Today's IT organizations have recognized the power of virtualization to improve service delivery while also reducing costs. Once relegated to the lab, virtualization now plays key roles across the IT organization. Companies are increasingly moving business-critical workloads onto virtualized infrastructures, with many organizations now running, or planning to run, more than 80 percent of their computing on virtualized platforms. The next step for these organizations is to realize the promised benefits of virtualization - agility and lower costs - and to grow its footprint. Virtualization can also lay the groundwork for a move to the cloud. A New Level of Freedom While virtualization completely changes the realized capacity of your physical resources, it does not change the functionality of the virtualized systems. Virtualization cuts your tight dependence on hardware... (more)

EC2 Boys Pitch in on OpenStack

At the OpenStack Design Summit & Conference this week in California, Nimbula, the cloud operating system company, signed up to be part of the OpenStack community to improve the OpenStack code base. It will also incorporate OpenStack services in future Nimbula Director releases. Nimbula Director, its flagship product, lets enterprises and service providers build large-scale, fully functional infrastructure services from bare metal in a matter of hours. Its customers include the Russian Internet company Yandex and the US government service provider, Solers. (That drip you hear is evidently the Cold War melting.) The widgetry is supposed to be differentiated by its high level of self-service, automation, application orchestration features and ease of use. It's cast as a one-stop virtual data center management solution that isolates customers from the operational and... (more)

Corporate Linux

If you think Linux is the choice of geeks only, think again. Many of the large software vendors are now shipping Linux versions of their software. In this article I'll take you through some of these product offerings. Be prepared, though: if you're new to this Linux world you're going to find some interesting facts. The majority of vendors are bringing their wares to this new and exciting platform. Hardware Before you can begin to use Linux, you'll need to find a platform on which to run the beast. Contrary to popular belief, you're no longer restricted to the Intel-PC platform. Yes, Linux runs largely on a PC platform, but many other hardware manufacturers have recently been helping the Linux revolution come to their doorstep. If you have a Sun UltraSPARC, you'll be able to run Linux on it. Although Sun Microsystems doesn't support Linux directly, it did help the tea... (more)

Just Add Linux

Open source software combined with commercial licensed software has become a market reality as open source technologies, like Linux and Apache, which are already tremendous market successes, are combined into business models by vendors who want to win in the marketplace. It's happening today and will continue to flourish. Here's why: Linux Market Penetration - Already a solid platform for servers and growing fast. To make a change, the market needs a catalyst - and that's Linux. The impact that Linux is having in the market is significant. According to analyst firm IDC, Linux is the fastest growing server operating system in the market, and second in volume only to Windows NT/2000 through 2005. With the projected growth of Linux on the server, spurred on by killer-apps like Apache and Samba, a market opportunity is born. The industry is now taking the next step to d... (more)

Linux Firewalls…and their advantages over Windows

With all of this talk about firewalls, many people are asking "what are the advantages of Linux firewalls over firewalls running on Windows?" In this article, I hope to address this question from several different angles. First, is Linux more secure than Windows as a firewall platform? Second, what problems do Linux firewalls manage to avoid which plague Windows firewalls? Third, why do organizations use Windows firewalls at all? On the way, I'll introduce Bastille Linux, a popular security project that includes a fairly powerful free firewall. The most obvious reason that you should put your firewall on a Linux or Unix platform is that the alternative, Windows, has shown itself to be rather insecure. MicroSoft doesn't appear to care one bit about security, as incident after incident has shown in the past few years. Between the Melissa, LoveLetter, Code Red and Nim... (more)

Caldera Morphs into the SCO Group

BREAKING NEWS (Monday, August 26, 2002) - Caldera International Inc, one of the four main Linux commercializers, has apparently woken up to the fact that most of its money is coming from the Unix operating systems that it bought from the old Santa Cruz Operation and so, in recognition, it's going to change its name to the SCO Group. The announcement is supposed to come later today at what used to be SCO Forum, but is now the GeoForum. And the festivities aren't being held in Santa Cruz anymore like they used to when SCO ran it; they're meeting in tacky, tawdry, fun-loving Las Vegas. Something like 90% of the $71 million in revenues that Caldera has recognized in the last four quarters, not including the quarter it'll post on Wednesday, were reportedly derived from Unix. In the same four quarters, Red Hat, the Linux market leader, which doesn't sell Unix, has done $7... (more)

Sun Drops Below Three Bucks

Sun's stock spent the week repeatedly diving below an ignominious $3. It closed Thursday at $2.71, a low point it hasn't seen in years. What made it go down and stay down yesterday was a Bank of America appraisal that said there was no near-term upside. Starts making one wonder what kind of job security Sun CEO Scott McNealy thinks he's got. He's the longest-serving CEO in high tech. ... (more)

Grand Schemes, Yes, But How to Pay for Them

So now that the Linux Standard Base 1.2 and Lil8nux specs are finished, the Free Standards Group (FSG) decided to ask people what was missing and what else they should do. Well. The suggestions have reportedly come gushing in... along with indications that a lot more companies than are on the FSG's member roster are making Linux part of their business strategy. Anyway, this has left the Free Standards Group with the dilemma of how pay for all the work people want under the current budget - and budgets of course have long since stopped being infinitely expandable, especially for consortia. So to forestall having to put the begging bowl out, Scott McNeil, the head of the Free Standards Group, took himself down to friendly VC to seek his advise and the two of them decided McNeil should try and put the arm on foundations. See, it can be argued that Linux - and particula... (more)

Intel Loses Itanium Infringement Case to Intergraph

Intergraph Thursday won the patent infringement case it brought against Intel charging that Intel's precious 64-bit Itanium chip, so long in the making, treads on two of its parallel instruction computing patents. The decision puts Intel at risk of having to cough up $150 million to pay Intergraph in damages. The two cut a deal back in April capping Intel's liabilities. Intel had already paid Intergraph $300 million in damages stemming from another suit charging that the Pentium trifled with Intergraph's Clipper IP. Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said Thursday night that, pending a look-see at what Intergraph turns into the judge by way of a draft ruling in 10 days, Intel was going to shoot the works and gamble on an appeal. If Intel wins on appeal, according the April deal, it doesn't have to pay Intergraph anything. If it loses, it's got to ante up another $100 milli... (more)

Ximian Lays Out the Red Carpet

So now Ximian is finally in the Red Carpet Enterprise business hoping companies will use its widgetry to automatically update groups of systems on demand or on preset schedules with the latest versions of custom software, Ximian stuff, Linux distros or other third-party software, all of which, it says, change pretty frequently in Linux. It says companies can bring the solution in-house behind their firewalls. It dropped the name of Amerada Hess as a customer. It's charging a flat $2,500 for access to its Red Carpet server, $200 for each customer server being updated or "managed" and $60 per system per year for the actual updates. Maureen O'Gara's LinuxGram is published weekly by G2 Computer Intelligence Inc. and distributed by Linux Business Week Copyright 2002 G2 Computer Intelligence. ... (more)

HP Claims To Be Linux' Big Kahuna

Hewlett-Packard claims to be the largest Linux vendor having moved $2 billion worth of gear. Gee just when Dell has been waving around those IDC figures that give it the lead in deploying Intel-based Linux technical clusters in the first half. Dell just knocked off a University of Utah compute cluster made up of 128 dual-Xeon PowerEdge 2650 servers running Red Hat. Be that as it may but Mary McDowell, the head of HP's Intel server unit, also claims she hasn't lost any direct business because of the merger and the death of the HP-branded NetServer line. ... (more)