Latest [lwlatest] from Linux

Swisscom Floats Red Hat Cloud

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 07:15:00 EST

Swisscom, the Swiss telecom, is going into the cloud business. Its subsidiary Swisscom IT Services AG has signed up with Red Hat as a Certified Cloud Provider and launched a public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud targeting enterprise-class customers primarily in the Swiss market. It’s offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux by the hour or year for virtual machine consumption on the IaaS cloud. Swisscom just posted its first quarterly loss in 10 years, losing $911 million largely because of a write-down in its Italian fixed-line unit impacted by the Italian debt crisis. It also pinched guidance on expectations of lower revenues and price erosion in its core market, which might explain it’s interest in diversifying.

CloudLinux Releases Virtualized File System for Shared Hosters

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 08:12:00 EST

CloudLinux, Inc., on Thursday released CafeFS 3, a virtualized file system for shared hosters that cages each customer within its own virtualized file system. CageFS becomes part of CloudLinux OS at no additional charge. CloudLinux OS, the only commercially-supported Linux OS made specifically for shared hosting, substantially increases server stability, density and security to bring far greater efficiency to the Web hosting business. To eliminate potential security issues, CageFS ensures that users will not see any other users and will have no way to detect the presence of other users on the server. As an additional precaution, users are not able to see server configuration files, such as Apache config files. Meanwhile, the user's environment is fully functional and is not restricted in other ways. Beyond providing safe Web hosting, CageFS offers the necessary functionality and security to provide safe IRC, shell and backup hosting.

IGEL Supports Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 21:08:00 EST

"We are pleased to be able to pass the improvements that Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 offers in centralized provisioning of virtual desktops directly on to our customers," states Florian Spatz, Product Marketing Manager at IGEL Technology, who also points out that, "this partnership strengthens our market position as the world's leading vendor of Linux-based thin clients and presents our customers with attractively priced solution options for enterprise-wide provisioning of virtual desktops."

CloudLinux Announces Support for Atomia

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 07:30:00 EST

CloudLinux, Inc., developers of the only commercially-supported Linux server operating system made specifically for shared hosting, today announced that CloudLinux OS is now fully compatible with the Atomia software automation platform. "Now, Atomia customers can easily upgrade their operating system to CloudLinux OS greatly enhancing the security and efficiency of their shared hosting businesses," said Igor Seletskiy, CloudLinux CEO. "Better control over computing resources leads to a better overall customer experience and results in lower churn." CloudLinux cages each user account within its own Lightweight Virtual Environment (LVE), allowing system administrators to limit CPU, memory, and the concurrent connections available to each server tenant. LVE effectively prevents the "bad neighbor effect," wherein one tenant can slow or take down an entire server. By limiting abuse, shared hosters can substantially increase server density, bringing far greater efficiency to their business.

Convirture Reports Strong 2011 as Virtualization Management Takes Off

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 05:00:00 EST

Convirture, which makes management software for Linux virtualization, had an excellent 2011. Convirture announced its fifth consecutive quarter-over-quarter growth, including increasing its customer base ten-fold for its commercial product, ConVirt Enterprise. The company now has customers in every global region, including North and South America, EMEA and Asia. The open source version of ConVirt has now been downloaded more than 60,000 times. In total, ConVirt software, which is available for most major Linux distributions including Debian, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu, is now being used by more than 8,000 businesses. "Linux-based virtualization is here, it's real and clearly there is an appetite for something other than VMware when it comes to managing cloud computing and virtualization technologies," said Arsalan Farooq, CEO of Convirture. "As KVM and Xen continue to gain traction with enterprise customers, we expect to see even faster growth through 2012."

CloudLinux Integrates with Vembu StoreGrid

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 10:07:24 EST

CloudLinux, Inc., developers of a commercially supported Linux server operating system made specifically for shared hosting, has announced integration with managed online backup software StoreGrid Hosting Provider Edition from Vembu Technologies -- delivering a solid, easy path to managed online backup. “Now, providers using StoreGrid can easily enhance the security and efficiency of their shared hosting businesses by upgrading their operating system to CloudLinux OS,” said Igor Seletskiy, CloudLinux CEO. “Better control over computing resources leads to a better overall customer experience and results in lower churn.” Vembu StoreGrid is built to address the complex data protection and disaster recovery requirements of dedicated, shared, cloud and managed hosting providers. Worldwide, some 3,000 managed service providers use StoreGrid for the managed backup service they offer customers. Providers can back up heterogeneous and virtualized environments at a very affordable cost.

