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Astaro releases installation and security products at LinuxWorld

Astaro Internet Security makes three releases this week at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo: one installation product and new versions of a security and a monitoring product.

Astaro Smart Installer is a blank thumb drive onto which administrators can download system images for individual Astaro products. A server will then recognize the drive as a CD with system images to integrate into a graphical user interface. The system saves time and money otherwise used ordering or creating CDs to upgrade new or broken applications.

Like version 1.3, Astaro Command Center version 1.4 details the health of each system device, enabling administrators to see which gateways require immediate attention or action (by threat level, license, or CPU/memory/disk usage).

Astaro 1.4 differs in that it divides security administration access into two levels: that for managers and that for unit managers. Managers can oversee system security from a centralized point and also grant or restrict each unit from access to data outside itself.

Changes to Astaro Security Gateway include improved email security and a switch in database management from MySQL to PostgreSQL.

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.

Zenoss debuts network monitoring tool at Red Hat Summit

Zenoss Inc., an Annapolis., Md.-based software company, has launched a new version of its open source networking monitoring and management tool at the fourth annual Red Hat Summit.

According to Zenoss, CEO Bill Karpovich, Zenoss Enterprise 2.2 is an open source cross-platform monitoring tool for networks, servers and applications. The 3-year-old company introduced its first free version in 2006, followed by an enterprise version with support and certification in 2007. The basic application performs configuration modeling, performance management and event management, including alerts and reporting.

With more than 4,000 users, he said, Zenoss is currently the most downloaded open source product and is created by SourceForge.

The new Zenoss Enterprise 2.2 version has a distributed architecture, making it much faster to deploy remotely over large networks. Previously, administrators had to configure the application manually on each remote collector that in turn controls many servers or network devices. Now, however, Zenoss Enterprise can be delivered to controllers automatically, Karpovich said.

In addition, Enterprise 2.2 includes an application program interface called WMI or Windows Management Instrumentation that enables Zenoss to monitor Windows servers as well as Linux machines, he said.

The new version also offers high availability and includes a series of new reports for turnkey monitoring, he said.

Zenoss Enterprise’s competitive differentiator is its power, affordable price, easy deployment and flexibility, Karpovich said. It runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise, Ubuntu and as a virtual appliance inside VMware.

To date, Zenoss Enterprise has more than 100 paying subscribers. The cost for support ranges from $100 to $140 per managed resource per year, depending on the service level.

Going virtual with Windows apps on Novell’s SUSE

Novell’s Service Pack 2 for SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 released yesterday has one especially hot item in its bag of assorted goodies: the Xen 3.2 virtualization engine. Since both SUSE as well as Windows Server 2003 and 2008 run natively (and fully supported by Microsoft) on Xen 3.2, Novell customers can run both SUSE and Windows virtual guests on the platform with no loss in performance — or so Novell promises.

Bernard Golden, a Linux author and the CEO of Navica Inc. consulting, said cross-platform virtualization could be convenient for a Novell shop that wants to test or deploy a Windows application virtually on SUSE machines prior to a full-scale rollout without tying up a lot of Windows servers.

“The key thing is to get Windows running a virtual machine on a hypervisor without an emulator,” Golden said. “If you can get rid of the [emulator] software layer, you’ll improve performance a lot.”

But live migration — the ability to move workloads from one server to another to balance loads or provide backup for one another — is even more important. And the ability to move computer images from one machine to another in a second or less without taking the server offline is critical, he said.

And now, with both Windows and SUSE fully supported on the Xen 3.2 hypervisor, users can test or deploy Windows applications — or move workloads around — on a virtualized server without tying up an entire machine to do so, Golden said. And by testing, data centers can prevent deployment conflicts with other functions, such as identity management, he said.

“It gives data centers a lot of flexibility to be able to do this without operating directly on the hardware,” Golden said. And with Windows’ dominance of application market, being able to test Windows apps virtually on Novell machines is pretty darned slick.

Open source events are popping up in Beantown

It must be the warmer weather. Ubuntu happenings are springing up everywhere in Boston. Just five days after Boston fans gathered at an upscale downtown nightspot to celebrate the release of Hardy Heron, Ubuntu’s latest operating system, a local school technologist kicked off a new organization to promote open source software in education.

Michael Selva, who works at Saint Stephen’s Armenian Elementary School in Watertown, Mass., attracted some 25 teachers and technologists to the kickoff event for a new group called Moving to Open Source Software in Schools, or MOSSIG, drawing attendees from many nearby communities and as far away as New Hampshire and Maine.

An offshoot of Massachusetts Computer Using Educators (MassCUE), the new group aims to wean educators from proprietary software. In November 2006, Selva himself became an advocate of open source after finding Saint Stephens’ computer hardware and software out of date and too expensive to replace. Converting a Dell server and 11 workstations to Kubuntu, a version of Ubuntu, and obtaining open source software for work and education proved just the ticket, he said.

Selva plans to follow up with working meetings on the first Tuesday of every month during the school year, starting at 7 p.m. May 6, at the school. He also plans an adult education program in open source for teachers and a hotline at mossig@googlegroups.com. He can be reached at (617) 605-7429 or  atms at saes.org.

VIPs’ drop-ins delight MySQL dinner guests

At the MySQL conference in Santa Clara, Calif., Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green, Sun’s senior vice president of software, dropped in unexpectedly in an informal dinner organized by the open source community and spent several hours chatting up the crowd.

