Features

Seven Keys to Success with Linux

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 10:45:00 EDT

The Linux operating system materialized through the work of Linus Torvalds, a Finnish student who introduced the first release in 1991 as an open source version of UNIX for x86 PCs. Although it wasn’t the first open source version of UNIX, the unique advantages of Linux soon attracted a following, and it quickly emerged as a viable operating system alternative. The combination of x86-based virtualization and the widespread adoption of Linux eventually opened the door to a new era of business computing, fueling major changes to today’s business information technology landscape. Today almost every organization has open source technology somewhere in their IT environment, usually in the form of Linux. For example, Linux provides the underlying plumbing for much of the Internet and World Wide Web. In short, Linux has arrived as a mainstream operating system for organizations everywhere and it now plays an integral role in business computing.

No RAC, No RISC, No Problem

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 10:15:00 EDT

Having fended off challenges from Linux for several years now, the RISC-Unix platform is now under siege on another front – x86 servers. Long dismissed as workgroup and departmental servers, or as platforms for low-level enterprise applications, x86 servers are making serious inroads into corporate data centers. Earlier this year, analyst firms Gartner and IDC issued studies showing that sales of and revenue from RISC-Unix servers were continuing their slide against x86 boxes. The Gartner study showed a 28.5 percent decline in the number of units shipped and a 26.9 percent drop in revenue from them. The IDC study released in May of this year cited a “perfect storm” of circumstances, including the recession, the purchase of Sun by Oracle, and potential hardware upgrades by other vendors inducing delays in purchase decisions, all leading to the lowest level of spending on RISC servers IDC has ever recorded. Also encouraging the move away from RISC-Unix for many applications is the combination of a gathering virtualization groundswell in the data center and the rapidly improving performance capabilities of the x86 platforms.

Novell and Red Hat: Taking Linux to the Cloud

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 18:00:00 EST

It is interesting to see how Open source rivals Red Hat and Novell have transferred their Linux warfare to the cloud. As both companies seek to use their open source history to advantage on the web platform by spouting standard mantras about avoiding vendor lock-ins and low cost, they have also taken different approaches on other counts when taking their cloud services to market.

New CIO Playbook: Positioning IT as Strategic to the Business

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 18:00:00 EST

According to a Smart Enterprise Magazine CIO report, three-quarters of today's CIOs help their companies develop new products or services. Gartner Group's 2008 Worldwide Survey of CIOs, 85 percent of CIOs are now looking toward "IT to make the difference in their enterprise strategy." This move away from "keeping the lights on" to a focus on business strategy and external customer interaction is completely changing the day to day activities of today's CIO. The result of IT's executive leadership becoming a "part of" vs. a "supporter of" the business is forcing a shift of culture and mindset across the IT organization. If CIOs do not approach this change with a sound plan, inertia may set in due to passive/aggressive behavior and create operational risk.

Staying On Track Amid Constant Change

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 11:00:00 EST

Change, then change again: it’s a story familiar to developer managers everywhere. Projects are getting bigger and more complex. Developers are striving to reduce time-to-market, and squeeze releases out ever faster to keep pace with the market’s demands for new functionality. What’s more, customers aren’t prepared to wait until Q2 next year for a major release, to get the next batch of features built into the solution. They’d like them now, thanks very much – while reserving the right to change the feature set at any time. In these accelerated circumstances, speed of development is not just about the coding; there’s an ever-growing emphasis on how you manage your teams and the overall development process.

Using Ext JS, Servlets, JSON, MySQL and Tomcat on Fedora

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:15:00 EST

These days the popularity of Ext JS (a JavaScript library) is gaining momentum. One of the most popular widgets within Ext JS is the DataGrid. The reason – displaying data from a database is one of the most common tasks of a web application. “Out of the box” the DataGrid has functionality (for instance ascending or descending sorting and reordering of columns by dragging it) that otherwise would require some effort from developers.

