The Linux Executive Report from IBM
August 2012
The Linux Executive Report from IBM: August 2012. 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
In a new blog post, Kelly Beavers, vice president and business line executive, IBM Systems Software, writes about how to avoid headaches and risk by using IBM Systems Director VMControl and SmartCloud Entry. According to Beavers: When organizations start thinking about embarking on a cloud deployment, they see the advantages of a utility-like model and the appeal of something such as Amazon's EC2 public cloud offering resonates strongly with them. However, according to the analysts, a primary concern about using public clouds is security, since most people have heard the horror stories about outages and data leaks. And so, despite the ease-of-use of the public cloud, the attraction of private cloud is that clients get the same user experience but it is all safely built inside of their own firewall - using their own resources and their own IT infrastructure, thereby eliminating what they perceive as the biggest risks with a public cloud.
In a new blog post, Adam Jollans, program director, Linux and Open Virtualization Strategy, IBM, comments on a new Gabriel Consulting white paper: As we approach VMware's annual VMworld 2012 Conference in San Francisco at the end of August, conventional wisdom says that customers are standardizing on a single x86 hypervisor for their IT infrastructures. But conventional wisdom may well be wrong. A new report published by Gabriel Consulting Group shows a remarkable diversity in the x86 hypervisors used in practice by IT departments. Nearly half of the 345 IT professionals surveyed were using two or three hypervisors, and a remarkable 18% were using four or more hypervisors. Hypervisor diversity - or "Hyperversity" as Gabriel terms it - is the majority choice.
Mike Day, IBM distinguished engineer & chief virtualization architect, open systems development software architect, examines three notable performance improvements coming in future enterprise Linux releases in his new blog: The performance improvements in upstream KVM development that are likely to make it into the next Linux releases from major distributors will be especially beneficial to enterprise KVM users. IBM's contributions to the KVM hypervisor are consistent with its longstanding commitment to Linux and represent a broad strategy of providing customer choice, in order to bring open technology to key segments of the technology market, and to enable IBM platforms, middleware, and services to have the best hypervisor technology available.
IBM is seeing growing momentum of IBM PureSystems among global clients and business partners, as organizations increasingly look for ways to reduce IT complexity and overcome the worldwide skills shortage. According to industry experts, approximately three-quarters of global employers cite a lack of experience, skills or knowledge as the primary reason for the difficulty filling IT positions. As a result, organizations are searching for new computing models that don't require a significant commitment of resources or employee training to set up and maintain. IBM PureSystems is addressing this issue by providing patterns of expertise - a new technology model that builds on the experience of thousands of IBM clients and streamlines the set-up and management of hardware and software resources.
LinuxCon is the leading annual technical conference in North America. Launched in 2009, LinuxCon has become known for offering top speaking talent, a cross-section of the leading players in the Linux community, innovative and timely content, a wide variety of opportunities for attendee collaboration and a place for smaller groups to co-locate for topic-specific mini-summits and workgroups. Co-located with CloudOpen, the Linux Kernel Summit and the Linux Plumbers Conference, LinuxCon North America 2012 will take place August 29-31 at the Sheraton Hotel & Marina in San Diego.
As we enter into the next chapter of x86 virtualization, KVM is poised to redefine the market with superior performance and an impressive ROI via commercial implementations such as Red Hat's RHEV3. The key to the success of RHEV3 lies within its manageability, which includes proper instrumentation and monitoring of the entire infrastructure within dynamic and converged infrastructures. Zenoss and the Open Virtualization Alliance invite you to explore this topic further during a live webinar on Wednesday, August 29, at 2 pm ET.
The oVirt Project develops and distributes an open source virtualization management platform that combines the KVM hypervisor with advanced capabilities for hosts and guests, including high availability, live migration, storage management, system scheduling, and more. As part of its community's efforts to provide education about oVirt and to bring more contributors into the fold, oVirt is hosting workshops at LinuxCon North America and LinuxCon Europe. Interested parties are invited to attend these workshops free of charge, and all workshop participants are eligible for a $200 discount on their LinuxCon registration courtesy of The Linux Foundation.