Typemock Joins Red Hat Innovate in Israel

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 14:14:36 EST

Typemock, a provider and pioneer of unit testing solutions, has announced it has been selected to participate in Red Hat Innovate, a new initiative launched by Red Hat in Israel. The initiative is designed to assist software development start-up companies based in Israel to leverage the power of open source communities. Red Hat Innovate offers numerous benefits, including joint marketing activities and access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system and JBoss Enterprise Middleware for development.

MapR Pushes the Hadoop Envelope

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 08:15:00 EST

MapR Technologies Tuesday released version 1.2 of its MapR Distribution for Apache Hadoop. The widgetry is imbued with more features to leverage MapReduce 2.0, when it gets here, a move meant to push the start-up way ahead of its Hadoop rivals. Out now in an early alpha cut called Yarn, MapReduce 2.0 is meant to let Hadoop run more than just MapReduce applications on the same cluster. (Think MPI and stream processing.) MapR, which already supports the industry-standard NFS interface as well as the Hadoop FileSystem API, means to combine MapReduce 2.0 with a robust storage services layer that provides direct access through NFS so companies can take full advantage of 2.0’s next-generation Hadoop resource management framework. It expects no one else will be able to match it – at least not for some time. The point release also expands support for C/C++ API access, provides easy-to-install packages for Mac and Windows (in addition to Linux) – no need to install third-party libraries like cygwin – and upgrades various packages such as HBase, Hive and Pig.

HP’s Putting a Back Door in the Itanium Alamo

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 10:00:00 EST

Goosed by Oracle – which has refused to port any more of its software to the Itanium chip signally used by HP – HP announced an oddly named Odyssey Project that’s supposed to unify Unix and x86 server architectures. Oracle claims Itanium has reached the end of its life – although Intel and HP haven’t told customers that – and in fact deny it – and says HP should move to the x86. HP is suing Oracle to force it to support Itanium to protect its Itanium revenues, which are now shrinking in part because of the uncertainty Oracle has injected into the market, down ~23% last quarter. HP CFO Cathie Lesjak said just the other day that Oracle’s position has made it hard for HP to close Itanium deals. Evidently caught out by Oracle, HP is now suddenly saying that customers “need the availability and resilience of Unix-based platforms along with the familiarity and cost-efficiency of industry-standard platforms.”

CloudLinux Announces Preferred Partner Program

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 16:00:00 EST

CloudLinux, Inc., developers of a commercially supported Linux server operating system made specifically for shared hosting, has announced its Preferred Partner Program with VPS.net the first to join. VPS.net, based in Salt Lake City, Utah, with operations and data centers all over the world, is part of UK2 Group, which provides web hosting and Internet services to a million customers worldwide. With offices in London and Utah, the UK2 Group employs more than 200 staff. VPS.net provides a high-performance, optimized and scalable cloud hosting service that includes the CloudLinux OS, which it offers to all of its customers worldwide. As a Preferred Partner, VPS.net and CloudLinux will do joint marketing and sales while VPS.net will have special access to technical resources. Additionally, VPS.net will host CloudLinux repositories allowing for exceptionally fast and reliable updates for VPS.net customers using CloudLinux software.

Amazon to Rent Out Supercomputers

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 07:15:00 EST

Amazon Web Services wants to move further up-market and service more of the HPC crowd so it’s publicly beta testing a Cluster Compute Eight Extra Large (CC2), its biggest, most powerful cloud service to date. The thing has 16 Xeon cores (a pair of eights with Hyper-Threading enabled), 60.5GB of RAM, 3.37TB of storage and 10 gigabit Ethernet for cluster communication. Users can have it with Linux or Windows Server 2008 R2. It costs $2.40 an hour per instance or $4,146 for a reserved instance on a one-year contract. Cheaper pricing might be had on the EC2 Spot Market. An array of 290 CC2 instances good for 63.07 teraFLOPS would run $1,000 an hour. Amazon fashioned a Linux cluster of 17,024 cores (1,064 instances) that ranked 42 on the latest Top 500 list just out. It hit 240.09 teraFLOPS.

