The Linux Executive Report from IBM
February 3, 2010
The Linux Executive Report from IBM: February 3, 2010. 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
If it weren't already clear that Linux is taking on a major role in the enterprise, consider the fact that the majority of contributions to the Linux kernel are coming from developers paid for their work. Seventy-five percent of code contributions to the Linux kernel between December 24, 2008 and January 10, 2010, came from people paid to do it by a range of companies including Red Hat, Novell and IBM, Jonathan Corbet, editor of LWN.net and lead author of the book "Linux Device Drivers," tells Linux Executive Report.
Cloud computing has become one of the most significant technical and business trends in decades, and, with the understanding that IT is a business asset that must be able to expand and contract as needed, increasingly, companies are turning toward the cloud as a way of improving the agility of their computing environments. The goal is simple—to have the best possible resources at the best price possible, without increasing capital expenditures.
Novell has introduced a suite of new tools to reduce the time and cost for ISVs and enterprises to develop, deploy and manage software appliances. With the availability of the SUSE Appliance Toolkit, Novell is providing an integrated solution for building, testing, updating and configuring software appliances across physical, virtual and cloud environments.
Linux skills are in high demand, and the necessary Linux training is readily accessible. The Linux Foundation has announced free Linux training webinar series and an expanded set of courses and course venues for its existing training.
Inside Linux at IBM
At Lotusphere 2010, the premier event for the enterprise collaboration community, held recently in Orlando, IBM announced a major expansion of IBM Lotus collaboration software and delivery of enterprise secure mail for Android, the iPhone and Nokia Symbian smartphones. "We believe IBM has taken a leadership position in providing the broadest mail and collaboration support for mobile devices," said Kevin Cavanaugh, vice president, messaging and collaboration, IBM.
IBM clients are benefiting from migrating workloads from distributed servers to virtual Linux servers running on z10 under z/VM because z/VM offers an extensive set of virtualization technologies that enable users to enjoy cost-savings when deploying Linux-based solutions on the mainframe. And as clients move mission critical work to Linux on System z, they need to manage that workload. The IBM Tivoli Service Management Center for System z is a set of integrated solutions that enable System z as a highly reliable hub for efficient management of business and IT services that span the enterprise, bringing service management and process automation to System z.
The world of world of work is evolving faster and faster. Whether you're a business or IT professional, Impact 2010 is the premier conference designed around you.
IBM hosts webcasts on cutting-edge technologies such as Linux and the mainframe, new strategies for smarter collaboration, and developing and testing with Linux in the cloud.
Linux, virtualization and cloud computing are the three most important trends in IT today. They are also interlinked.
IBM has unveiled new software that helps customers accelerate and automate their migration projects. Based on hundreds of migrations from competitive systems to IBM, IBM developers have created new software tools that automate many of the manual processes to help accelerate Sun migrations. This software automatically discovers and identifies the Sun assets, provisions the new target IBM environment, and streamlines workload transitions—optimized across hardware, software and processes. The software can speed migrations from Sun Solaris to Linux or AIX, IBM's UNIX operating system, as well as applications and middleware to IBM systems. This workload-centric methodology has shortened the provisioning step from weeks to days for some clients.
IBM also announced at Lotusphere 2010 that it is working with business partners to create solutions integrated with IBM Lotus Foundations to help small and medium-sized businesses address one of the biggest challenges they face-the complexity of information technology. Lotus Foundations is IBM's hardware and software solution that helps SMBs collaborate with tools including email; office applications for creating documents, presentations and spreadsheets; file sharing and back up and recovery for data protection. With Lotus Foundations, SMBs have access to all of the tools needed to run a business and quickly establish a reliable IT infrastructure. The solution is completely autonomic so that installation, set-up, monitoring and problem resolution are all done without human intervention.
Inside IBM's Linux Partners
IBM is once again sponsoring Novell's premier annual customer/industry event, Brainshare 2010, Making IT Work as One. IBM will be represented by the IBM Alliances team, STG (System z, System x, Power Systems) and IBM SWG. Over the past 25 years, Novell BrainShare has earned the reputation as one of the top technical conferences in the industry. The bulk of the participants are decision makers, evaluators and purchasing influencers in their organizations looking to learn about and implement the newest products and solutions from Novell and partners such as IBM.
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