LinuxWorld

Oct 10 2008   5:15PM GMT

LinuxWorld to OpenSource World: A move in the right direction?

Posted by: Pam Derringer
Linux, TechTarget Blogs, Linux blogs and news, Open source applications, LinuxWorld

Same time. Same place. New name. After a 20% drop in attendance last summer, LinuxWorld is ending its decade as an independent trade show and will re-emerge next year with a new name and a broadened focus as OpenSource World. Just like last year’s LinuxWorld, OpenSource World will take place in August in San Francisco’s Moscone Center.

The change mystifies this LinuxWorld 2008 attendee. Last summer’s event clearly drew disappointing crowds, with lots of excess aisle space on the show floor and plenty of last-minute seats at keynote lectures. Melinda Kendall, IDG World Expo’s vice president and general manager of OpenSource World, confirmed recently that attendance at the 2008 show was only 8,000, a decrease from the 10,000 drawn in previous years.

Representatives of two companies who exhibited at LinuxWorld in previous years but bowed out in 2008 said they stopped attending LinuxWorld because they felt they would be more successful at reaching their respective target audiences at other events.

“Linux is mainstream now and it no longer needs a special show,” said one Linux vendor who didn’t want to be quoted by name. “The show doesn’t generate much ROI. It’s more about students than business-to-business.”

Bob Williamson, senior vice president of product management at Menlo Park, Calif.-based SteelEye Technology Inc., which won in the Best of Show category in 2007, said SteelEye has better conversations with customers at shows like VMworld, the Red Hat Summit, Novell’s BrainShare or Oracle OpenWorld where customers go to find specialized knowledge about the products they implement.

“Over the years, LinuxWorld became less and less relevant to us,” Williamson said.

The change to OpenSource World “will water [the focus] even more, he said. “By trying to cast a wider and wider net, they’ll draw people who are less and less interested in the exhibitors, and it will be harder and harder to find people to have the right conversations.”

But Kendall says that petering excitement surrounding LinuxWorld is in fact a tribute to Linux’ success in becoming a mainstream computing platform. The way to restore the buzz and boost attendance is to broaden the scope and include the emerging open source mission-critical applications, which are still very much in the early-adopter stage, she said. The broadened focus also will attract some non-Linux open source vendors who didn’t attend LinuxWorld because of the event’s name, she added.

Kendall said she hadn’t yet won exhibitor commitments from big, non-Linux vendors like Sun Microsystems or Microsoft but has received supportive comments from companies like IBM.

“We’ll continue to be the largest Linux event in the world,” Kendall said. “But also the largest show for open source buyers and sellers, which may not have been clear before.”

Kendall may be right. But there’s a danger in running trade shows for trade shows’ sake. Just as there is a danger in creating technology for technology’s sake without first checking  with users. See file under Digital Equipment Corp.

I hope I’m wrong. But I have my doubts. This seems like a move in the wrong direction.

 

Aug 15 2008   7:46PM GMT

Ubuntu growing its ecosystem of apps, partners, Canonical says

Posted by: Pam Derringer
IBM, Linux, Ubuntu Linux, TechTarget Blogs, Linux blogs and news, Open source applications, LinuxWorld

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.

Aug 10 2008   1:30PM GMT

Reporter reflections on LinuxWorld 2008

Posted by: Pam Derringer
Linux, Ubuntu Linux, TechTarget Blogs, Linux blogs and news, Open source applications, LinuxWorld

The 11th annual LinuxWorld Conference & Expo at the Moscone Center in San Francisco has packed up and gone, but organizers did a lot this year to make it more informative, with special sessions such as the Executive Summit on innovative technologies and entertainment like the Golden Penguin Bowl geek challenge.

Other organizations joined in the fun, with Groundwork Open Source hosting a mascot American Idol-like contest between Tux the Penguin, Mozilla Firefox, Beastie the BSD Demon and GNU Gnu, each of whom appeared in costume to drum up support for their respective candidacies in the exhibit hall. As of late Thursday afternoon, Mozilla Firefox was the runaway winner with 49% of the votes. Beastie the BSD Daemon trailed in second with 31%; Tux the Penguin, 6.6% and GNU Gnu, 2%.

In addition, the Open Voting Consortium featured costumed singers luring attendees to participate in its mock presidential election between Barack Obama and John McCain on machines running Ubuntu. Obama was the big winner, tallying 545 votes to 135 for McCain. In other categories, Canonical Ltd. scored a big win for the top exhibit. The purpose of the exhibit was to showcase the use of Linux-run voting machines, which the group is promoting in California as a more secure operating system.

