Maybe it was the fact that ex-Sun COO Ed Zander finally got himself a real job running Motorola that inspired Sun co-founder, inventor of the workstation and serial entrepreneur Andy Bechtolsheim to throw in the towel at Cisco, where he's been holed up as general manager of its gigabit switching business since Cisco bought Andy's Granite Systems for $220 million and light out with a new start-up he won't talk about. There's speculation that what he's up to involves the stealth mode Kealia Inc in Palo Alto, which he's funding and which is supposedly headed towards some kind of big fat distributed video server and storage. Even at Cisco Andy was reportedly into this convergence thing of entertainment meets the Internet and how to protect copyrights. Andy, by the way, funded the German company that wrote StarOffice until Sun rode to his rescue and bought him out from u... (more)

Red Flag & Miracle Linux Buddy Up

China's Red Flag Software and Tokyo-based Oracle-majority-owned Miracle Linux have formed a joint venture to create a unified Linux platform for Asia that would harry Microsoft at least on the server side. At least that's what they hope. They even have desktop aspirations. Miracle is going to think about distributing Red Flag's desktop Linux in Japan. They're calling the system Asianux and said it should be ready by May, according to the AP. If nothing else, they'll get interoperability out of the exercise by adopting a common kernel. They'll have a joint support center at Oracle's Beijing facility. Back in September, South Korea, China and Japan signed a pact to develop and cultivate open source non-Windows systems. ... (more)

Novell Spent $250m to Get $40m

The smart money at Prudential has noticed that Novell spent $250 million to buy SUSE and Ximian and acquire roughly $40 million in Linux revenues, or less than 5% of Novell's total revenue stream, to help it rejuvenate a billion-dollar revenue base that's been stagnate for the last five years. Pru says, "Integration and execution issues likely present formidable challenges." Still, the brokerage, which just initiated coverage of Novell, thinks Novell might significantly improve its financial prospects over the next two years from these two small but strategic moves. ... (more)

Amazon CTO to Keynote at SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Conference & Expo

SYS-CON Events announced today that Amazon CTO Dr. Werner Vogels will deliver the opening keynote at SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Conference & Expo (www.cloudcomputingexpo.com), which will take place November 19-21, at the Fairmont Hotel at the heart of Silicon Valley, in San Jose, California. The first International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo will be colocated with the 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo (www.virtualizationconference.com).. Building the right infrastructure that can scale up or down at a moment's notice can be a complicated and expensive task, but it's essential in today's business landscape. This applies to an enterprise trying to cut-costs, a young business unexpectedly saturated with customer demand, or a start-up looking to launch. There are many challenges when building a reliable, flexible architecture that can manage unpre... (more)

Oracle+MySQL Opponents Take to the Barricades

MySQL Journal on Ulitzer Monty Widenius, the creator of the MySQL open source database – which is apparently all that stands between Oracle and its acquisition of Sun – thinks that Oracle shouldn’t have his baby and that the European Commission – whose investigation into MySQL has put the Oracle-Sun merger in limbo – should force Oracle to spit it out to another company. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, a guy with a collector’s temperament not given to letting things that belong to him go, has said he wants to keep MySQL and has claimed to be watching Sun’s revenue plunge by $100 million a month while he waits for the EC to finish its probe, a exercise that could take well into January. MySQL isn’t supposed to be why Larry shocked everybody and offered $7.4 billion for poor down-on-its-heels Sun back on April 20. Sticking it to IBM was probably something he relished and wi... (more)

Oracle Claims Victory Over EC; Says Sun Will Sell Clouds

Oracle Keynote at Cloud Expo Cloud Computing Expo - Oracle expects the European Commission to wave its acquisition of Sun through next month MySQL and all without any annoying conditions. Oracle president Safra Catz, who’s been wrestling with the EC, said so when the company posted its fiscal second-quarter results Thursday, another reason Oracle’s going to have a Merry Christmas. Catz took a bunch of Oracle users to an EC hearing a week ago to buttress the company’s claims that the EC had put words in users’ mouths to support the theory of harm it manufactured to try to stop Oracle from getting MySQL. Oracle Named Exclusive Diamond Sponsor of Cloud Expo 2010 The meeting was backed by a write-in campaign from hundreds of users as well as a letter from the US Senate and a public statement from the Justice Department. A grateful Catz said, “I want to thank all of our... (more)

