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Market Roundup August 18, 2006 Virtualization and Open Source Advances at LinuxWorld |
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This week at Linuxworld
in San Francisco, Lenovo and Novell announced the first Linux-based ThinkPad
mobile workstations, which will run Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10
(SLED 10). The Thinkpad T60p laptops are based on Intel Centrino Duo mobile
technology and are the result of a two-year research and development effort
between Lenovo, Intel, and Novell. The systems are not targeted at consumers
nor even at hardcore Linux users; they have been
designed specifically for electronic engineers engaged in integrated circuit
and board-level design who use numeric intensive computer-aided design (CAD) or
electronic design automation (EDS) applications in a mobile environment. Enterprise
customers will give configuration preferences and software requirements to
Novell, which will build a custom version of SLED 10. Novell will send the
operating system to Lenovo which will install it and any other software
required onto the laptops and test them to make sure
the system works with all the software installed. Lenovo is currently
certifying engineering design applications from companies including Cadence,
Synopsys, and Mentor Graphics. Novell is now investigating other industries
with heavy Linux usage such as automakers and financial services for future
solutions opportunities.
Until now, to install
Linux on a notebook, the user had to purchase a laptop with Microsoft
installed, uninstall Microsoft, and then install the preferred Linux
distribution. One of the things Lenovo has offered mainstream users is the
ability to purchase the T60p laptops with empty hard drives and the ability to
purchase support for SLED 10 from Novell for $50 a year. This allows mainstream
users a chance to get Linux desktops without having to pay Microsoft, and it
allows Lenovo to offer maximum flexibility to customers with minimal risk to
themselves. Because the Linux market is fragmented by geography and industry,
it is difficult for hardware vendors to select a distribution on which to standardize.
It’s also difficult to justify the expense of taking on another operating
system if the market share numbers do not easily pan out, which Linux on
workstations and desktops has yet to do. Because Intel has helped in
development and is one of the key initial customers for this project, Lenovo
and Novell can treat this as a pilot program that will help them develop
products designed for target markets. A not insignificant portion of the
portable market was once handled this way until vendors went to mass-market
portables. It may be that for Linux, this model of customized systems will
become the predominant model with vendors providing operating systems
integrated with applications to markets with large enough purchase volumes.
For design engineers, this announcement provides a couple of new opportunities. First, it brings much of the power of workstations to the mobile environment, allowing designers to unchain themselves from desktop systems. On the other hand, it also allows them to have one system for both design applications and for normal office tasks such as email and other corporate applications. These new laptops are designed to be slim but powerful portable workstations that engineers can use in multiple environments. If Lenovo and Novell can get this right and Intel can exploit the capabilities these systems offer, then the success can be replicated in more industries as more user groups begin to exploit the benefits of customized systems for their application environments.
Virtualization and Open Source Advances at LinuxWorld
“Virtualization” and “Open
Source” are two of the hottest terms in the IT lexicon today. At the LinuxWorld
conference held this week in San Francisco there were significant developments
on both of these areas. At the show the OpenVZ project released its operating
system-level server virtualization software in the form of a kernel build for
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (RHEL4). The OpenVZ project supplies software built
on Linux that permits isolated, secure virtual environments to be created on a
single physical server. The software now allows OpenVZ environments to be
called by designated name rather than by numeric ID and, more importantly, it
is now possible to set the number of processors available to specific virtual
environments allowing for more granular performance tuning. In addition OpenVZ
now includes support for Virtual Ethernet devices allowing network device
creation inside the environment. The software now supplies Checkpointing and live migration capabilities permitting virtual environments
to be stored on disk and restored to another physical server.
Also at LinuxWorld,
SWsoft announced its plans for the future development of its Virtuozzo
operating system-level virtualization software. Chief among these is that all
future releases of SWsoft’s Virtuozzo management solutions will include support
for virtualization tools supplied by other vendors. The idea is to allow data
center managers to administer various virtualization technologies from a single
management tool. Later this year the company plans to add support for VMware
virtual machine environments and will then add support for Xen and other
technologies soon thereafter.
The development of the
OpenVZ project is indicative of the fact that there is continuing demand for
open source solutions to deliver mainstream IT capabilities. Both of these
announcements show that virtualization is now moving into real world usage and
out of the test/trial arena. There is no doubt that virtualized environments
offer many advantages to organizations, not least of which is the ability to
vastly increase the typical utilization rates previously achieved on Intel
servers with appreciable net benefits in terms of lowering cost of ownership
and delivering more highly available business systems.
However, “virtualization” is not a simple one-step project. To achieve maximum benefits the routine administration of virtualized environments must be well managed, and it is here that the development of tools such as SWsoft’s Virtuozzo is important. The demands placed on the workloads of IT administrators are not likely to decrease anytime soon and good management tools are an essential requirement. With Virtual machines moving into everyday use there is a profound need to administer them effectively from a single console if system performance and security are to be maintained and if management costs are not to escalate rapidly.