Shelter Mutual Insurance Co., an insurance company with a presence in 14 states, was facing out of control server sprawl and difficulties with air flow and rack space, writes Jim Utsler in the August issue of IBM Systems Magazine. To deal with the problem, Shelter opted to move many of its applications to IFL processors running on its mainframe, slowing the growth rate of the existing Intel technology-based boxes. As an added bonus, the company's applications are now running faster on its zEnterprise 114 (z114) platform than they had in the past, notes Utsler.
Inside Linux at IBM
In a new blog, Ian Robinson, virtualization product line manager, IBM Systems Software, STG, writes about the complexity that comes with the managing physical and virtualized servers, and the increasing need to manage more than one hypervisor. That's where IBM Systems Director with VMControl comes in, he says. "Generally, when we think about new technology we tend to focus on all the advantages it adds. And, in the case of server virtualization - a technology that has been strongly embraced over the past decade as it expanded beyond the mainframe into the realm of x86 servers - the advantages are many. Virtualization is being widely embraced in the enterprise because it enables greater utilization of an existing infrastructure, flexibility in terms of reallocating resources when they are needed and where, and not incidentally, significant cost savings due to a smaller physical footprint, energy efficiency and the ability to avoid or postpone new hardware purchases."
IBM PowerLinux big data analytics solutions help businesses gain new insights with scalable, powerful solutions using Apache Hadoop-based IBM InfoSphere BigInsights software to analyze data-at-rest, and InfoSphere Streams software to analyze data-in-motion. The deep integration and optimization of analytics workload performance on PowerLinux enables businesses to run thousands of tasks in parallel to deliver analytics services faster.
Miami-Dade provides its county agencies an easily accessible and robust IT environment to support three million citizens and host millions of Miami's visitors. It needed a smarter way to improve business processes and lower costs. IBM has worked with Miami-Dade to support all of Miami's County Municipal agencies with IBM's Business Analytics.
In this paper, ITIC examines IBM's PowerLinux strategy and delivers a verdict. It concludes that PowerLinux offers current and prospective IBM customers high performance and reliability for physical and virtualized environments at an extremely aggressive price point, and that it's the right solution at the right time to disrupt the market's inertia towards "good enough" computing.
Mike Day, distinguished engineer and chief virtualization architect, Open Systems Development, IBM, dispels some persistent myths about KVM in his new blog. "KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is gaining traction in the enterprise as a virtualization solution that provides high performance, scalability, and cost efficiency," writes Day. "But misconceptions still abound about this open source hypervisor. Some falsehoods continue to be perpetuated by organizations offering competing products, and others because KVM is maturing quickly and the up-to-date, correct information is not yet widely known. Here, we tackle some of the most persistent myths about KVM - because it's time to set the record straight."
Inside IBM's Linux Partners
This year's OpenSUSE conference will take place at the Czech Technical University in Prague. The campus is located in the district Dejvice and is next to an underground station that gets you directly to the historic city center. The conference will run from October 20 through October 23. More information is available from the openSUSE Conference website.
The Red Hat EMEA Partner Road Tour 2012 will take place between September and November 2012 in various cities across Europe. IBM is a platinum sponsor of the event which is designed for business partners, distributors, resellers, solution providers, global and local system integrators, as well as for independent software vendors, who have an interest in solutions around virtualization, infrastructure, cloud, middleware, and storage. In addition, the Red Hat Asia Pacific Partner Conference is an annual event at which partners across Asia Pacific gather to learn about the latest and greatest from Red Hat and its alliance partners, as well as gain insight about the direction and strategy moving forward.
SUSECon is the first annual global conference for SUSE customers, partners and community enthusiasts, enabling SUSE users to learn about the latest developments in enterprise-class Linux. SUSECon will be held from September 18-21, 2012 in the Grand Caribe Convention Center at the Caribe Royale Hotel in Orlando, Florida.
Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) member company Abyres has successfully transitioned several Malaysian government agencies to open virtualization environments running Microsoft Windows applications powered by KVM. As a result, the agencies have a cost-effective, user-friendly platform that is easy to manage and maximizes utilization, reliability and availability of the high-performance virtual machines Abyres delivers.