Open Voting Consortium booth at LinuxWorld 2008

The expo also enlisted attendees in an “Installfest” to fix discarded computers and install open source software. Installfest’s goal is 1,000 repaired computers for donation to local schools. The effort also will reduce the 300,000 pounds of electronic waste abandoned monthly at two county dumps, according to organizer James Burgett.

During the four-day event, the tables outside the exhibit hall with free Wi-Fi Internet access were quite popular, as well as the Dice booth which attracted crowds of job seekers. But Dice wasn’t the only one searching for those with Linux skills. I shared a lunch table with a Google recruiter who faced an uphill battle trying to convince a 30-something attendee that, as a Google employee, he would still have time for his family, despite Google’s apparently intense work environment.

The Dice booth at LinuxWorld

Later that evening having dinner at a local sports bar, I met a Dell recruiter who also was head-hunting for talent at LinuxWorld. The Dell rep was enthused about Dell’s acquisition last year of EqualLogic, a New Hampshire-based storage networking company, that offers an all-in-one-box server solution for small offices with no IT staff, similar to IBM’s just-announced Lotus Foundations product for a self-managing appliance server, also targeted at small and medium-sized business. Sounds like a trend worth watching.

As far as show attendance, while organizers won’t release the final numbers for months, it seems clear that attendance couldn’t possibly equal the past few years’ tallies of 10,000 each. There were too many empty seats at the keynotes and too much room to walk around on the show floor. Lower attendance was likely attributable to a combination of a slow economy and high airplane fares as well as the maturity of the market. Further Linux doesn’t have the cool factor it once did; it’s now mainstream and simply part of how we work and live. With the maturity of the market, there’s less of a gee-whiz factor that drives users to computing shows. The good news is that attendees tended to be higher level and in a position to make decisions. Just curious: how come Red Hat Inc. and Novell Inc. weren’t among the exhibitors?

Aug 6 2008   2:47PM GMT

Ganglia 3.1 enables custom cluster, grid monitoring

Posted by: Caroline Hunter
Linux, DataCenter, HPC, Clusters, grids and mainframes, LinuxWorld, Administration, interoperability and integration

Ganglia, community partner to GroundWork Open Source, releases cluster monitoring product Ganglia 3.1 at LinuxWorld Conference & Expo this week in San Francisco. Ganglia is a distributed monitoring system for high-performance computing systems such as clusters and grids. The central feature of Gangila 3.1 is that it allows administrators to create customized “metric modules.” Admins can create a module from metrics for CPU, network, disk and memory that they select à la carte, allowing for a tailored monitoring environment.

“I would hope that [Ganglia 3.1] changes business practices for the better, making clusters easier to use and more expandable,” said Ganglia developer Brad Nicholes. “We want to make sure that whoever needs to monitor data has the resources they need to do so.”

Previously, an administrator could create a metric module but could not integrate it into the Ganglia interface.Ganglia 3.1 allows an administrator to expand a cluster by adding custom metric modules on an as-needed basis. Ganglia 3.1 uses the round-robin scheduling algorithm, which enables admins to tailor the collected data to company’s needs.

Nicholes noted that it is important to upgrade all gmon agents, tools which allow a GUI to “talk” to the various components of a cluster, at the same time.

If you would like to use Ganglia with GroundWork Open Source’s GroundWork Monitor, GroundWork offers a Ganglia Integration Module that allows Monitor to provide multiple role status views, dashboards, reports, notifications and configuration tools.

Aug 1 2008   7:42PM GMT

Splunk highlights data management maturity at LinuxWorld

Posted by: Caroline Hunter
Linux, Database, DataManagement, Enterprise applications for Linux, Systems Management, Administration, interoperability and integration, LinuxWorld

Software company Splunk creates products that aid companies primarily in log file management - collecting information about the data in their systems and continuously reporting it back. At this year’s LinuxWorld Conference & Expo, Splunk will highlight several further-reaching data management products: Splunk for Virtual Server Management, Splunk for Change Management and Splunk for Server Management.

The products, in providing fuller access to information about what and how your system is doing, promise to make system management more practical and security maintenance more immediate.

The products being released this week at LinuxWorld integrate log file management with a variety of other tasks. They can simultaneously manage log files and collect and manage messages, traps and alerts as well as statistics from all system areas.

As one administrator commented on the blog of Splunk CEO Michael Baum, “Log file management is DEAD.” It is becoming just one side of the larger task of system management. For help on configuring Splunk, check out this tip.

