Sun Throws It’s Hat into the Virtualization Ring

In a move that was expected, Sun Microsystems has announced it has a Xen Hypervisor offshoot called xVM (stands for X86 Virtual Machine) that has appeared in OpenSolaris, but hasn’t yet been included in the standard version of Solaris.

Don’t expect to see this happen any time soon, and the first inclusion into Solaris will likely be in the form of a VMWare appliance, running on a hardware appliance.  Yes, thats right, Sun wants to provide a hardware appliance that would be the best place to host their virtual appliance.  Guess you have to get that hardware business into view at every opportunity, hmm?

Ian Murdock’s Project Indiana (an attempt to modernize and streamline the best of Linux-like advances into Solaris) will likely be the first place where we’ll see this integration occur.  Apparently there might be some performance enhancements that result from it’s running on OpenSolaris, or so this blog claims.

You can see some slides from a presentation about xVM and get more information.

 

Linux World 2007 in SF

Well, unfortunately I did not get to personally attend Linux World in San Francisco last week, but fortunately for me – there are tons of outlets for me to get details on what the buzz was all about last week. If any of you happened to be there, and have additional comments/insights to share, I’d love to see some comments posted…

SearchEnterpriseLinux’s Jack Loftus posted a blog entry which links to several other articles and interesting summaries… as good a place to start as any.

Then of course, there’s the official LinuxWorld 2007 conference website which has links to several major industry announcements and even promises to have videos of all the keynotes – although they aren’t posted quite yet.

If you’re interested in seeing some of Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian’s keynote where he discusses how we can accelerate adoption of Linux (in general), you can read a summary from Jack Loftus here, a summary from CNet here and watch the entire keynote via Flash here or even download Ron’s slides here. Personally, I think he did a good job of conveying the message (yes, I’m probably a bit biased, but I think his points are generally right on for enterprise Linux), and yes I truly think his points (if followed) would help Linux in general and SUSE.

Here’s a link to Novell’s press kit for Linux World – we had several exciting press announcements to share last week… definitely check these out!

You can also check out Novell CMO’s video blog entries from the Linux World show floor here and here.

Novell’s Russ Dastrup video guru also created a couple of videos for the show… here and here.

Finally, I’m one of those “visual” people… so I love multimedia. BIG THANKS to the folks at TechTargetTV for putting a series of videos together on YouTube which show some of the highlights/reflections of the conference. My favorite, has to be their video of the “Bag of Schwag” – pretty funny!

 

ATT – Migrating from UNIX to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10

• Sep 18-21, 2007 @ Atlanta, GA
• Advanced Technical Training: 4 days, Lecture + Hands on
• Help us out and put your favorite Linux specialist’s name in the “Special Instructions” or “Customer Code” field when you register.
• More Details

More events in the East…

 

Case Study: Stock Firm Reaps Linux Benefits

Redmayne-Bentley, a stock broker firm in the UK switched from an aging legacy Unix platform to SUSE Linux Enterprise on Unisys systems. The firm’s main issues were to reduce costs, improve security and provide constant availability, which they did with Unisys’s and Novell’s help, resulting in:

• Transaction speeds jumped 10x
• Batch processing dropped to less than an 1/8th of previous times
• Improved failbacks and security
• No disruption to ongoing business

Silicon.com has a well-written wrapup on this case study, while the Unisys site has the definitive view of the migration.

Enjoy,

RossB

 

Who uses SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on System z?

Here are some public success stories for customers using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on the (zSeries) System z platform:

http://www.novell.com/success/america_first.html
http://www.novell.com/success/casas_bahia.html
http://www.novell.com/success/fnb_omaha.html
http://www.novell.com/success/ebs.html

Related blog entries of interest:

https://opseast.wordpress.com/2007/03/06/why-insurance-companies-like-linux/
https://opseast.wordpress.com/2007/02/28/mainframe-linux-vs-unix/

There’s also a whitepaper that talks about running SLES on System z:
“Server Consolidation with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on IBM System z“

 

Podcast for SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time

Expert Moiz Kohari discusses SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time in this edition of the Novell Open Audio podcast.

