Linux

JBoss and rPath demonstrate choice and customization leading in Linux

This post was written by News Contributor, Pam Derringer.

Sometimes writing or reading tech stories about entirely different products can uncover new trends and ideas. I was intrigued with the JBoss Open Choice Java Application story last week because Red Hat officials said its new framework would enable customers to add specific functionality like clustering, caching, messaging and security in “microcontainers” or do without it, according to their needs.

In addition, for the first time, JBoss customers would be able to choose between three levels of application complexity, and move from one to another within the same management framework. By offering customers choice, JBoss will create major disruption in the Java application world, according to Aaron Darcy, JBoss product line director. Darcy added that customers are moving away from the bloated, one-size-fits-all applications that must contain code capable of doing everything, and opting for slimmer versions more tailored to their needs.

Darcy’s words struck a chord because last fall and again more recently, I wrote about rPath, a startup birthed by former Red Hat staffers who saw scaling problems with large deployments first-hand, and decided to solve the problem by upending the traditional all-purpose horizontal stack, creating a vertical, app-centric Linux-based stack with only the elements that a customized application needs to run. Obviously, rPath-constructed applications, too, are a lot slimmer than all-purpose counterparts. They are also a lot easier to maintain and update, saving time for IT operations staffs say rPath folks.

Although their approaches are somewhat different, the two companies are both reacting, it seems to me, to similar needs for more choice and customization rather than a hefty one-size-fits-all, “that’s all we offer” approach. Is this a trend that will reshape the software industry as we know it? What do you think?

Readers weigh in on Sun/Oracle impact

This post was written by News Contributor, Pam Derringer.

A May 5 story on SearchEnterpriseLinux.com about the decline of Sun Microsystems and its recent purchase by Oracle Corp. drew some thoughtful, diverse views from readers. The article concluded that Linux didn’t cause Sun’s downfall, fiscally speaking, but provided a low-cost x86-based OS that offered companies a cheaper hardware/software alternative, indirectly undermining Sun’s overall business.

David Marsh, an IT architect with a custom chip company, said his firm is planning to replace its outdated Solaris systems with cheaper, more powerful x86-based hardware, a decision that has nothing to do with the pending Oracle/Sun merger. Marsh expects to migrate its Oracle e-Business suite from Solaris to Linux at the next upgrade, probably virtualizing some portions of the application, and potentially all of it, on VMware.

Marsh’s firm also uses Sun Solaris instead of Windows to run Citrix XenApp, which functions as the front-end for its designers, who use many Linux-based tools. Marsh would prefer to migrate them from Solaris to Linux because the licensing for the Windows version of XenApp is “triple” the cost on Solaris. However, a Citrix spokeswoman said Citrix currently has “no plans” to add a XenApp version for the Linux platform.

Marsh was dismayed with Citrix’ response and predicted that “quite a few high-end customers will switch to other products,” like X-Windows display software for Windows or free, open source Xming software.

But Rich Rutkowski, whose small firm makes point-of-sale systems for retail outlets, hopes that Oracle will leverage Solaris and Java at Linux’s expense. Rutkowski’s firm was using Linux for development but was disappointed with Red Hat and Novell’s SUSE open source OSes. Red Hat doesn’t support Sun’s application server directly but, instead, refers users to Sun forums, he complained. And SUSE has a complex install process for nVidia drivers and, worse, a SUSE desktop upgrade caused a kernel panic, he said.

“After experimenting with OpenSolaris and the full production Solaris, we realized that everything we added to Linux (Postgres, Java Application Server and Java) came packaged with a full install of Solaris,” Rutkowski said. “Buying from Sun makes sense and the costs were actually cheaper. We will stay with Sun hardware and software and observe Oracle’s actions. There is no reason to go to Linux if Oracle keeps Solaris open.”

Oracle’s $7.4 billion purchase of Sun Microsystems is expected to be finalized this summer.

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.

Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit wrap-up

The 3rd Annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit was held last week in San Francisco. Among the talks was a presentation by Al Gillen, program vice president, system software at IDC, titled “The Opportunity for Linux in a New Economy.” The presentation was based on a white paper, sponsored by The Linux Foundation (LF), which looks at the impact of the current economic conditions on the computer industry, and how the Linux ecosystem will ride through this disruptive time. The presentation focused on IDCs expectation that the Linux ecosystem will be less impacted by the downturn and recover more aggressively than other platforms.

Other keynotes and panels during the week were from Linux kernel developers and representatives at IBM, Novell and Red Hat, among others. Thursday and Friday’s agenda included the ISV Summit, which focused on sharing the latest advancements in Linux and looking at best ways to work among the community. Other panel discussions and workgroup focus was on high-performance computing, file systems and systems management, among others.

We’re Linux video contest winner announced
The winner of the “We’re Linux” video contest was also announced at the summit. Amitay Tweeto, a 25-year-old graphic designer from Israel, beat out 90 contest entrants to win the grand prize for his video “What Does It Mean To Be Free?” Tweeto will receive a trip to Tokyo, Japan to participate in the Linux Foundation’s Japanese Linux Symposium in October 2009.

Two runner-ups were also announced:

• Runner-up: “The Origin”
• Runner-up: “Linux Pub”

A combination of community votes and a panel of judges determined the winners:

• Matt Asay, CNET blogger and executive at Alfresco, Inc.;
• Larry Augustin, venture capitalist and former chairman of VA Software,
  and Linux Foundation board member;

• Jono Bacon, Ubuntu community manager;
• Joe Brockmeier, openSUSE community manager;
• Melinda Mettler, director, School of Advertising at the Academy of Art
  University; and

• Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO, O’Reilly Media, Inc.

openSUSE Build Service added to Linux Developer Network
On Wednesday, Novell and the Linux Foundation jointly announced that the openSUSE Build Service will be added to the Linux Developer Network (LDN). The openSUSE Build Service enables developers to package software for all major Linux distributions, and is used to provide transparent infrastructure for the creation of the entire openSUSE distribution. Additionally, the openSUSE Project, a Novell sponsored and community-supported open source project, announced a new release of the openSUSE Build Service with support for compiling for the ARM platform.

The Linux Foundation will be providing an interface to the openSUSE Build Service via the Linux Developer Network site, so that developers can create packages for all major Linux distributions via LDN. The build service enables developers to create packages for CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu, in addition to openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise. The addition of the openSUSE Build Service to the LDN compliments LDN’s popular AppChecker application, which enables developers to create portable applications for Linux. The build service is a perfect tool for LDN’s overall goal of assisting developers to deliver these portable applications.

The openSUSE project is also releasing the 1.6 version of the build service that includes support for compiling packages for the ARM platform, which is primarily used for embedded devices. The support for cross-architecture build support means that developers can create RPM or Debian packages for openSUSE, Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora. This work has been contributed by 5e DataSoft GmbH, working as part of the openSUSE community to add support for embedded devices based on ARM. 5e provides solutions based on openSUSE.

The latest release of the build service also includes support for building openSUSE appliances, live CDs, installable USB images, Xen images and VMware images. Developers can now create their own custom openSUSE distribution using the build service.

Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier, openSUSE community manager, said, “This is the culmination of years of work by the openSUSE Project. The openSUSE Build Service has always been intended as a tool that would accelerate the general adoption of Linux. It’s gratifying to see the build service becoming part of the Linux Developer Network and being embraced by the larger community.”

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.

Is Microsoft suit against TomTom first shot in Linux war?

Is Microsoft’s suit filed against GPS device maker TomTom the first shot in a larger Linux war? That was the question being asked yesterday after news spread that Microsoft had filed a patent-infringement suit in US District Court for the Western District of Washington against TomTom NV and Tom Tom Inc. The Linux community went into a tizzy in 2007 over Microsoft’s patent tirade, which indicated that open source software violated 235 of the company’s patents. At the time, experts explained that this move by Microsoft could just be some arm twisting to create more Novell-like deals. Yesterday’s announcement reignited some of that concern, but left some scratching their heads after what appeared to be a series of recent moves by Microsoft to work with the open-source community. These include last week’s announcement of a Microsoft interoperability agreement with Red Hat, sans patent pledges.