Aug 22 2007   2:20PM GMT

LinuxWorld wrap-up: Demystifying data recovery

Posted by: admin
disaster recovery, LinuxWorld

This gem didn’t have a home on any of our sites, but I didn’t want the reporting to go to waste. So it’s going underground on the Enterprise Linux Log. On that note, enjoy some session coverage from LinuxWorld 2007!

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SAN FRANCISCO – Everyone in IT uses storage in their data center, therefore everyone will one day have to deal with that storage failing. It could happen at anytime.Even in the moments before your LinuxWorld presentation on demystifying data recovery.

That’s what happened to Chris Bross anyway, roughly five minutes before attendees starting filing into his session on “Demystifying Data Recovery” here at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo.

Bross is an enterprise recovery engineer with Novato, Calif.-based DriveSavers Data Recovery Inc., and the good news for his presentation was that he had brought along a backup USB thumb drive with a copy of his presentation. All too often however, Bross said IT managers and decision makers are not taking the steps necessary to secure and recover the data.

All storage fails eventually

“All storage is going to fail eventually. All hardware breaks. Are you prepared for the inevitable?” Bross said before conducting an informal poll about who had ever lost data.

A smattering of attendees, Bross included, raised their hand (In addition to losing a USB thumb drive, Bross would later admit that one of his two Ubuntu laptops failed during a shipping snafu).

But the informal poll belied a much bigger problem in data back up and recovery in today’s enterprise; one which Bross set out to diagnose and recover much as he and his staff have done hundreds of times back in Novato with hard disks damaged by fire, water and mechanical defects (the latter being demonstrated with a variety of drive-head-on-platter audio clips from real life recovery efforts at the DriveSavers clean room).

Disaster recovery: the numbers

“For all of the effort [systems administrators] put into assigning employees backup tasks, 60% of all corporate data today resides on unprotected PC desktops and laptops,” Bross said, citing industry research from Rochester, N.Y.-based Harris Research.

And when natural disasters strike – and they will, despite the disagreement over the disaster recovery between business executives and IT staffs — the track records of today’s data centers is poor.

According to a study from the University of Texas, U.S. small and medium-sized businesses have shown that when they lose data in a natural disaster, 50% never reopen and 90% are gone in two years. Bross said the hourly cost to “recreate” these battered data centers can run anywhere from $50,000 per hour to $2 million per job at large eCommerce sites.

The reality of reliability

Bross said common knowledge in data centers is that the mean time before failure (MTBF) – or “mean time to failure” – for a typical hard drive is between 500,000 to 1.5 million hours. In an ideal environment, the annual rate of failure of any given drive is .88%.

But two studies from Google Inc. and Carnegie Mellon disagree. In both studies, real world testing of drive reliability found the actual annual replacement rate was actually 3-8%. On top of that revelation was word that failure rates double after the first year of service. For drives older than one year, Bross gave simple advice: “If you experience a drive error of any kind, pull the drive. It’s better to be safe than sorry,” he said.

Those were just mechanical failures though; like natural disasters and virus corruption. Truth be told, studies have shown that user error is by far the biggest contributor to data loss. Fully 60% of all hardware failure is the result of the user, Bross said, which includes malicious/accidental deletion of code, incorrect RAID configuration, accidental reformatting and bad maintenance.

Data protection and the inevitable

Bross concluded his session with a number of tips and best practices for systems administers to use in specific situations.

Hurricanes and floods – “Remember if want to preserve data, you’ll want to make sure that the drive is kept wet,” Bross said. “Storage needs to remain wet. If it dries out, there’s lots of calcification and mineral deposits that can form and cause havoc.” Bross instructs all of his customers to keep wet drives submerged and cool.

Data has been damaged, now what? – Rule number one: Don’t panic. Evaluate the failure and check the status of you backup, Bross said. “Don’t run repair utilities on it. Don’t reformat the volume. Don’t restore backup to the drive in question. Don’t remove drives from a RAID system or rebuild it. Instead, cool heads will prevail and you should evaluate and check the backup drive first, he said.

RAID is not equal to backup! — RAID, by its definition, is a redundant array of disks. “The reality is that a RAID device is only part of the backup solution,” Bross said. “RAID is good for one thing and it’s not as the primary backup application–it’s fault tolerance,” he said.

DIY data recovery – Doing things on your own is good for corruption, deletion or logical corruption of volumes. However, Bross warned that this approach is bad for hardware damage or complex configurations.

Local service providers – This is a good option for transfers, but not for data recovery (this category also encompasses a local expert).

