The Linux Executive Report from IBM
March 9, 2011
The Linux Executive Report from IBM: March 9, 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
Dundee is Scotland's fourth largest city, home to 145,000 people. Like all U.K. local authorities, the Dundee City Council needs to handle increasing demand for IT and e-government services, while also reducing costs in line with central government targets. When the lease on its server and storage hardware needed to be renewed, the council saw an opportunity to enhance its capabilities and increase value for money. Dundee worked with IBM to upgrade its mainframe environment with two powerful IBM System z10 servers, and introduced the IBM XIV Storage System to replace a mixed storage environment.
Wall Street is adopting high speed HPC systems with low latency to create new profit centers in arbitrage trading, and is using virtualization to increase back office efficiency and cost savings of existing HPC systems, according to the conference organizers. The 2011 show and conference will feature low latency and virtualization as two strategies to increase speed and increase full operations performance of HPC systems.
Following Watson's winning performance against Jeopardy! game show champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, IBM hosted a keynote session about its Jeopardy! Watson project at The Linux Foundation End User Summit. But Watson wasn't the only computer system that won last month when it competed successfully on Jeopardy! The other computing system is called World Community Grid, a virtual supercomputer that helps scientists solve humanitarian challenges by tapping the unused computing power of personal computers around the world. Scientists who use World Community Grid are not only set to receive Watson's $500,000 in prize money - but are already earning support worldwide because the day after the tournament's conclusion, World Community Grid saw a 700% spike in the number of people who normally volunteer their computers' spare power for the effort.
Inside Linux at IBM
Two new analyst papers, "The Mainframe and the Cloud" and "Scaling Your Oracle E-Business Suite with IBM System z and Linux" are now available from IBM.
The IBM Software Product Availability tool provides you the latest information about IBM software available for the Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux Server (SLES) versions and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) versions for System z.
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.
"z/VM and Linux on IBM System z: The Virtualization Cookbook for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0" and "z/VM and Linux on IBM System z: The Virtualization Cookbook for SLES 11 SP1" are now available from IBM.
SUSE Linux Enterprise is the ideal end-to-end solution for running critical business on IBM zEnterprise System.
Inside IBM's Linux Partners
In light of Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, enterprise customers on the Sun SPARC-Solaris platform face uncertainty in ongoing support and development, and should consider alternatives, according to a new Cabot Partners white paper sponsored by IBM and Intel.