Amazon Émigré Starts Network Monitoring Firm

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 06:45:00 EST

Boundary, a real-time network monitoring-as-a-service (MaaS) start-up that’s been pretty sub rosa since it got organized last year, surfaced Tuesday sporting a Big Data analytics platform as well that’s supposed to do what Hadoop and Cassandra do but a thousand to tens of thousands times faster. The company was started by CEO Benjamin Black, who was engineering director at Microsoft Windows Live involved in building one of the largest content delivery networks in the world and co-authored the first documents on what would become EC2 as principal engineer for Amazon infrastructure. He also led the design and implementation of new layer 3 network for Amazon’s production network. Boundary’s been operating since January on $4.1 million of Black and LightSpeed Venture Partners’ money spent in part apparently on Boundary’s own infrastructure. Its widgetry, currently in beta, works with public clouds like EC2, of course, and private clouds and across physical and virtual systems.

China Reportedly Develops Its Own Processor

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 07:00:00 EST

China says it’s developed a Linux-running supercomputer using a natively developed 16-core 64-bit RISC chip called the ShenWei SW1600. It’s unclear if the Chinese started from scratch with a brand new architecture or based the processor on existing American designs. Reports suggest it could be a reverse engineered DEC Alpha 21164, others something beholden to Intel. It’s supposed to be capable of 140 Gflops at 1.1GHz. Last year China built what was for six months the world’s fastest supercomputer out of Intel and Nvidia parts. It was dethroned by a Fujitsu machine using Sparc chips.

CFEngine Moves to the US

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 04:15:00 EDT

CFEngine AS, the Norwegian outfit with the popular eponymous open source configuration and compliance management widgetry for automating distributed infrastructure, has moved its sales operation to Palo Alto in hopes of turning its freeloading Fortune 1000 accounts into paying customers. Its first job will be to identify the big companies using its free software that haven’t taken a subscription yet. Its cross-platform commercial stuff, just upgraded to CFEngine 3 Nova, costs $250 per server. The new rev is supposed to give system administrators more control over constantly changing, increasingly complex IT infrastructure.

CloudLinux Partners with Parallels to Improve Stability of Hosting Servers

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 07:00:00 EDT

CloudLinux, Inc., developers of the commercially supported Linux server operating system made specifically for shared hosting, has announced a partnership with Parallels, the hosting and cloud services enablement leader. CloudLinux OS, which will now be accessible directly from Parallels Plesk Panel and Parallels Business Automation solutions, offers web hosting companies the ability to manage resources available to their shared hosting customers. Parallels' customers can now purchase CloudLinux OS licenses directly from Parallels. This agreement is in addition to the existing integration of CloudLinux OS with Parallels Business Automation, currently used by many larger web hosting companies. CloudLinux is fully compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and CentOS, enabling easy conversion -- typically in less than 10 minutes.

The Linux Foundation Announces Five New European Members

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 02:01:00 EDT

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, has announced that five Europe-based companies are joining the organization: AboveIT, Comarch, CSR, Symbio and Tieto. These companies are joining The Linux Foundation to collaborate on advancing Linux in the enterprise and in mobile computing. They join seven other new members from Europe announced earlier this month (http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/announcements/2011/10/linux-fo...) and are coming together to collaborate this week at the first-ever LinuxCon Europe taking place in Prague, Czech Republic: http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon-europe.

Management Software for Linux Virtualization Made Available

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 09:00:00 EDT

Convirture has released ConVirt Enterprise Cloud - software that manages virtualized datacenters and cloud deployments built on KVM and Xen virtual machines. ConVirt Enterprise Cloud provides a set of sophisticated tools capable of managing an entire virtual and cloud infrastructure from a single console, including private clouds, hybrid clouds, traditional virtual machines as well as public cloud resources such as Amazon EC2. "As we developed this product and worked with our beta customers, we kept hearing the same thing again and again: customers are concerned about the potential for complexity, fragmentation and workload management issues that come with adding cloud resources," said Arsalan Farooq, CEO of Convirture. "Until now, users of KVM and Xen did not have a management layer that provides a unified means of viewing and managing their entire traditional, virtual and cloud-based environments. With ConVirt Enterprise Cloud, IT staff can manage the complex, properly allocate computing resources and deliver real ROI for the organization."