Professional data recovery services — For mission critical data where risk is not an option. Employ clean room facilities as required by drive manufacturers. Bross said that even in these pristine professional conditions “not every patient makes it though this ‘ER for hard drives’.”

Remote access services — Cannot be used with physical device failures. There is the potential risk to customer data that hardware or logical volumes could degrade during diagnosis. Potential benefits are a quick resolution and recovery of data. And there’s no need to ship hardware to lab, either.

Bross said users can avoid needing these data recovery strategies in the first place by making complete backups regularly. “Have a process and a schedule. Assign responsibility and create a chain of command,” he said. “All storage eventually fails. Run home and backup your data now. Be happy you did and sleep well tonight.”

Aug 15 2007   9:54AM GMT

How to expand Linux in two styles: Novell vs. Red Hat

Posted by: admin
Red Hat, Microsoft, SUSE/Novell, LinuxWorld

As a journalist, I get perturbed when I see talking heads on TV (on issues political, technological or otherwise) “attack the messenger” when the message they’re delivering isn’t something they agree with. The theory is, of course, that if you can discredit the person, then the public will not focus on the message — however legitimate it is to the conversation — and your position will win out.

I hate this. Reminds me of immature schoolyard antics from grade school. I know you are but what am I, etc. In the land of adults, which many of us presently inhabit I hope, I see no place for this kind of discourse. It leads to stagnation, and I’m fond of progression.

Today, I took another look at Ron Hovsepian’s keynote address from LinuxWorld last week, and his message of “expanding, extending, and enlarging” the Linux operating system. Was the message tainted a bit by the fact that Hovsepian is a businessman at the head of the number two commercial Linux distributor in the world? Sure it was, but there were points to be gleaned from his talk that I think the Linux community would be apt to mull over for a bit before they jump on the Microsoft hating bandwagon.

Red Hat’s Michael Evans, vice president of corporate development at the company, didn’t get that memo. Speaking to InfoWorld, Evans said he liked the idea but at the same time expressed doubts about the effort since Hovsepian was involved. “Personally, that he’s the guy that did the deal with Microsoft, I’m suspicious of things he says,” Evans told InfoWorld.

I’m not sure I agree. If this is true, shouldn’t we not also be suspicious of what Red Hat executives say, because they’re also trying to make a buck off of Linux? Maybe “paying a premium for Linux support” from Red Hat because it’s the best in town deserves a deeper look, eh, Oracle? Should we outright dismiss what Red Hat has to say about Oracle Linux whenever Oracle fires off a press release about another big name customer making the switch to that which Ellison has wrought? Obviously not. If we’re suspicious all the time, then we’re not doing work. We’re getting complacent — which was one of the pillars of Hovsepian’s keynote. Ironic, don’t ya think?

These personal attacks muddy the issue, which I am going to assume is exactly the point. They also do little to advance intelligent conversation (and this is where I’ll concede that my blogging may also fall into this category). Why is Red Hat attacking Novell so much these days anyway? Aren’t they currently kicking ass in the commercial Linux market? Last I checked it was bad business to even acknowledge the competition when you’re so far ahead in the standings.

Hovsepian’s keynote focused, as I said, on the expansion of Linux. He used phrases like “vendor neutral” to describe his ideas, and never once implied that Novell (or Microsoft) should be the one driving the ideas he put forth. Unlike many of the LinuxWorld keynotes last week, Novell’s was refreshingly lacking many of the self-aggrandizing remarks that plagued those of eBay and Amazon.com. Note to Amazon — we get it, you have a new SaaS initiative coming out, thanks for the advertisement for it in the middle of your keynote. Novell’s keynote did see a product pitch or two, as Hovsepian took some time in the middle there to gush about ZENWorks. It seemed out of place in a keynote full of general ideas about expanding Linux, but that doesn’t mean we should ax the entire speech en masse.

Aside from his moment of ZEN, Hovsepian seemed to be about promoting ways to take Linux past the enterprise success it’s enjoyed for the past five years or so. Linux is mission critical, sure, but there now exists the danger of complacency both with its developers and its corporate handlers.

Some points to address:

Today, if an ISV writes an application on Linux, it might run everywhere, and it might not. Even if it runs on multiple Linux distributions, the market desires that it be certified on multiple distributions. We need to work more on standardization. The Linux Standards Base is doing incredible work, but does anyone out there agree that there could is something more to be don? In a vendor neutral kind of way? Maybe you don’t agree with that. Why?