Moving to the Cloud: The Road Ahead

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 10:04:00 EST

I hope it’s clear that today’s clouds are powerful resources that can be used to rapidly develop and deploy applications; they provide on-demand resources and true value. The challenges I outlined in configuration, storage, networking, and management really come into play when you try to integrate the power of the cloud with your existing infrastructure and processes. These challenges are centered on the fact that the cloud is separate from the data center – a problem that hits home when you want to utilize existing applications and rely on your existing services and infrastructure.

Hybridfox: Cross of Elasticsfox and Imagination

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST

Now we have a Eucalyptus' Private Cloud installed and running on our premise, and it remained kinda of an artifact in our data-center for sometime. So I thought why has not someone written anything about how make to make Elasticfox work with Eucalyptus. But there were quite a few pointers to what version will be ideally suited to use for Eucalyptus, like this one, thanks Ajmf. I took the cue from there, I enabled debugging on elasticfox, and used firebug to dig deeper. And I came up with Hybridfox, yeah, and it works.

Cloud Computing Ain’t Electricity – It’s a Supermarket

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 15:15:00 EDT

Thanks to Nicholas Carr everyone loves to talk about Cloud Computing as electricity and how we are transitioning from own power-stations to central grid. After a lot of discussions about “the cloud”, it occurred to me recently that there is a far better model to make cloud idea easy to understand – and it is supermarket. Electricity is kind of a wrong model. Not because so many folks are now trying to get the pendulum swing back and get to solar panels and other micro-generators, but also because software and IT services are much less uniform than electrical current. There’s no single “IT utility current” you can get from your network outlet to solve all IT needs.

Anatomy of Cloud Computing Platform

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 13:30:00 EDT

As the IT operations continue to evolve and transform the business towards agility and adaptability to ever changing rules of marketplace, the efficiency of any IT operation is of paramount significance. The phrase ‘time to market' has a completely new meaning in today's dynamic business environment where the only constant is change. This rapidly changing environment has lead the IT and business leaders alike to re-think the ‘procurement to provisioning' process with one goal in mind - Efficient use of resources.

Is Amazon EC2 As a Platform Secure?

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:30:00 EDT

Following on from my last post, Securing Applications on the Amazon Elastic Cloud, One of the biggest questions I often see asked is “Is Amazon EC2 as a platform secure”? This is like saying is my vanilla network secure? As you do to your internal network you can take some steps to make the environment as secure as you can, such as:

Build Reliability into Cloud Computing for SMBs

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 17:30:00 EDT

With IP networks taking on many new challenges from VoIP, rich multimedia and other high-bandwidth consuming and high-priority applications, SMBs need to be sure the network connectivity between their business and Cloud Computing provider is protected with controls for reliable Internet circuit availability, and for optimizing delivery of traffic to critical applications.

1st Annual GovIT Expo: Letter from the Technical Chair

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 15:15:00 EDT

Within a few short months, we have seen a whirlwind of change across the government IT industry landscape. The appropriation of $7.2B for broadband Internet access nationwide, the launching of USASpending.gov, the appointment of Mr. Vivek Kundra as the nation’s first ever Federal Chief Information Officer and the rapid adoption of cloud computing are only a few examples of this historic change.

Using a Perl Debugger with Server Side Triggers

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 09:30:00 EDT

This article describes a method to use a perl debugger on trigger scripts without advanced interprocess debugging tools. Using a perl debugger with a V4.x server side trigger launched by the server is very difficult and encounters two known obstacles: The server will fire the trigger and the debugger will run in a thread of the detached server process; the debugger will start but will probably not communicate with you. However, if you manually started the server via a shell command then the perl debugger will start, accept input from the keyboard, then you will loose contact with the debugger; it does not have exclusive access to the keyboard because it is running in the context of the detached server process. The next command you type will go to the shell, not the debugger. It gets messy from there.

Use The Source, Luke!

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 10:00:00 EDT

Is ESB just an expensive integration hub or is there more to the story than we heard…

In the beginning, the ESB (Enterprise Service Bus), was marketed as much more than an integration technology. While the core of an ESB is certainly about connectivity between services, there was – and still is – so much more to an ESB than just integrating disparate protocols and technologies. Transformation, parallel processing, content based routing, and service orchestration are among the more useful and beneficial capabilities of an ESB.

