VMware. But that acquisition has paid off extremely well.”

Ironically, the Red Hat news alert that initially popped up this week linked to a Computerworld column suggesting that IBM buy Red Hat, while admitting the outcome was quite unlikely. But a closer look revealed that Google erred in listing the “recent” article, which was written in 2002. The author, Nicholas Petreley, a computer consultant in Hayward, Calif., said this week that he was one of the first to urge IBM to buy Red Hat in the mid-’90s but said the acquisition now would simply put it in competition with other distros, similar to Clabby’s argument against a VMware/Red Hat merger. And Petreley’s thoughts were the same as mine: somehow the VMware piece resurrected his IBM column out of the depths of time and presented it as something new.

Well, as we all know, technology doesn’t always work 100% of the time. And this is just one more example.

The bottom line: Red Hat appears not to be a takeover candidate for now. And that’s probably a good thing.

Ubuntu growing its ecosystem of apps, partners, Canonical says

Malcolm Yates, the global independent software vendor (ISV) alliance manager at Canonical Ltd., traveled halfway around the world, flying from London to San Francisco with a message for LinuxWorld: Ubuntu is growing up. No longer just an operating system for geeks, Ubuntu has begun to evolve into a mature ecosystem with a small but growing cache of applications to run on top of an OS and more partners to expand its reach, he said.

Addressing an oft-cited shortcoming, Canonical is in the process of adding numerous key partnerships to expand the desktop and server offerings on top of Ubuntu’s OS and forging pacts with hardware vendors as well, Yates said. Parallels virtualization software and IBM DB2 database software already are downloadable from Canonical’s website and enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management applications in the works, he said. The desktop is beefing up, too, with OBM messaging and collaboration software and IBM groupware are coming soon, he said.

Canonical also has strengthened its development team to nearly a dozen members during the last year and has built a mini-operating system to enable ISVs to develop Ubuntu-based applications quickly and bring them to market, Yates said.

Although he didn’t have solid numbers, Yates estimated that Ubuntu’s share of the open source operating system market has doubled or tripled from IDC’s 9% projection last year, with the number of users opting for paid support rising proportionately. Server and desktop users both are growing but desktops – boosted by a 50,000 deployment by French police – are increasing faster, he said. But the coming addition of IBM groupware to Ubuntu’s desktop should boost Ubuntu’s momentum in the corporate market, both desktops and servers, he said.

Canonical’s goal is to make Ubuntu available via any partner and any business model and deliver it to users on the server as well as the desktop, Yates said.

Navy’s ship cancelation a blow for real-time Linux, IBM

The U.S. Navy’s cancelation of its $20 billion Zumwalt destroyer contract last week because of a 50% price hike is disappointing for the Linux community and surely must be for IBM The Armonk, N.Y.-based computer company developed Java-based, real-time capabilities to the Linux kernel specifically for the Zumwalt to ensure that all shipboard systems will run with precision timing, particularly battle systems. The Zumwalt’s unified computing system, developed by general contractor Raytheon Co.. in Waltham, Mass., runs on an IBM BladeCenter and IBM x86 servers on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Since the 2005-2006 Navy design undertaking, IBM has incorporated its technology in IBM WebSphere Real Time, a computing environment for running real-time Linux applications, and recently won an innovation award for its real-time kernel project at this year’s Red Hat Summit.

Now, after the completion of only two destroyers, the contract has been aborted, which surely means a hefty chunk of lost hardware sales for IBM but, more significantly, a step backward for shipboard computing technology, in general, and Linux in particular.

IBM spokesman Mike Darcy said he didn’t know the impact of cancelation on future IBM revenues but said that IBM will continue to work with other customers, defense and financial sectors among them, as interest “continues to grow” in real-time Linux operations.

“Real-time Linux will continue,” Darcy said. “This [the Zumwalt project] is a great showcase for Linux technology.”

Raytheon spokesman Jonathan Kasle agreed.

“We don’t believe the Navy can afford to put old technologies onto any ships,” he told the Boston Globe last week. “Zumwalt technologies advance mission capabilities to address current and evolving threats and support … lower ship personnel levels and lower operating costs. These technologies can be leveraged for future or existing ships.”

According to Darcy’s general reference to current “defense” customers, it appears that the military is already doing so. Let’s hope so. Reverting to old technology on new Navy ships is not the way to go.

Red Hat out-marathons the pack in financial services

You have to run pretty fast to keep up with Red Hat these days.

The leading open source vendor just broke two speed records for the financial industry. First, it broke the gold standard for real-time status by processing updates in less than one millisecond, completing a single transaction in .9 of a millisecond. Typically, the fastest processing rates are 10 milliseconds to 20 milliseconds per transaction.

Second, Red Hat had the lowest standard deviation ever recorded or less than .5 milliseconds, which in layman’s terms translates into greater consistency. And third, a single server with a stacked Reuters Market Data System (RMDS) completed a very high ‑- but not record-breaking ­­­­­- volume of transactions, 5.8 million updates per second.

The Securities Technology Analysis Center, which provides performance measurement services to the financial service industry, performed the tests, running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, the latest version, with RDMS 6.0 on IBM BladeCenter H and 10 gigabit Ethernet.

“In financial services, speed is the difference between making money and losing money,” said Scott Crenshaw, vice president of Red Hat’s platform business unit. “The result is clear: more data, faster data, means better trades and better decisions.”

As if that weren’t enough, Crenshaw struck a blow to proprietary software. “We were 2.4 times faster than Sun Microsystems,” he crowed, comparing Red Hat’s 5.8 million updates with Sun Solaris’ record of 2.4 million updates.

