Posted by lee on April 8, 2010
Right on cue, Red Hat announced they are shipping Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) version 5.5. As you’d expect, RHEL 5.5 adds the obligatory bug fixes but it’s also been re-tuned to handle extreme virtual workloads. The new release is available to Red Hat clients with current support contracts.
Benefits include performance improvements including smarter thread, memory and I/O optimisation. RHEL 5.5 supports new AMD, Intel and IBM processor families – taking advantge of their virtualisation-friendly silicon. The upgrade also adds support for non-uniform memory access (NUMA) and virtual guests can allocate up to 32 physical processor cores and 512 GB. That should ensure that heavy weight applications like SAP, BI and SOA run faster and more efficiently.
Those of us who run a lot of I/O intensive workloads now have Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV), allowing a VM to saturate a 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapter. Red Hat proudly claim to be the only vendor able to sustain data rates of 10Gb/s. A short lived advantage given that Citrix XenServer is already adding SR-IOV support, but impressive none-the-less.
Hard core developers have better debugging tools, including SystemTap. SystemTap can dynamically trace C++ code to find optimisations and pinpoint low-level defects. Windows integration got a boost with better LDAP user/group mapping and SAMBA file and print engine support for Windows 7. This brings file/print under full support and negates Linux teams from “rolling their own” which can frustrate support providers.
Whilst RHEL 5.5 doesn’t shake the universe, it is a solid and worthy upgrade. It certainly whets our appetite for RHEL 6, the beta version of which should arrive in next few weeks.
VN:F [1.8.5_1061]
Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
Posted by lee on April 7, 2010
Gartner recently published a forecast that shows Google’s Android mobile phone platform is growing it’s market share at the expense of Microsoft and Palm. By 2012, Symbian will still lead the smart phone race, with Android coming in a respectable 2nd. Gartner is predicting that the leader board is set to change given the growth rate Android is experiencing in the US.
Android offers carriers and consumers as compelling alternative to Apple’s iPhone. For corporates, Android promises more enterprise control than Apple is offering, and a richer application delivery platform that the Blackberry currently offers. The open source nature of Android allows the likes of Motorola’s Cliq to innovate around a commodity capability – the smart phone OS.
Those players wishing to stay in the race with proprietary offerings (RIM, Apple and Microsoft) will have to invest significantly in brand awareness and R&D to keep up the agile innovations and leaner bills of materials that Android promises.
The rise of cloud-based applications (apps) and services is accelerating the adoption of richer handsets. The market is becoming more sophisticated, with corporates and consumers alike both understanding the practical benefits. Android is supported by different handset manufacturers, giving their loyal customer base a new capability. Much of this will take place without the consumer caring about the OS, as usual – focusing instead on the bundle of call/data plan, hardware, software and online services.
All in all, the enterprise is faced with challenges to integrate and manage their fleet . There are echos of the late 80s and learly 90s roll outs of client/server and desktop PCs. I hope the lessons of history are not lost, and IT can embrace the new challenge and deliver enterprise-class control with the flexibility, personality and agility that mobile users are accustomed to.
VN:F [1.8.5_1061]
Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
Posted by lee on March 30, 2010
IPSec is best known as a VPN enabler, but that is only part of the story. I’d like to invite you to take another at IPsec as a form of network access control for the cloud.
Confidentiality of data is important, but controlling who can talk to a machine is just as important. In many instances an application will provide it’s own encryption (HTTPS, SSL, TLS, etc). In those scenarios IPSec still have a valuable role to play.
Often we want to isolate managed from non-managed machines, we want two machines to authenticate before communication can proceed. Using Kerberos and certificates then IPSsec can authenticate hosts and optionally enforce encryption.
If a firewall is akin to a nightclub bouncer then IPSec authentication acts more like a military checkpoint.
When you have server instances spread across your DMZ, cloud providers, dedicated hosting or DR centres then being able to trust that a VM instance is authentic is important. When you need all machines to interact securely as part of the same administrative domain, then encryption becomes important too.