So what gives? According to Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft’s corporate vice president deputy general counsel for intellectual property, this case is not about open-source, specifically. In an interview with Todd Bishop at TechFlash, he explained:

… open-source software is not the focal point of this action. The case against TomTom involves infringement of Microsoft patents by TomTom devices that employ both proprietary and open-source, and as I said, out of the eight patents, five of them relate to proprietary software infringement.

Some cool-headed folks within the Linux community also spoke out yesterday, urging others to “calm down.” One of these was the executive director of the Linux Foundation, Jim Zemlin, who posted a blog post that began with just that phrase. Other open-source leaders were leery, as was indicated in a CNET news piece on the suit.

It’s too early to tell, but from what I have seen, all the Linux community can do is watch and learn, and as Zemlin says, “hope for the best, and prepare for the worst.”

Red Hat’s virtualization suite based on KVM

Red Hat has announced their virtualization strategy for 2009, kicking off another week with a webcast and press releases on some pretty big changes for the market. Red Hat shared that these changes were in response to market demands for virtualization. Navin Thadani, senior director of virtualization business at Red Hat shared that the big three obstacles for virtualization are cost, performance, security and scalability, and that the company’s strategy aims to help customers overcome these.

The company’s virtualization products (launching in the next three to 18 months) include:

• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers
• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops
• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor
• RHEL 5.4
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform

The biggest change is a shift to using the kernel virtual machine (KVM) hypervisor, and shifting away from Citrix’s XenServer. This move is the next logical step, following Red Hat’s acquisition of Qumranet in September 2008. Qumranet came with virtualization solutions, including its KVM platform and SolidICE offering, a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

In the company’s webcast, the question was asked “Why does the industry need another hypervisor?” Despite the fact that is amused some in the IT world, Thadani coolly stated that while Xen was the best hypervisor on the market in 2007 when RHEL 5 was released, “the KVM hypervisor has demonstrated that it offers superior capabilities… so it will be the strategic direction for the future development of our virtualization product portfolio.” He also explained that Red Hat will continue to support Xen until 2014.

Thandani said that by choosing KVM, performance woes would be resolved, citing up to 98% bare-metal performance. He highlighted that KVM, as part of the Linux kernel, takes advantage of the development work that has gone into Linux, including the hardening effort. Additionally, Red Hat and other developers have worked with the government on SELinux, a built-in Linux security component missing from other hypervisors in the marketplace.

Current virtual machine (VM) deployments max out in the 1,000s of machines, and thus they are unable to meet current business needs for more complex operations. Thadani shared that Red Hat’s Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers is designed for large-scale systems management, and is capable of scaling to thousands of hosts with Red Hat’s new search-driven user interface, which allows administrators to easily manage a large number of machines, scaling up to the tens of thousands of VMs. High-performance virtualized machines is the area that Red Hat is positioning itself to lead in, according to Thadani.

The stand-alone Red Hat Virtualization Manager for Servers is designed to be implemented with shops less familiar with enterprise Linux. According to the company, it is:

A new, richly featured virtualization management solution for servers that will be the first open source product in the industry to allow fully integrated management across virtual servers and virtual desktops, featuring Live Migration, High Availability, System Scheduler, Power Manager, Image manager, Snapshots, thin provisioning, monitoring, and reporting.

Thadani explained the difference between the stand-alone and integrated virtualization management offerings, equating them to the difference between a point-and-shoot camera and a SLR camera.

“From the stand-alone standpoint, we’ve designed it to be easy-to-use and easy to deploy,” says Thadani. “It is for enterprises without a lot of Linux experience, and we’ve made it easy to use. It’s a new market for Red Hat.”

To sum it all up, Red Hat is harnessing the power and current buzz in caused by virtualization technology and taking advantage of the current economic climate to move into new markets. No pricing has yet been released for the products, but it’s open source.