That’s why it was somewhat surprising to see the CTO of an organization that offers an (open-source) ESB essentially quoted as discouraging the use of ESBs unless it’s for use as an integration hub. Dana Gardner, in To ESB, or Not to ESB?, analyzes MuleSource CTO Ross Mason’s recent blog that actively discourages architects from leveraging an ESB unless it’s necessary.

While the conversation focused on the pitfalls of using an ESB where you don’t need one, the Mule CTO naturally believes there are architectures where the ESB makes sense. To begin with, you need to be working on a project where you have three or more applications that need to talk to each other, he explained.

“If you’ve got three applications that have to talk to each other, you’ve actually got six integration points, one for each service, and then it goes up exponentially,” Mason said.

The ESB technology is also needed where the protocols go beyond HTTP. “You should consider an ESB when you start using Java Message Service (JMS), representational state transfer (REST), or any of the other protocols out there,” Mason said. “When communications start getting more complicated is when an ESB shows its true value.”

I could disagree more, but not much. The reduction of a robust technology like ESB – once considered the backbone of SOA – to little more than an integration hub was painful to read.

But what’s more painful is that the paraphrasing in Dana Gardner’s article misses most of Mason’s guidance. Reading through the original blog clearly indicates that Mason believes an ESB is much more than an integration hub and even spells out a rather lengthy list of “selection criteria” to help architects understand when and ESB will be beneficial and when it will not. But Gardner’s article appears to make the case that the only good use for an ESB is as an integration hub.

SECOND HAND INFORMATION OFTEN LACKING NECESSARY CONTEXT

The only disagreement I have with Mason’s list is that some of the criteria seems to contradict other criteria. For example, he states: “Do you need to use more than one type of communication protocol? If you are just using HTTP/Web Services or just JMS, you’re not going to get any of the benefits if cross protocol messaging and transformation that Mule provides.” but then offers “Do you need message routing capabilities such as forking and aggregating message flows, or content-based routing?”

But what if I need aggregation of message flows and content-based routing between three or more HTTP/Web services? Oh the conflict!

Aside from that particular nit, which is really not all that much of one given that architects are smart enough to resolve that apparent conflict, Mason’s extensive set of questions not only offer proper guidance but also subtly lays out a comprehensive list of what an ESB can (and should) really do. He is not, as it appears from Gardner’s article, implying ESB is nothing more than an integration hub. In fact it appears that Mason is doing exactly the opposite as the list of criteria clearly leads the reader toward an understanding that if the only thing you need is integration, you might want to look at solutions other than an ESB. The problem is that the secondary article distills Mason’s guidance in an attempt to succinctly get to the point and in doing so oversimplifies the answer to the question “Should I use an ESB or not?”

The article about the original article is lacking the context necessary to properly interpret and understand Mason’s points. It’s much the same as we see in an application infrastructure, where multiple point products are chained together in an attempt to provide a variety of application delivery related services: security, optimization, load balancing, secure access, and acceleration. As data flows from one solution to the next, the original context is lost and the loss of that context means that most of the hops are bereft of all the juicy information (the lengthy list in Mason’s article) necessary to actually make intelligent decisions regarding the application of policies designed to improve application security, reliability, and performance.

The use of disparate solutions to provide related but separate application delivery functions takes the transaction out of context much in the same way second-hand sources tend to distill the original source until its context is nearly gone and changes its intended meaning. That leaves folks (and devices) interpreting information without the benefit of the original context, which can lead to the wrong conclusion (wrong policy, wrong decision, etc…).

Too, the simplification of a technology-related matter also bothers me not just because it does a disservice to ESB, but because it happens all the time with technology; I see it every day with load balancing and application delivery. Load balancing is certainly core to application delivery, the latter deriving from the former over time, but application delivery is, like ESB and any other evolutionary solution, comprised of much more functionality and value than its predecessor. Load balancing is certainly easier to implement, like point-to-point integration between two services, but the optimization, security, and acceleration benefits of application delivery are lost when focusing solely on load balancing much the same way the orchestration, processing, and management benefits of an ESB are lost when focusing solely on its integration capabilities.