Likewise Works with Microsoft to Enable Next-Generation NAS Devices

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 06:45:00 EDT

A sea change is about to occur in the storage industry - from block based storage to file based for applications and virtualization - and believe it or not it all stems from changes coming to the SMB protocol. Yes, that's right, a protocol. The performance of back-end storage has been a major choke point to scaling virtualization and cloud infrastructures due to limitations of previous versions of CIFS/SMB, which led to the adoption of block based storage. Now, with SMB 2.2, file based storage becomes not only a credible option, but the recommended option for provisioning Microsoft workloads. Likewise Software has announced an agreement with Microsoft to support SMB 2.2 by adding Linux and Unix-based devices - which enables secure access to unstructured data using a consistent set of protocols across platforms.

Free Yourself from Database Client Libraries in 15 Minutes

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 10:30:00 EDT

Are you tired of managing your database client libraries? Imagine one driver supporting all major UNIX/Linux platforms for all major databases... Imagine no more, Progress DataDirect Connect for ODBC does all that – and more. In addition to using wire protocol technology to eliminate the need for database client libraries and supporting all major UNIX/Linux platforms for all major databases, Progress DataDirect Connect for ODBC delivers the fastest, most scalable application performance of any driver on the market today. In this short video, you will see how to free yourself from the hassles of Database Client Libraries. If you aren’t already using Progress DataDirect Connect for ODBC, see what you are missing.

CloudLinux Now Running on More Than 5,000 Servers

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 11:37:31 EDT

CloudLinux Inc. makers of CloudLinux OS, on Tuesday announced that it is now being run on more than 5,000 production servers worldwide, a 100 percent increase in just six months. CloudLinux isolates each user account within its own Lightweight Virtual Environment (LVE) allowing system administrators to limit CPU, memory, and the concurrent connections available to each server tenant. LVE effectively prevents the, "bad neighbor effect," wherein one tenant can slow or take down an entire server - the number one cause of shared-server stability issues, making it an ideal platform for shared hosting. "We are now beginning to see the exponential growth in CloudLinux OS adoption that we expected once the OS gains acceptance," said Igor Seletskiy, CloudLinux CEO. "Shared hosters, data centers - and others - that need a commercially-supported, cost-effective means of providing a secure, dense, server environment are increasingly turning to CloudLinux to maximize efficiencies."

CloudLinux 6.1 Introduced with Free Conversion and Installation Offer

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 09:15:00 EDT

CloudLinux, Inc., has released CloudLinux OS version 6.1, which is based on kernel version 2.6.32 that adds enhanced security, stability and compatibility to the company's flagship product. As the only commercially-supported Linux OS made specifically for shared hosting, CloudLinux OS 6.1 is fully compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and CentOS, as well as most major control panels including cPanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin and others. Hosts can easily convert to CloudLinux, typically in less than 10 minutes. With the release of CloudLinux 6.1, the company is offering free conversion/installation support through October 15, 2011. "CloudLinux 6.1 further improves on what has quickly become the premier OS choice for shared hosters," said Igor Seletskiy, CloudLinux CEO. "Support for the latest Linux kernel enables hosting providers to offer the best service offerings to their customers by delivering shared hosting products that best meet the needs and budgets of businesses of all sizes."

Red Hat Pushes into All-Cloud Management

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 06:30:00 EDT

Red Hat is building a policy-based cloud manager meant to spin up, deploy and, well, manage multiple Linux and Windows virtual images, their applications and their necessaries across clouds. It’s called Aeolus presumably after the Greek ruler of the winds. It’s advertised as “freeing users from cloud lock-in by making the choice of cloud provider – private, public, or hybrid – a simple launch-time option.” It’s theoretically supposed to pick the best solution, but it’s also part of Red Hat’s beta IaaS widgetry, CloudForms. Red Hat says it wants Aeolus to be an open source project, but you know how those things go, the butcher never quite gets his thumb off the scale.