Go, open source! Guess you should have been here for the Boston Marathon!

IBM presents the anatomy of a Linux file system

IBM’s DeveloperWorks site has an up-to-date, concise explainer about the Linux file system up today that’s worth a quick read, for refresher’s sake.

When it comes to file systems, Linux is the Swiss Army knife of operating systems. Linux supports a large number of file systems, from journaling to clustering to cryptographic. Linux is a wonderful platform for using standard and more exotic file systems and also for developing file systems. This article explores the virtual file system (VFS)—sometimes called the virtual filesystem switch—in the Linux kernel and then reviews some of the major structures that tie file systems together.

It covers all the basics (and I mean BASICS; example of a header found within: What is a file system?), and then goes into the technical stuff after that. Like I said, worth a quick read when you get the chance!

The i5 and Oracle certification headaches

My comrade in data center arms Mark Fontecchio is presenting a unique iSeries problem over at our sister blog today.

At the iSeries blog, Mark tells the tale of an iSeries user who would like to run all his Oracle software — databases and the E-Business Suite — on the same hardware and software platform. he would like that hardware platform to be the i5.

But there’s where the trouble begins. Mark explains:

The Oracle certification matrix is a guessing game, according to this person. First off, Oracle doesn’t certify its Database Server or E-Business Suite to run on i5/OS. It does certify both to run on AIX, which can be carved into a partition of its own on the System i, but the database team wants to run Oracle applications on Linux. Why? According to this person, that’s what Oracle recommends and besides, that’s what they’re familiar with anyway.

OK, so run them on Linux on Power, right? Wrong. Oracle has certified Oracle Database Server to run on Linux on Power, but not the E-Business Suite. So now this person isn’t sure what to do. Oracle Database Server will likely get migrated off the System i and onto x86 unless IBM and Oracle can come together and figure out how to certify the E-Business Suite on Linux on Power.

It’s a migration certification quandary, is what it is. Do you have a solution? Do you have the same unsolvable problem? Shoot Mark Fontecchio an email about it, because he’s planning to tackle this issue head on with an upcoming article.

A short history of Linux

IBM DeveloperWorks is running an in-depth look at the inner working of the Linux kernel today, so all you Windows admins who sneak over here to SearchEnterpriseLinux.com on your lunch breaks should go check it out. Virtual file systems, drivers, system call interfaces, and a host of other Linux kernel subsystems are yours for the viewing. And according to the article, Linux currently boasts 6 million lines of code. At which I say, just code? How about six million lines of fun?!

Perhaps the most interesting bit of information over at DeveloperWorks however, are some of the new features now found in the most up to date stable version of the Linux kernel.

Linux, being a production operating system and open source, is a great test bed for new protocols and advancements of those protocols. Linux supports a large number of networking protocols, including the typical TCP/IP, and also extension for high-speed networking (greater than 1 Gigabit Ethernet [GbE] and 10 GbE). Linux also supports protocols such as the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP), which provides many advanced features above TCP (as a replacement transport level protocol).

Linux is also a dynamic kernel, supporting the addition and removal of software components on the fly. These are called dynamically loadable kernel modules, and they can be inserted at boot when they’re needed (when a particular device is found requiring the module) or at any time by the user.

A recent advancement of Linux is its use as an operating system for other operating systems (called a hypervisor). Recently, a modification to the kernel was made called the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). This modification enabled a new interface to user space that allows other operating systems to run above the KVM-enabled kernel. In addition to running another instance of Linux, Microsoft Windows can also be virtualized. The only constraint is that the underlying processor must support the new virtualization instructions. See the Resources section for more information.

Flexible. Open. KVM and hypervisors. Sounds pretty good to me.

IBM’s second annual open source analyst meeting

Take one multi-billion dollar company, add a sprinkling of inquisitive analysts and a smattering of open source software, and you’ll have the annual IBM open source analyst briefing, which happened last week.

Analyst Joe Clabby, who’s spoke with SearchEnterpriseLinux.com in the past about topics like Xen paravirtualization, attended the event and came back armed with 30-odd pages of notes.

The takeaway? That IBM had firmed up its message from one year ago, and was decidedly more serious this time around about filling “gaps” in its support of open source software.

According to Clabby (who was writing for Charles King’s Pund-IT Review), some of last year’s gaps included:

• IBM’s open source business/revenue models were a little “tenuous”;
• The fiercely independent open source community had yet to indicate that it wanted large, commercial vendor involvement in their initiatives;
• There were large infrastructure-related holes that needed to be filled;
• Customer buying preferences were not clearly understood;
• IBM and other commercial vendors needed to prove that they could all play well together in the open source sandbox – especially when it came to building common standards to support open source initiatives

But things have firmed up a bit this year, Clabby said, and had gone from “mushy” to firm with the help of a few panel sessions:

• One of the panels had four business partners willing to speak about IBM’s efforts in open source. On this panel I asked each partner to describe his open source business/revenue model. To my surprise, I found four different models [one software as a service (SAS) approach; one SAS wannabe; one user-based pricing; and one custom-based pricing]. In short, there appear to be about eight or ten valid models for deriving revenue in the open source space – and IBM’s business partners – as well as IBM are using several of them.
• In addition to panel discussions, IBM presented 16 sub-sessions related to open source including open communities; the impact of Web 2.0; application server progress; software delivery models; small/midsized business initiatives; systems/storage management; real-time Linux, grids, and more. Suffice it to say, that IBM is very, very active in many, many aspects and areas of open source computing.
• IBM is placing a lot of emphasis on creating turnkey, replicable, branded system/application/server products to simplify market delivery of its open source solutions

Exciting times at IBM for open source.