Beyond the photo op and blogging opportunity, the visit was encouraging to the group, according to Zack Urlocker, Sun’s vice president of MySQL products. “It was a very nice touch, showing that they are actively listening to the community and understand its importance in the open source world,” he said.

Red Hat blog: Caffeine needed

Don’t read Red Hat’s latest blog on its desktop policy unless you’ve just chugged a few bottles of Red Bull. In a blog update on its desktop product direction, it says, ” We have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future.” I’ll bet I’m not the only caffeine-deprived reader who skipped — or might skip — right over that word, consumer. Then I scan down to the bold print which reads: ” our desktop product plans for 2008 and 2009 include …” and thinking, “Huh?” OK, so this is a reader error. Still …

Red Hat then lists three initiatives, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop, which, contrary to its name, is a niche product for specialzed uses in manufacturing and other verticals. Not what the term “enterprise” brings to mind at all. The other two are Fedora, the free, community-based desktop version, and, finally, we’re getting to the news here, the Red Hat Global Desktop (RHGD), a desktop project currently in development targeted to countries in Eastern Europe and Latin America that are severely undersupplied with computers.

Announced last June and stalled by marketing and assorted other issues, this project, which is still not a done deal. Companies often fall behind in their projects so that’s hardly a crime. But couldn’t Red Hat have simply blogged about the news: it’s late with the Global Desktop project, and be done with it instead of making readers embark on a verbal treasure hunt? And, by the way, mum’s the word on when this initiative is going to happen. It would be nice to know, after all that time wasted.

Novell BrainShare 2008 kickoff: New SUSE, new roadmap, new pals

SearchEnterpriseLinux.com expert Sander van Vugt blogs from Novell BrainShare in this post.

At the annual Novell BrainShare user conference that started in Salt Lake City today, Novell unveiled its roadmap and loaded the car with new friends. The roadmap includes a new strategy focused on agility, called Fossa, and a new release of SUSE: SUSE Linux Enterprise 11. Joining Novell for the trip will be new partners bearing products such as SAP, PlateSpin and Atos Origin.

Focussing on SLE 11, Novell’s CTO Jeff Jaffe talked about product features, but mostly about development plans. Novell wants to leverage the OpenSUSE network, communicating better with the open source comunity, an area where Novell hasn’t been particularly successful lately.

Another new development is the joint solutions that Novell is going to develop with PlateSpin. These solutions will add important features that are currently lacking, such as P2V and V2P in the Xen stack that is offered by SUSE Linux.

Also very important for Novell is that it has extended its partnership with ERP vendor SAP. According to SAP’s Pat Hume, SAP has chosen to work with Novell because it is the fastest growing enterprise-level Linux vendor.

With these developments, Novell is bolstering its position as the vendor in charge where open source software meets enterprise needs. I’ll be here all week reporting on developments.

BrainShare is being talked about elsewhere in the blogosphere. The VAR guy notes that the Microsoft-Novell partnership is a rancorous marriage, as Novell is still pursuing its anti-monopoly suit against Microsoft. Reporting from BrainShare on Sunday, March 16, blogger Richard Bliss saw some clamor around a CRM product, at least as much clamor as a small crowd could muster.

Linux growth tied to personnel issues

This post was written by Megan Santosus, SearchEnterpriseLinux.com feature writer.

Linux has outpaced Windows and Unix in corporate adoption rates, according to research firm IDC’s 2007 server market numbers. The pace of Linux’s future adoption could partly depend upon whether certain people choose early retirement, another researcher says.

According to IDC, Windows is still the dominant player, responsible for 36.6% of server revenues for the fourth quarter of 2007. (Quarterly Windows revenues totaled $5.7 billion—a new quarterly record.) Unix servers took in 33.3% of quarterly revenues. And Linux servers—which reached a milestone of $2 billion for a single quarter—made up 12.7% of revenues for the quarter.

While Linux still lags its rivals, it’s growing at the fastest clip. IDC pegged Linux year-over-year revenue growth from 2006 to 2007 at 11.6%. By comparison, Windows revenues grew 6.9%, and Unix a paltry 1.5%.

Richard Jones, vice president and service director for Data Center Strategies at IT research and advisory firm The Burton Group, sees a shift in sentiment among CIOs he talks to that mirrors what’s going on in the market. “CIOs that haven’t moved to Linux yet are planning to do so soon,” Jones said.

Certainly, Linux is gaining a track record for reliability, Jones said, and costs—at least for initial software licenses and maintenance—are lowest for Linux compared to Unix and Windows. And Jones cited Oracle Corp.’s decision to release its 11g database first on Linux as further evidence that the market is shifting irretrievably.

With all the momentum behind Linux, an interesting question emerges: Why isn’t every shop that is able from a workload standpoint to migrate to Linux doing so?

Jones however sees a good reason for the hesitancy: skills. Unix shops in particular remain set in their server ways. Most have veteran Unix experts running their IT systems. “Many shops today have Unix engineers and administrators,” he said. “Once those people start to retire in droves, that’s when many CIOs will make the move to Linux.”

It sounds downright bizarre to buck the trend toward running apps on commodity servers, especially considering that enterprise applications like Oracle and SAP run on commodity-based x86 boxes running Linux.

In this case, it’s not the technology after all. It’s the people.