Basic Apache and MySQL Performance Tuning

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 16:30:00 EDT

Apache and MySQL make up the backbone of many Linux based web servers. According to the August 2011 Web Server Survey by Netcraft, Apache currently runs on 65.18% (or 301,771,518!) of web servers. Similarly, MySQL is the most popular open source database and holds a significant portion of the market share – especially for web content. This article will detail how you can get at the ‘low-hanging fruit’ in order to make some simple changes that will yield big performance gains. If your system is running httpd, the Apache web server, it will definitely benefit you to evaluate and modify your web server configuration to ensure that your system runs smooth. This can be an incredibly broad topic and certain an article of its own, but here are a few things you can address that can provide a big impact in your performance.

Microsoft Cuts Cloud Deal with Chinese Linux Outfit

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 07:45:00 EDT

Microsoft turned up Monday in Beijing with a cloud pact with leading Chinese Linux provider China Standard Software Co Ltd (CS2C). They’re supposed to co-develop, co-market and sell “mixed-source” solutions to the Chinese public and private cloud market. The widgetry will be built on Microsoft’s Hyper-V cloud architecture and include support for CS2C’s NeoKylin Linux Server products. A customer legal covenant agreement goes with it. What exactly that means wasn’t disclosed nor were any terms. The pair also pledged to sponsor a joint virtual technology lab in Beijing for solution development and testing of cloud solutions, which is supposed to enable customers to move to virtualization and a cloud-based IT infrastructure. It will focus on the certification of NeoKylin on Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V, creating Microsoft Systems Center management packs for NeoKylin application workloads, and incorporating support for NeoKylin in Hyper-V.

Samba 3.6 Out

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 10:15:00 EDT

The Samba Team has released Samba 3.6, a major new release of the Free Software file, print and authentication server suite for Microsoft Windows clients. The widgetry includes the first Samba implementation of Microsoft's new SMB2 file-serving protocol. Samba’s new SMB2 server has been tested by major vendors and has reportedly been able to double the performance of some network applications when run in conjunction with Windows 7 clients. Samba has also completely rewritten its print subsystem. Samba 3.6 is the first “on the wire”-compatible version of Microsoft’s SPOOLSS printing subsystem, and is the basis for ongoing work to create an implementation of Windows printing separate from the Samba file server.

Linux Labs Completed Development for HPC Cloud Computing Service

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 21:00:00 EDT

Searchlight Solutions Ltd. on Tuesday announced its subsidiary, Linux Labs International, Inc., has recently completed a key upgrade of its proprietary NimbusOS for use as the Operating System for its High Performance Cloud Computing ("HPC2") service. Linux Labs NimbusOS was developed to be compatible and configurable for almost all HPC applications. This recently finalized upgrade is an important milestone in preparing for the formal launch of the Company's HPC2 Service. The modified NimbusOS will run the servers that will allow customers to run their HPC applications.

The Detested Microsoft-Novell Deal Lives On

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 07:45:00 EDT

Remember that hated no-sue deal between Microsoft and Novell? Well, it’s been renewed with SUSE, the now Novell-replacing Attachmate-owned business unit returned to Germany where SUSE came from. The deal, as loathed as it was by the open source crowed, was the salvation of SUSE and has now been extended another four years or until January 1, 2016 and calls for Microsoft to invest $100 million in new SUSE Linux Enterprise certificates for customers receiving Linux support from SUSE. Microsoft said in its Monday announcement that “As IT operating environments become increasingly consumerized, cloud-based and automated, there is an implicit expectation that the underlying technologies from multiple vendors should work together. For this reason, the collaborative relationship between Microsoft and SUSE has come to be viewed as a model for the industry.”

Oracle Makes Oracle Linux More Competitive

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 16:00:00 EDT

Oracle has bought Ksplice for its little-heard-from Linux operation. Price was not disclosed. The Cambridge, Massachusetts start-up offers zero downtime updating, which is supposed to increase the security, reliability, availability and general likeability of Oracle Linux by letting customers apply or delete security updates, diagnostics patches and critical bug fixes without rebooting. Oracle expects the widgetry to distinguish it from Red Hat (from which Oracle Linux derives) and SUSE, which Ksplice will not support.

