The Linux Executive Report from IBM
September 2012
The Linux Executive Report from IBM: September 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
IBM announced an updated mainframe server with new, cutting-edge System z capabilities for security and analytics. The IBM zEnterprise EC12 (zEC12) enterprise system is the result of an investment by the IBM Systems and Technology Group of more than $1 billion in IBM research and development primarily in Poughkeepsie, New York as well as 17 other IBM labs around the world and in collaboration with some of IBM's top clients.
The tenth annual Ohio LinuxFest will be held on September 28-30 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center in downtown Columbus, Ohio. Featuring authoritative speakers and a large expo, the Ohio LinuxFest is welcome to all free and open source software professionals, enthusiasts, and everyone interested in learning more about free and open source software.
OpenStack announced the launch of a new, independent OpenStack Foundation to promote the development, distribution and adoption of the OpenStack cloud software. As the independent home for OpenStack, the foundation has already attracted more than 5,600 individual members, secured more than $10 million in funding and is ready to fulfill the OpenStack mission of becoming the ubiquitous cloud computing platform.
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.
Red Hat has rolled out a preview release of its OpenStack distribution based on OpenStack framework for building and managing private, public and hybrid infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds. Red Hat has been working with an early group of customers who have been strong advocates for a commercial release of OpenStack from Red Hat, and who have been instrumental in providing the feedback and testing required to bring this preview release to completion. The company now seeks to work with a wider group of customers to further develop Red Hat's OpenStack distribution and its usage with other Red Hat products. In addition, Red Hat is working closely with key partners such as Rackspace to provide fully managed Red Hat OpenStack-powered clouds in the future.
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 has entered into its second beta, including updates based on feedback provided by current Red Hat customers using beta 1, the Red Hat Virtualization Team reports. Current Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization customers are able to get access to the second beta of the platform via Red Hat Network.The series of beta releases are intended to allow current Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization customers to provide feedback to Red Hat on new technologies.
SUSE announced the general availability of SUSE Cloud, its first commercially supported private cloud solution. Powered by OpenStack, SUSE Cloud is an automated cloud management platform that enables the rapid deployment and easy ongoing management of an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) private cloud. SUSE Cloud helps enterprises to improve resource utilization and speed the delivery of services by seamlessly managing and provisioning workloads across a secure, compliant and fully supported cloud environment. SUSE Cloud also integrates with SUSE Studio and SUSE Manager, allowing enterprises to rapidly deploy, adapt and manage applications and workloads across private and public clouds.
Technology has never been more important, Doug Balog, general manager, System z, IBM, told the audience in his keynote at SUSECon, the first annual global conference for SUSE customers, partners, in Orlando, Florida. In fact, according to IBM's most recent global CEO study, for the first time, CEOs identified technology as the most important external force impacting their organizations. Standing out amid all the other challenges organizations face are three macro-level themes - the massive amounts of data flowing into organizations, the increasing mobility of the workforce and the accompanying security risks that can bring, as well as the need to get more from their infrastructure in order to drive greater efficiency, be more flexible and more reactive.
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.
While conventional wisdom suggests that enterprises are standardizing on a single x86 hypervisor for their IT infrastructures, the reality may well be different. Recent research published by Gabriel Consulting Group shows a widespread use of multiple hypervisors in the data center, with KVM as the fastest growing hypervisor. This webcast featuring Dan Olds of Gabriel Consulting will explore this "hyperversity" trend and the strategic importance of hypervisor diversity to the enterprise. SLTN in the Netherlands will describe their experience using multiple hypervisors to deliver their cloud services. IBM and Red Hat virtualization experts will discuss how Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization on IBM Systems can help enterprises benefit from and successfully manage hypervisor diversity. This webcast titled, "The Reality of x86 Virtualization: Hypervisor Diversity," will be held Thursday October 11.
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 Linux at IBM
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.
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.
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.