The Linux Executive Report from IBM
April 13, 2011
The Linux Executive Report from IBM: April 13, 2011. A monthly summary of important trends and market research, case studies and information about IBM's Linux initiatives of interest to senior management.
Linux News
At the High Performance Computing (HPC) Linux Financial Markets event in New York City on April 4, IBM leaders, along with customers Datatrend Technologies and Insurance Services Office, kicked off the conference with a panel discussion about how IBM systems and Watson technology could be applied to the financial industry.
Linux kernel 2.6.38 provides a range of enhancements that improve performance for running databases as well as other programs, writes Joab Jackson in a recent InfoWorld.com article, "New Linux kernel gets a speed boost."
The Linux Foundation, the non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, hosted a roundtable discussion on "What's Next For Linux in the Enterprise and the Cloud" at the 5th Annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in San Francisco.
The Red Hat Summit will take place in May 3-6 in Boston. Inna Kuznetsova, vice president, marketing and sales, Systems Software & ISVs, IBM Systems & Technology Group, will present a keynote talk about "Open Virtualization and KVM: Ready for Business!"
Virtualization is one of the hottest topics in computing today, helping organizations save money by sharing IT resources and providing the enabling platform for cloud computing. As with every new technology, however, there is always the risk of proprietary lock-in to single-vendor platforms and consequent loss of flexibility and choice for end users.
Inside Linux at IBM
Linux Running on IBM System x and IBM BladeCenter provides an open, reliable and secure IT environment that can scale as workloads demand. Solution briefs from IBM highlight the advantages.
Did you miss a webcast covering important information about technologies you need to learn more about? IBM offers replays on-demand of webcasts presented by IBM experts and partners.
Inside IBM's Linux Partners
The openSUSE Project, a worldwide project sponsored by Novell, has announced that openSUSE 11.4 is now available for download. According to the openSUSE Project, the new release is the first major community distribution to ship LibreOffice in its stable release, the first to ship Firefox 4.0 which includes a redesigned user interface and improved performance, and it includes the first Qt4-based release of Scribus, an open source desktop publishing application.
Red Hat has announced the availability of the beta for the first update to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. The beta provides new features, bug fixes and support for new hardware from partners. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, the last major operating platform release, included features applicable to all computing environments - from physical to virtual to the cloud - with improvements in performance, scalability and reliability, and according to Red Hat, the release has already set a new standard in storage performance based on internal testing by Red Hat engineering.
SUSE Linux Enterprise is the ideal end-to-end solution for running critical business on IBM zEnterprise System.
One of the most widely available alternatives to the Sun's SPARC-Solaris platform is the IBM System x or BladeCenter and Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based platform.