Top 10 Reasons to Choose an Open Source Application Integration Solution

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 12:06:00 EDT

Why choose an open source ESB? To learn more about the value open source brings to application integration, download the whitepaper, “Top 10 Reasons to Choose an Open Source Application Integration Solution.”

Likewise Sells Heritage Assets to Go into Storage

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 06:15:00 EDT

Likewise, the open source company that made its bones connecting Linux, Mac OS X and Unix systems to Microsoft Active Directory, has sold off its Active Directory Bridge business unit, including its Likewise Open and Likewise Enterprise software, to Beyond Trust so it can concentrate on “disruptive” storage software. It claims it “sits at a very unique intersection of the storage, identity and security markets; we plan to fully exploit this position. As many of you know, we have quietly become the foundational platform for many of the biggest names in the storage industry. Moving forward we will be making a number of much higher profile announcements.”

Typemock Launches Easy Unit Testing Framework for Linux

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 05:00:00 EDT

Typemock, a provider and pioneer of easy unit testing solutions, announced on Tuesday the launch of Isolator++ for Linux. Isolator++ for Linux enables easy unit testing of C++ on the Linux distributions, Ubuntu, Fedora (Red Hat) and SUSE (Novell). This release marks Typemock's ability to offer unit testing tools and mocking frameworks for multiple platforms and enable organizations that work on Windows and Linux to benefit from one solution for both platforms. Isolator++ for Linux enables unit testing - the foundation of agile development - of any C/ C++ code (including complex code such as statics, globals and non virtual method) by allowing the test to intercept and fake behaviours. The API is specifically designed to make tests more concise, more resistant to production code changes and easier to understand for new users which ensures that time is not wasted re-writing unit tests. It also protects the code from regression bugs and allows organizations to feel confident that their final product meets industry standards.

Oracle Releases VM Template for MySQL Enterprise Edition

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 06:00:00 EDT

Enabling more efficient and lower cost deployments of virtualized MySQL environments, Oracle on Monday announced the first Oracle VM Template for MySQL Enterprise Edition. The new Oracle VM Template for MySQL helps eliminate manual configuration efforts and risks by providing a pre-installed, pre-configured and certified software stack that includes Oracle VM Server for x86, Oracle Linux with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel and MySQL Enterprise Edition. By pre-integrating the open source database with Oracle Linux and Oracle Virtualization technologies, enterprise users and ISVs can deploy and manage a virtualized MySQL database server for Web and cloud-based applications. The Oracle VM Template for MySQL Enterprise Edition further demonstrates Oracle's investment in MySQL and allows users to benefit from a single point of contact for 24/7 technical support for all pre-configured components.

Red Hat Wheels Out MRG 2.0

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 09:00:00 EDT

Red Hat Thursday delivered Red Hat Enterprise MRG 2.0, an upgrade of its Messaging, Realtime and Grid widgetry, which is supposed to include advances in performance, scalability and management, and support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1. Red Hat says it delivers high-speed/low latency, open standard application messaging; a deterministic low-latency real-time kernel; and a high-performance computing grid scheduler for distributed workloads and cloud computing. MRG is supposed to be important to Red Hat’s cloud strategy and its month-old OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

Penguin Computing Launches New Interface for Easy Access to Its HPC Cloud

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 02:00:00 EDT

Penguin Computing, experts in high performance computing (HPC) solutions, on Tuesday announced the immediate availability of PODtool, an interface that makes it easy to offload excess workload to Penguin’s on-demand environment Penguin Computing on Demand (POD). PODtool is a web-service based command line interface that drastically simplifies the management of compute jobs on Penguin Computing’s HPC on-demand offering POD. Compute job scripts for SGE and TORQUE can be submitted and will be implicitly routed to the corresponding execution environment. Data staging commands allow for easy data transfer of job input and output data to and from POD. Job control and monitoring features enable users to fully control compute jobs they are authorized to manage. PODtool’s user account mapping capabilities facilitate the management of POD compute jobs from any Linux system.