Distillation is all well and good, and oft times necessary, but should not happen at the expense of the technology.

Technorati Tags: MacVittie,F5,ESB,SOA,integration,application delivery,load balancing,optimization,acceleration,security,protocols,JMS,content-based routing,Ross Mason,Mule Source,Dana Gardner,web,internet,blog

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Categories: Development and General , SOA Delivery , General SOA

New Features in PowerBuilder 11.5

Thu, 28 May 2009 12:45:00 EDT

I plan to make this the first of a series of articles that discuss the new features in PowerBuilder 11.5, which was released late last year. Of course, they won’t be the first articles we’ve run on the topic, as we ran an article on the new Code Access Security features back even before 11.5 was released and a more recent article on New DataWindow Features. This series of articles is intended to discuss the major hitters of the remaining features.

Five Ways Cloud Computing Strengthens IT

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 15:00:00 EDT

This is a blog that proposes five distinct ways in which cloud computing solutions can strenghten the efforts of development and test teams within an enterprise.

Why an Application Grid?

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 22:00:00 EDT

Application servers, those dependable workhorses that run most enterprise Java applications, are rarely a hot topic of conversation these days. As a technology category, the application server appears to be fairly “established” and that the focus has moved elsewhere in the stack, but appearances can be deceiving.

Virtualization Experts in High Demand

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 18:30:00 EDT

Those with virtualization skills are in high demand right now. That makes them just as difficult to retain as it is to find and hire them. Indeed, as virtualization becomes more important to enterprise IT, those who understand VMWare, and other virtualization technology, as well as understand virtualization in general, are commanding top salaries and they are often recruited away from current employers.

Guilty of Arrogance Too

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 11:15:00 EDT

You have perhaps heard that while we were on vacation Linux file system ace and convicted wife killer Hans Reiser took the cops to where he had buried her body. Two days later when Reiser was supposed to be sentenced to 25 years to life for first decree murder the judge disclosed that Reiser could have pled guilty to voluntary manslaughter in exchange for three years in jail and - given the time served while awaiting trial - could have been out next spring, which would have saved his little boy from testifying.

Engelbart's Usability Dilemma: Efficiency vs Ease-of-Use

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 09:15:00 EDT

The mouse was the original idea of Doug Engelbart who was the head of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart's philosophy is best embodied, in my opinion, in the design of another device that he invented, the five-finger keyboard - with keys like a piano, used by one hand. The problem was, Engelbart's five-finger keyboard and mouse combination was very difficult to learn.

The 'Best of Both Worlds': Running Fedora 8 on Legacy Windows XP

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 11:00:00 EDT

One of the beauties of Linux from a business point of view is that it doesn't require the 'latest and greatest' hardware to run properly. This means you can increase the return on investments (ROI) for legacy hardware. As I'll show in this article, as in the case with virtualization, the 'latest and greatest' software is not required either.

How Open Is "Open"? – Industry Luminaries Join the Debate

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 05:00:00 EST

In order to describe itself as an 'open source' company, need a company merely be 'a company that will help you make the switch to open source in your company' - or does it have to be one that lets users feely download, compile, and use the software in question? Where is the dividing line? How open is 'open'? At Enterprise Open Source Magazine we contacted a range of FOSS luminaries for their take on the issue.

Symantec to Support Linux on POWER With High Availability and Backup Solutions

Wed, 07 Jun 2006 21:00:00 EDT

Symantec has announced an agreement with IBM that provides for the delivery of Symantec high availability, storage management, and backup products for the Linux on POWER platform by the end of 2006. These solutions will help clients consolidate Linux applications on the IBM System p platform.

Linux Cover Story — Multidimensional Tagging

Sun, 21 May 2006 09:30:00 EDT

Multidimensional tagging, a key component in social sharing sites, can potentially help enterprises manage large stores of information. In this article, I'll examine the ways that multidimensional tagging will be implemented using Open Source tools.

