The Linux Executive Report from IBM
October 18, 2012
The Linux Executive Report from IBM: October 18, 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
A new blog posted by the Red Hat and IBM Performance Teams showcases the new performance results for KVM, which is incorporated in both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.
KVM can help provide protection from the sting of increasingly expensive virtualization licensing costs especially for Linux and mixed workload environments, writes David Hsu, program director, WW IBM Linux and KVM Marketing. He offers a pricing analysis of the KVM stack compared to its competitors (i.e., VMware and Microsoft) in a new blog.
Heterogeneous and hybrid are two key aspects of cloud computing that matter, according to a survey that Red Hat conducted among more than 400 attendees of the recent VMworld conference in San Francisco.
The Information On Demand conference, taking place October 21-25 in Las Vegas, will offer 700 technical education sessions, 110 hands-on labs, 300 customer speakers, usability sandboxes, the new Technical Unconference, as well as general sessions and keynotes, and the ability to network with experts, IBM executives and innovative IBM business partners. IBM's PowerLinux team will also be out in force at the conference.
The number of different hypervisor brands deployed in data centers is "broad and expanding," according to a new blog by Aberdeen Group senior research analyst Dick Csaplar, highlighting the results of a May 2012 Aberdeen survey examining whether the hypervisor market is expanding or contracting.
It is critical to align business requirements and IT capability but this assumes that business drives IT and not other way around, writes Marcel den Hartog in Enterprise Tech Journal. With the combination of Linux on System z, IBM paired the flexibility of Linux and the reliability of the mainframe, which den Hartog notes is a "match made in heaven," particularly for IT managers "who understand that only an IT strategy without technical bias and driven by the business is sensible."
As part of its community's efforts to provide education about oVirt and to bring more contributors into the fold, oVirt is hosting a workshop at LinuxCon Europe 2012, which is scheduled for November 5-9 in Barcelona, Spain. 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.
The Red Hat Forum will be held October 23 at the Westin Tokyo (Ebisu). In addition to sessions on building your own cloud, big data, cloud development, and solutions on the cloud, Red Hat executives, including Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst and others, will present keynotes. IBM is also a gold sponsor of the one-day event and Jean Staten Healy, director, Worldwide Linux and Open Virtualization, IBM, will present a luncheon keynote.
SUSE has released SUSE Manager 1.7, the latest version of its systems management solution for enterprise Linux environments. SUSE Manager helps enterprises manage SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers with a single centralized solution. The new version includes flexibility and compliance enhancements that help customers grow their Linux deployments while reducing management effort.
Inside Linux at IBM
Miami-Dade is one of the largest counties in Florida, with a population of three million citizens. Recognizing the opportunity to open up government with a large-scale analytics platform that could allow internal users and citizens to access a wealth of public information via the web, the county deployed IBM Cognos Business Intelligence in a Linux environment on its existing IBM System z mainframe platform. The result is that employees and citizens can now access reports using a standard web browser.
This white paper delves down to a lower level by taking a look at architectures for providing high availability of the underlying system resources necessary to support HA for those higher-level software servers when running on Linux for System z.
Case studies and videos showcase how customers are benefiting from IBM technologies and KVM
Mike Day, IBM distinguished engineer & chief virtualization architect, Open Systems Development Software Architect, looks at some of the features anticipated in upcoming enterprise Linux releases in his new blog post. According to Day, enterprise adoption of KVM is growing, and KVM features are continually being updated and expanded. Development in KVM is focused not only on high performance - the must-have for enterprise adoption - but also on support for application developers and Systems Administrators storage, usability, high availability, disaster recovery, and security.
In a new blog, Adam Jollans, program director, Linux and Open Virtualization Strategy, IBM, examines the issues causing organizations to opt for mixed x86 hypervisor environments.
Inside IBM's Linux Partners
This year's OpenSUSE conference will take place at the Czech Technical University in Prague.
The Red Hat EMEA Partner Road Tour 2012 is taking place between September and November 2012 in various cities across Europe.
Attend the Red Hat Government Symposium on October 23 at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. to gain insight from industry thought leaders and connect with peers.