IPSec fits both scenarios – and since it is bundled into modern version of Windows, Linux, Solaris and Mac OS – it’s a leading candidate for the Trusted Cloud.
VN:F [1.8.5_1061]
Rating: 8.0/10 (1 vote cast)
Posted by lee on
Red Hat has announced an upgrade to their enterprise virtualisation suite – REV 2.2. With REV, Red Hat is able to transport a user’s Windows (or Linux) desktop from the data centre to a variety of devices (smart phone, laptop, netbook, thin client or desktop PC) over local and wide area networks.
The march towards desktop virtualisation seems unstoppable with Citrix, VMware and Microsoft already making investments. Ultimately, desktop virtualisation is driven by end users who want the flexibility, centralisation, consolidation, security, savings and control that hosting desktops in a data centre promises.
Red Hat has finally incorporated the technology it acquired from Qumranet a couple of years ago. The deal included SPICE (Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments) technology that is analogous to Citrix’ ICA and VMware’s VDI.
Another big bonus for busy IT shops is Red Hat’s inclusion of V2V technology that migrates virtual machines created on competing platforms to Red Hat’s. The V2V inclusion is a technology preview (beta) that Red Hat hopes will give it the edge over VMware and Citrix today and soon Microsoft.
The management tools have also been upgraded to help to tame enterprise-scale VM farms. For those enterprises that need to run hefty applications, scale-up performance has been tweaked to 256GB with 16 virtual CPUs. That is enough horsepower to run an ERP application suite for an SME.
VN:F [1.8.5_1061]
Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
Posted by shad on March 22, 2010
Open Source Linux is a powerful operating systems with some very impressive capabilities. Today, Linux is the underlying operating system of choice for a number of serious organisations including financial instructions, airlines, film studios and broadcasting companies. People in the enterprise are using Linux for its dependability and scale.
The Linux embedded systems are finding their way into mission critical appliances as well as commodity appliances such as mobile phones.
However in the mind of the uninitiated, Open Source Linux is still very much a ‘collegiate’ or ‘cheap/free’ technology. I think that this is one of the biggest misnomers in technology. Open Source Linux is about making an Open Standards based technology available to people, not only to participate and contribute, but to allow for enterprise grade System Integration.
In my view Open Source Linux is about providing a rock solid platform. In order to provide a reliable, rock solid platform there needs to be investment and making an investment ultimately requires funding. You can argue that people building the very latest high availability Linux based systems are very bright and talented individuals and these individuals deserve the same level of reward as their none Open Standards cousins. Love of Open Source is not enough to feed the talent required to keep Open Source Linux healthy.
There are some serious tools in the Open Source camp, Liferay (Enterprise Grade Portal), Alfresco (Enterprise Grade CMS and Workflow), JBoss (Enterprise Grade Middleware), Intellio (Enterprise Grade BPM), Unified Recording (Enterprise Grade Compliance Recording), SugarCRM (Enterprise Grade CRM) and the list goes on!
From a financial perspective the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of Linux bases systems compared to none Open Source is not solely measured by software licenses. It is measured by the efficiency of the technology and how much you can get out of your resources. As an example, Linux underpins many of cloud computing platforms and render farms. Linux is the new Unix offering a myriad of powerful enterprise grade tools. It is being taken seriously by the enterprise and it is time for it to be recognised as a first class citizen.
Shad Mortazavi, Operations Director, OpenIQ.
VN:F [1.8.5_1061]
Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
Posted by lee on March 21, 2010
The giant Japanese firm, Fujitsu, has recently announced a range of cloud-class servers. IBM has partnered with Red Hat to offer the underlying virtualisation technology. One of my favourites, 3 Tera has been acquired by CA. Our hosting provider, Rackspace, has a slew of hosted cloud server offerings including CentOS, Red Hat and even Microsoft Windows.
The big news at CeBit Australia this year is “The Cloud”. For budget holders concerned with “doing more with less” and doing it faster than ever before – the opportunities offered by enterprise-class utility computing is compelling. Of course, it’s still early days – and enterprise essentials like backups, SLAs, holistic security and QoS are still contentious topics. That’s not to say that solutions don’t exist – just that best practices are lagging behind the thought leaders.