Sounds *somewhat* sane, right? Well it’s basically paraphrased from Jeff Jaffe’s blog over at Novell. So now it’s suddenly not worth pursuing or discussing at all?

Jaffe also calls for sacrifice, reducing fragmentation of Linux, and unification (standardization of ISV applications). But we should ignore them all because his company now has a newly created position for working with Microsoft? Maybe the LSB is doing great work, or maybe just good work. There’s now at least one major company out there that thinks more could be done with standards and certifications. Ignoring that opinion, and going along on the road to status quo feels like something to me. I can’t quite put my finger on it… oh wait, that’s right, it’s complacency.

Ultimately, we must remember that this was a keynote, meant to garner a few headlines and begin the brainstorming process–not solve any major problems. But to simply dismiss the message outright because you disagree with a company’s business plan seems kind of reckless to me. Don’t rest of your laurels just yet, Linux, there’s still much more to be done.

Aug 13 2007   11:28AM GMT

LinuxWorld 2007 decompression

Posted by: admin
Uncategorized, Andrew Kutz, Linux blogs and news, LinuxWorld, Administration, interoperability and integration

So another LinuxWorld Conference and Expo has come and gone — but what’s this?! Where’s the Linux?!

Sure, it was there in sessions on interoperability between Linux and Windows; and in Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian’s “can’t we all just get along” keynote; but overall this year was one to remember for all the things that weren’t 100% Linux-related.

Take the conference that happened concurrently with LinuxWorld, for example. The Next Generation Data Center conference was a treehugging lovefest with sessions devoted to “green computing” and power and cooling. Our brothers and sisters in arms over at SearchDataCenter.com had a field day talking with users and analyst sat the show about these and many other topics, including Site Editor Matt Stansberry. Matt flew down on a puddle jumper from Oregon to cover the show alongside myself and Sr. SearchEnterpriseLinux.com site editor Jan Stafford, and I’m happy to say he was able to basically commandeer our good friend Andy Kutz’s afternoon keynote on greening the data center. SearchDataCenter also managed to corner Andy after the session and get some thoughts up on YouTube, which was an interesting venture to say the least.

Then there was virtualization; a topic that dominated LinuxWorld’s of the past, sure, but seemed to really come a boil in San Francisco last week. At InternetNews.com, writer Sean Michael Kerner described it pretty well, leading off an article with, “If this week’s Linux World were to be summed up under a single theme, it would be penguins gone virtual.“

“Gone virtual” they most certainly did, with the virtualization track getting nice traffic from attendees and from Jan, who threw together a few cool videos on virtualization, Linux and everything else in between with her trusty (and inexpensive) Flip video recorder. A side note: That thing’s pretty good for YouTube quality video. One hour point and shoot recording time for $150? Yes please! /shameless promotion.

Bernard Golden, one of our expert contributors at both SEL and SearchServerVirtualization.com, penned a nice recap of the virtualization news from LinuxWorld that addressed the debate surrounding the Xen vs. KVM camps. Is fragmentation a good thing when we’re talking about virtualization technologies? Read Golden’s column and see if it answers your questions or creates new ones.

Of course, this is but a sampling of our LinuxWorld 2007 coverage. For more, I encourage you to head over to our LinuxWorld conference page and see what SEL, SSV and SearchDatacenter.com had to offer. The page is getting new content every day as we add some post-coverage content too, so check back often.

Aug 9 2007   1:32PM GMT

Accelerating the progress of Linux in the enterprise

Posted by: admin
videos, SUSE/Novell, LinuxWorld, Administration, interoperability and integration

In case you missed the Novell keynote with Ron Hovsepian, here’s a quick recap in video form. The theme? Accelerating the progress of Linux in the enterprise. You can catch our extended reporting on Hovsepian’s four vehicles for Linux acceleration over at SearchEnterpriseLinux.com

Aug 8 2007   5:34PM GMT

Live from LinuxWorld 2007 — the Bag of Swag!

Posted by: admin
videos, LinuxWorld, Linux humor

The grand SearchEnterpriseLinux.com video experiment continues… This time I play the straight man to SearchDataCenter.com Site Editor Matt Stansberry’s … well, you’ll see.

In this video Matt and I look at all the free junk we’ve accumulated this week at LinuxWorld. Some of it’s pretty cool, and the rest is what it is. I come off kind of bored I think, but believe me, I’m not. THIS is new media at its finest.

Fun fact: Matt and I saw Barry Bonds hit his homer last night live from a “Frank Sinatra” bar in downtown San Francisco. Not quite as cool as seeing it live, but then again we’re really not that cool to begin with.