IBM and Open Source beyond Linux
At LinuxWorld this week
IBM announced its road map and blueprint to advance key developments in Linux
and Open Source business models. Scott Handy, Vice President Linux and Open
Source, IBM, revealed eight open source initiatives beyond Linux that are
targeted to help accelerate the adoption of open standards and extending
existing product lines in order to reach new potential customers. At the same
time IBM announced new work that it is undertaking with the open source community
to improve the development of general Linux kernel functionality, expanding its
Linux focus around virtualization and Cell processor technologies. In addition
IBM will work with the open source communities to extend Security-Enhanced
Linux and security. Exploiting its extensive experience in with Linux, Eclipse,
and Apache, IBM plans to utilize open source business models and a new
collaborative development blueprint to target eight open source business
opportunity areas beyond Linux. The eight new opportunities include:
▫ Client
Side Middleware supporting the Eclipse Rich Client project for hosting
cross-platform applications.
▫ Development
Tools built on Eclipse.
▫ Web
Application Servers based on Apache open source projects such as Geronimo.
▫ Data
Servers building on the open source Apache Derby and no-license fee IBM DB2
Express-C.
▫ Systems
Management, including the open source Aperi storage project.
▫ Open
Hardware Architectures promoting community driven collaborative innovation with
Power.Org and Blade.Org.
▫ Grid
Computing with expanded support for Open Grid Services
Architecture and the Globus Alliance.
▫ IBM
Research/Business Consulting and Technology Services enabling customers to
innovate with open source solutions.
These announcements should
help promote the fact that Open Source encompasses more than just the Linux
operating system. Open Source is in many respects much more a philosophy than a
product or range of solutions. It is interesting to see that the areas being
addressed here cover many of the core IT areas that provide fundamental support
to business operations and demonstrates how broad is the
scope of open source developments efforts.
It is equally important to recognize that IBM is also working with the open source communities to help define and develop business models that work with open source solutions. This is an area in which there is still considerable latitude for innovation. For Open Source to thrive to the fullest it is essential that economically sound and sustainable communities develop, and these must to be based not just around open source technologies but around acceptable open source-compatible business models. IBM has been one of the major supporters of open source and it is good to see the company taking efforts to ensure that as wide an audience as possible understands the full potential of “Open Source.” It is time for the Open-Source-equals-Linux misconception to fade away.
Topio and Network Appliance Data Combine Solutions
Topio, Inc. recently
announced the integration of its Data Protection Suite (TDPS) 3.0 with Network
Appliance Data’s ONTAP 7G and FlexClone. The combination of the two choices is intended
to offer advanced functions for data management. Those functions include
non-disruptive, continuous data replication and on-demand cloning for
production support applications such as development and testing, reporting,
data analysis, point-in-time recovery, or archiving. The stated goal of the new
solution is to enable continuous replication from any production storage to
NetApp storage for SAN or IP SAN, thus eliminating application disruption
during the copy process and allowing customers to avoid duplicating production
storage in the production support environment, an occurrence that is admittedly
expensive. In the production support environment, the combined solution should
maintain a current, 100% consistent data image, while at the same time
leveraging NetApp Data ONTAP to deliver instantaneous cloning of data sets; all
this while consuming virtually no incremental storage. Topio and Network
Appliance Data decided to utilize a point-and-click interface so that customers
can have a single point of control to manage replication and clone creation and
retention for up to 256 clones per NetApp system. These capabilities’ stated
goals are to significantly reduce capacity requirements while at the same time
removing the operational barriers to delivering on-demand copies of
always-current data.
Data that is virtually
inaccessible is virtually useless. All companies need to access their archives
at some time or other, so being able to do so quickly and easily cuts down on the frustration and labor hours of the people
who have to retrieve it. However, for most SMBs, unless they are highly
data-centric, Topio and Network Appliance Data’s solution most likely would be
overkill. Large-scale businesses are probably the target audience, and they may
just like what they see here. More efficiency means less overhead, and the same
bit of data being stored in at least two different places is admittedly highly
inefficient. If the Topio and NAD solution lives up to its promises, it will
likely be a cost-effective solution, and one that is likely to be implemented
by enterprises of all ilks.
The world of data storage may not be glamorous, but it is vitally necessary, and thanks to the attention it is receiving from today’s hot shot programmers, some of the world’s cutting edge technology can be found in the data storage arena. It’s a quiet but impressive technological growth area. Searchable databases are the very least that a business needs to stay competitive, no matter the size of the business. The days of a simple tape backup are most likely soon to be long gone, and are probably going to stay gone. We might all count ourselves lucky in the fact that “reverse progress” just doesn’t happen. The cutting-edge data storage solutions of today will in all probability become available to the SMB of tomorrow. We are looking forward to it.