The permissive licensing model of Linux coupled with the ability of the DevOps to automate the deployment and provisioning is making Linux the operating system of choice for wise cloud-sters. The big guns in Enterprise Linux are playing hard ball. Check out Ubuntu’s Eucalyptus-based Cloud, Red Hat’s Enterprise MRG Grid, SuSE’s Studio for building appliances, Citrix with it’s XenServer family.
The future of cloud-based Linux is bright – no, where are my sunnies.
VN:F [1.8.5_1061]
Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
Posted by lee on
Cloud computing is big news this year. The flurry of announcements, new products and online services is causing the IT world to rethink how it designs, deploys and delivers services to it’s users. Cloud computing offers a business the agility to accelerate the deployment of a solution by leveraging the economies of scale and operational excellence of web-scale providers.
Whilst cloud computing in the enterprise is split between public and private clouds – the inherent use of extreme virtualisation to rapidly spin up capacity to meet fluctuations in demand is very attractive.
The giant Japanese firm, Fujitsu, has recently announced a range of cloud-class servers. IBM has partnered with Red Hat to offer the underlying virtualisation technology. One of my favourites, 3 Tera has been acquired by CA. Our hosting provider, Rackspace, has a slew of hosted cloud server offerings including CentOS, Red Hat and even Microsoft Windows.
The big news at CeBit Australia this year is “The Cloud”. For budget holders concerned with “doing more with less” and doing it faster than ever before – the opportunities offered by enterprise-class utility computing is compelling. Of course, it’s still early days – and enterprise essentials like backups, SLAs, holistic security and QoS are still contentious topics. That’s not to say that solutions don’t exist – just that best practices are lagging behind the thought leaders.
The permissive licensing model of Linux coupled with the ability of the DevOps to automate the deployment and provisioning is making Linux the operating system of choice for wise cloud-sters. The big guns in Enterprise Linux are playing hard ball. Check out Ubuntu’s Eucalyptus-based Cloud, Red Hat’s Enterprise MRG Grid, SuSE’s Studio for building appliances, Citrix with it’s XenServer family.
The future of cloud-based Linux is bright – no, where are my sunnies.
VN:F [1.8.5_1061]
Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
Posted by lee on
The generous team at Athena Security have released a free Firewall Browser for enterprise firewalls. With the tool, you can search, view and audit your firewall’s rule base of your Cisco, Check Point or Netscreen. The tool is designed to uncover hard to spot configuration errors that expose your network and data centre to internal and external threats. Given it’s enterprise credentials and free download, we hope you’ll pass the download link onto your network and security colleagues.
VN:F [1.8.5_1061]
Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast)
Posted by lee on March 20, 2010
If you are concerned about desktop TCO, then your options just got a little broader. If you’d prefer to lock your data and applications in your data centre but your user’s are prone to whine about losing their eye candy – read on.
WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
VN:F [1.8.5_1061]
Rating: 6.0/10 (1 vote cast)
Posted by lee on March 18, 2010
Agility. We hear it all the time – from the board room to the data centre. DevOps or Agile Operations is a contraction of Developer and Operations. It’s the application of development toolsets and mindsets to the role of IT operations.
Our reader will note our penchant for automation, as a once-upon-a-time programmer and a Systems Administrator (Windows, Unix and Mainframe) – I’ve always scripted. I still do – I installed, configured and customised SugarCRM in 30 seconds last week because I wrote a script 12 months ago. I’ve installed a few over the months, each took next to no time.
The “typical” Unix administrator is often regarded as being more geeky than their Microsoft brethren. Whether or not that is true is debatable. What is less controversial is that Unix administrators are more frequently found typing arcane commands into a command line than their Windows WIMP-raised counterparts (PowerShell power users excepted).
The emergence of DevOps warrants further investigation and consideration from both Windows and Unix camps.
WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
VN:F [1.8.5_1061]
Rating: 9.0/10 (2 votes cast)
Loading ...