OpenNebula 2010: A Year of Innovation in Cloud Computing

This year has seen some great progress for the OpenNebula project, with the release of the most advanced and flexible enterprise-ready cloud management tool, and the continued growth of an active and engaged open-source community. As 2010 draws to and end, we'd like to review what this year has meant for the OpenNebula project and give you a peek at what you can expect from us in 2011. Orion Release After a first Beta release in July, the stable version of OpenNebula 2.0 was available for download in October. OpenNebula 2.0 marked the end of a large and laborious release cycle and an important milestone for the project in terms of functionality, maturity and community engagement. Besides many exciting new features for your Cloud and an improved scalability and robustness, this release also marked the start of a new add-on section for high-quality, third-party open-... (more)

Understanding Hyper-V Replica

Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Role introduces a new capability, Hyper-V Replica, as a built-in replication mechanism at a virtual machine (VM) level. Hyper-V Replica can asynchronously replicate a selected VM running at a primary site to a designated replica site across LAN/WAN. Here both a primary site and a replica site are Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V hosts where a primary site runs production or the so-called primary VMs, while a replica site is standing by with replicated VMs off and to be brought online, should the primary site experiences a planned or unplanned VM outage. Hyper-V Replica requires neither shared storage, nor a specific storage hardware. Once an initial copy is replicated to a replica site and replication is ongoing, Hyper-V Replica will replicate only the changes of a configured primary VM, i.e. the deltas, asynchronously. The following schematic... (more)

What Independence in the Cloud Looks Like

Happy July 4th everybody! In celebration of our Day of Independence, Gathering Clouds thought we would explore what it takes to gain vendor freedom in the cloud context. Vendor lock-in is a much discussed issue in the cloud. But on some level, the choices your company makes can determine the degree of lock-in you either exist in or feel on a day-to-day basis. Freedom in the cloud has some costs associated with it, though different costs than freedom overall... There’s a strategic imperative around be agile in your cloud vendor relationships. Lock-in can be detrimental, especially when you reach the point that you do need to transition out of a certain cloud, due to scale or other requirements. Perhaps your company has reached the scale where buying hardware and depreciating the costs are a smarter decision compared to continuing to rent infrastructure through AWS. ... (more)

With Three Industry Firsts, New Digi Core Module Speeds Development of Low Power Wireless Multimedia Devices

Digi International (NASDAQ: DGII) today introduced the ConnectCore™ Wi-MX51, the industry’s first core module designed specifically for low power, wireless multimedia applications. It is the industry’s first wireless enabled core module based on Freescale’s new high-performance i.MX51 processor, first to offer 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi and first to support Microsoft’s new Windows CE 6.0 R3. The ConnectCore Wi-MX51 enables wired and Wi-Fi networking for low power embedded applications with demanding performance requirements such as displays within medical devices, digital signage, security/access control devices, point-of-sale equipment and industrial automation technology. “The ConnectCore Wi-MX51 features three industry firsts that make it ideal for low power, wireless multimedia applications,” said Larry Kraft, senior vice president of global sales and marketing, Digi... (more)

Black Duck Software Expands Partner Program Services and Global Reach With New Strategic Alliances

WALTHAM, MA -- (Marketwire) -- 03/30/10 -- Black Duck Software, the leading global provider of products and services for accelerating software development through the managed use of open source software, today announced new training and certification programs for reseller and legal partners in addition to new strategic alliances extending Black Duck's reach into multiple markets, industries and regions across the globe. New partner services and alliances demonstrate the growth of the Black Duck Partner Program (www.blackducksoftware.com/partners) and support its mission to help businesses and organizations capitalize on the benefits of using open source software in multi-source development. Black Duck is actively building up its partnerships across all partner categories, including Global, Legal, Systems Integrator and Consultancy, Open Source Community, Resellers,... (more)