Mentor Graphics Announces Embedded Linux Platform Support for Freescale

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 00:15:00 EDT

Mentor Graphics Corporation on Tuesday announced its support for Freescale Semiconductor’s Advanced Multi-Processing (AMP) Series of QorIQ multicore processors by providing its comprehensive Mentor Embedded Linux platform, open source tools and services, to deliver a unified workflow for Freescale customers. The QorIQ AMP Series provides 28-nanometer process technology, an efficient 64-bit core and highly advanced acceleration engines for optimal performance and power efficiency in processing for networking, industrial and aerospace/military markets. Freescale customers who are developing Linux-based applications using the AMP Series processors are expected to realize productivity and device performance gains when using the Mentor Embedded Linux platform. Freescale and Mentor Graphics have developed a unified workflow methodology for embedded Linux-based development, enabling customers to create innovative, customized applications with greater productivity and reduced risk.

Adobe AIR Dead on Desktop Linux

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 08:30:00 EDT

AIR has joined Adobe Reader in the dustbin of Adobe products on Linux. According to figures gathered by Netmarketshare that Adobe uses to justify its decision to terminate AIR on desktop Linux, desktop Linux accounts for less than 1% of the market. More important – from Adobe’s point-of-view – desktop Linux has accounted for less than 0.5% of lifetime AIR downloads so, instead, Adobe is off chasing the “mobile client,” the 200 million Android, BlackBerry Tablet OS and iOS devices that can download and run AIR apps. It’s killing off AIR and the AIR SDK for desktop Linux with the latest 2.7 release of AIR. The last Adobe release of AIR for desktop Linux is AIR 2.6.

Eucalyptus Loses Ubuntu to OpenStack

Fri, 13 May 2011 09:30:00 EDT

Without saying why, the Ubuntu project has decided that the Ubuntu Cloud should be based on Rackspace’s open source OpenStack from here on out. The current Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) based on Eucalyptus Systems CEO Marten Mickos’ euphonious code won’t exactly be thrown out with the bathwater. Canonical will continue to support it as a standalone implementation. It said customers that have deployed Eucalyptus private clouds will continue to get maintenance apparently through April 2015. However, migration tools will be provided in Ubuntu Server 11.10, which will also include the OpenStack stack. It’s due in October.

Ubuntu Cloud to Transition to OpenStack

Wed, 11 May 2011 09:30:00 EDT

The Ubuntu project announced on Tuesday that future versions of Ubuntu Cloud will use OpenStack as a foundation technology. The Ubuntu project gathered in Budapest, Hungary, to discuss future development plans that will culminate in the October release of Ubuntu 11.10. This announcement makes OpenStack a core part of the Ubuntu Cloud product, which enables users to build an open source cloud. The current releases of Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), which is based on Eucalyptus, will not impacted. Eucalyptus will continue to be available for download and will be supported by Canonical. This means that customers who have deployed private clouds based on existing Ubuntu releases will continue to receive maintenance and, in the case of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, this will continue through to April 2015. Eucalyptus will remain within Ubuntu and will be available for users who prefer this technology. For customers with existing private cloud deployments, Ubuntu will provide tools to automate the migration process to the Ubuntu Server 11.10 when it is released in October 2011.

Attachmate Guts Novell

Thu, 05 May 2011 09:00:00 EDT

After taking possession of Novell, Attachmate’s first reaction was to gut the place. According to published reports “hundreds” of surprised employees in Provo, Utah, where Attachmate means to return the company’s headquarters back from Massachusetts, were laid off Monday. One report put the number at 700-800 people and said sales, HR, legal and corporate operations were particularly hard hit. Attachmate didn’t say how many were let go but product lines are reportedly also being trimmed. Staffers on the open source Miguel de Icaza-led Mono Project, the cross-platform version of Microsoft’s C#, Common Language Runtime and.NET framework, were let go

ISVs - OS-Free App Delivery for Instant Provisioning

Wed, 04 May 2011 09:00:00 EDT

Application virtualization innovator AppZero announced a two-part webinar series aimed at Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) who are looking for ways to reduce the cost of acquiring customers (CAC) as well as the time and cost of their sales. AppZero discusses and demonstrates how to accomplish these goals without altering the ISV business model or technology of choice. Combining a 30-minute overview of business and technology concepts with a follow-on 60-minute technical drilldown session, AppZero will efficiently address the interests of both ISV business decision makers and technical practitioners.