Enterprise Open Source Feature Story — "FOSS 101"

Fri, 21 Apr 2006 16:00:00 EDT

Linux and other Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) enjoy a reputation for ubiquitous use in educational settings. While FOSS openness and low acquisition costs resonate with the approach and needs of academia, it's proving difficult to establish a clear adoption trend. Certainly there exists ample anecdotal evidence of adoption, school-by-school, department-by-department. Certainly a range of Open Source projects arise from and also target education. However, close investigation reveals a mixed reality for Linux and FOSS in education: perusing college course listings, at least in the United States, doesn't support the notion of near-universal Linux/FOSS use across curricula - either in computer science or as a platform across other disciplines. It's even more difficult to measure Linux and FOSS adoption in K-12 settings where course catalogs don't exist and where classroom IT closely tracks home computing use.

New Absoft Roll Contains Leading Software Development Tools for IntelR

Wed, 05 Apr 2006 11:45:00 EDT

Absoft Corporation announced the new Absoft Roll with IntelR Software Products for Platform Rocks. The new Absoft Roll provides software developers with the best compilers, debuggers, math and message passing libraries, and advanced performance tuning and optimization tools for compiling, debugging, running, and optimizing high performance computing applications for clusters and grids.

Linux.SYS-CON.com Feature: Live Patching on Linux

Sat, 18 Mar 2006 14:00:00 EST

There are some computing systems that require high availability. Telecommunication systems are a good example. They require 24 hours a day and 365 days a year service availability and their downtime should not exceed five minutes per year and that includes hardware and software upgrades. These systems require carrier-grade reliability that guarantees high service availability, 99.999% uptime or higher.

Linux.SYS-CON.com Cover Story: Rapid Cluster Deployment

Fri, 17 Mar 2006 08:15:00 EST

After building a number of clusters from the ground up -including one that made it to the Top500 Supercomputer list - I decided to try a service that many vendors now offer - having a system racked and stacked at the factory then shipped to us. Such a service saves a huge amount of time, not to mention my back, not having to build the cluster and cable all the equipment together. I've been a fan of well-cabled systems and have found the quality control to be acceptable. The key component is the pre-build requirements and verification before the system is built. This will ensure the system shipped is what is expected when it arrives at your front door. There can still be a fair amount of cabling that has to be done once it arrives, if you have a multi-rack configuration, but it's usually limited to plugging in the system's power and public network.

OSDL Mobile Linux Initiative

Tue, 21 Feb 2006 13:15:00 EST

The global mobile phone market is enjoying explosive growth. With annual unit sales in the hundreds of millions, Gartner analysts estimate that by 2009 the worldwide installed based will top 2.6 billion mobile handsets. For the Linux and Open Source segment of the IT industry, such numbers are tantalizing, orders of magnitude beyond shipments and even the installed base for servers, and far greater in volume than the worldwide desktop market. For the Linux software and related hardware markets, mobile phones are an opportunity to 'break out' and enjoy greater market share in client devices, complementing the already important presence of Linux in the voice and data communications infrastructure.

Benefiting from Open Source Development

Sun, 05 Feb 2006 12:45:00 EST

In a market that is defined by today's tight IT budgets, saving on software licenses can mean the difference between financial failure and success for a software development project. While our corporate clients use commercial-grade application servers, we sometimes find ourselves in a situation where there are no funds for developer licenses of these commercial application servers. Out of necessity, we developed and implemented a process that allows for development on top of an open source stack, while production delivery relies on a commercial application server.

Linux.SYS-CON.com Feature - Best Practices in Cluster Management and HPC

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 08:30:00 EDT

Albert Einstein defined success as 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration. Although he had no inkling about the emergence of Linux Clusters for High Performance Computing (HPC), his words ring true for designing, building, and managing compute clusters.

PHP 5: Open Source Scripting for the Heterogeneous Enterprise

Sat, 03 Sep 2005 13:00:00 EDT

Enterprise IT departments face significant challenges in building applications that tie together heterogeneous business functions and data from a range of existing systems and applications. Existing portal applications are too rigid and inflexible to adapt to changing business requirements. Existing Java and J2EE application development tools are complex and sophisticated, requiring the commitment of expensive resources and long development cycles.

Open Source Accounting Solutions

Fri, 12 Aug 2005 15:00:00 EDT

At first glance, you might think accounting systems are the main type of software that keep you using Windows systems. QuickBooks, Peachtree, Microsoft Money, and Quicken all run on Windows, and not directly in Linux. These programs have certainly captured the market for financial software for small businesses. Slightly larger businesses opt for expensive enterprise accounting systems such as Great Plains, MAS 90, and Lawson. These programs require extensive customization to make them work for a particular business. A few open source systems have emerged to provide compelling alternatives to proprietary accounting software. These systems are beginning to surpass the proprietary offerings in terms of features, customizability, and flexibility.

Migrating File and Print Services from Windows to Linux

Wed, 13 Jul 2005 20:45:00 EDT

Most organizations provide their users with the ability to print, store, and access files on network servers. Accessing and saving files to network drives and printing to shared network printers is probably something administrators don't spend much time thinking about unless it's to help users install print drivers or assist them in accessing shared network directories. If your organization has moved to Linux in the data center (or in some of your business workgroups), migrating Windows file and print services to Linux is a good next step. Obviously, before embarking on a migration, you'll want to make sure your technical staff has the necessary skills to implement and maintain file and print services in a Linux environment. For any migration, consider professional consulting and training options. Oftentimes, the money spent on consulting and training outweighs the man-hours and productivity costs of a migration gone to hell. As a preamble, let's briefly make a case for migrating file and print services to Linux. According to a PC Magazine lab test, Linux print serving provides up to 60% better throughput than printing under Windows and that, from a performance perspective, Linux has more than 100% better average response time than printing under Windows.

How to Migrate from Microsoft IIS Web Server to Apache on Linux

Sat, 25 Jun 2005 12:45:00 EDT

In Part 1 ('Why Are You Waiting?', Vol. 2, issue 9), I discussed the business and technical considerations in migrating Microsoft IIS Web servers to Apache on Linux. Now, I'll address those who've decided that migrating to Apache on Linux is the way to go for their organization and show how to make that decision a reality.

OSDL and Desktop Linux - Hype Meets Reality

Tue, 14 Jun 2005 11:00:00 EDT

Linux has come a long way, quite quickly over the past couple of years. It has moved from a system usable only by those willing and able to spend time installing, configuring, and re-configuring again to systems that are sold by a wide variety of distributors, some of which have specialized desktop distributions. The list includes distributions such as Red Hat, Novell, Mandrake, Debian, and several others for specific geographies. They all install about as easily as any other OS that doesn't come pre-installed from a machine maker.

Open Source Mobile Phones

Tue, 14 Jun 2005 11:00:00 EDT

In the past 18 months, mobile phone manufacturers in Asia and elsewhere have introduced over a dozen handset models based on Linux, and before the end of 2005, you can expect to see a dozen more smart and feature phones announced and shipping. While it's easy to gush over this emerging trend, and to wax eloquent over the technical particulars of these intelligent mobile devices, it may be more interesting to examine the drivers behind this wave of adoption.

Building the Better Blade

Mon, 30 May 2005 12:15:00 EDT

When blade servers burst on the computing scene several years ago, they were hailed as a replacement for traditional rack-mount solutions and a catalyst for the continuing shift away from proprietary Unix servers and mainframes and toward systems leveraging the x86 architecture and Linux. Fueled by promises of lower cost, higher density, and easier manageability, 1,000-node blade deployments were expected to address enterprise server hardware consolidation needs.

Metadot Uses LAMP to Create a Popular Portal Application

Mon, 30 May 2005 12:15:00 EDT

Trade publications, news magazines, and blogs are filled with secrets and solutions for easily and cost-effectively building Web sites, intranets, and the like. Recipes like these are great but, in reality, how do we make it happen?