Check out the Podcast here.

 

New VIrtualization Beta Promises IBM System p Growth

IBM released a new virtual Linux environment called “IBM System p Application Virtual Environment” or “System p AVE” into public beta today.  Neither way of referring to this new technology is particularly mellifluous or easy to pronounce, but regardless this is seriously good news for those who have System p hardware and want to take better advantage of Linux on those boxes.

System p already has a very healthy market share at 31.5% of revenue, according to the numbers for 2006 and System p AVE’s advent is sure to help grow this market share.  Now it’s possible to consolidate AIX and Linux on the same server, the supported systems and applications are listed briefly here.

Some of the notable capabilities of AVE are:

• Ability to run most Linux X86 binaries unmodified on System p
• Virtual X86 environment and file structure
• Dynamic translation and mapping of X86 instructions to Power
• Caching to improve system performance
• No need to re-compile, translate or alter existing distributions

For more info on this beta, including the signup forms to get involved, visit the System p AVE landing page.

Powered by ScribeFire.

 

SAP and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with Xen Virtualization

There are still some IT people who are questioning whether Linux is ready for the mission critical data center applications you run your business on.  Some also have questioned whether Xen virtualization is “ready for prime time” (although it’s been fully supported and included with SLES 10 since July 2006).  The answer is an emphatic YES!

Novell just made an announcement concerning SAP running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10 using Xen that should help emphasize this fact.

“Jointly tested by Novell and SAP, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with Xen met or exceeded SAP’s stringent performance requirements for SAP applications in a virtualized environment. Virtualization of the IT infrastructure for SAP deployments can result in enormous advantages for businesses, such as consolidation of workloads onto fewer servers for reduced capital and management costs.”

Read the press release.

Check out the Novell SAP home page.

 

Oracle on SLES

Here’s a couple of links to sizeable Oracle on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) implementations.  Have any of your own you’d like to share?  Leave us a comment…

• Novell Beige Paper – Novell recently completed its upgrade from Oracle* 11.02 to Oracle 11i. As part of the process, many individual and independent systems became part of the upgraded Oracle system.
• Success Story – The Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto has built a major academic information system using Oracle* 10g running on SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server. This groundbreaking solution offers high availability and performance for critical administrative systems, with a low cost of ownership.

 

Reflection on HIMSS 2007

For those of you who aren’t acquainted with HIMSS, think of the largest trade show you’ve ever seen (for me Gartner’s Annual IT Expo in Orlando) and double or triple that! Amazingly enough, I [Ben] was told that the 2006 iteration of HIMSS was much larger than this year (even with the 24,000+ that were in attendance this past week)!

From my perspective, it was interesting to observe the growing interest and progress of open source in health care. Not only did we see this in our discussions with the major clinical application vendors (e.g., McKesson which has certified its entire clinical-application stack on Linux), but also with the small point-solution application vendors. Moreover, I was impressed in my conversations with customers to note the extent to which hospitals are using or considering Linux for their edge-servers and in their datacenters.

Long story short, while it’s clear that health care, in many regards, is still exceptionally conservative in its adoption of new infrastructure technologies, it is also obvious that there is a clear movement away from UNIX and a surge of interest, certification, and deployment on Linux.

Ben Pressley
Novell East OPS Team / cub-reporter

 

Mainframe Linux vs. Unix

Here’s a nice overview article from Ken Milberg on SearchOpenSource.com which talks about features and benefits of Linux on the mainframe platform compared to Unix – in general terms.  The short of it is that Linux on the Mainframe can provide the “best of both worlds” — the innovation and “flexibility of Linux, along with the availability and support of an IBM mainframe”

While we’re on the subject, here’s a website with a lot of great information and links related to Linux on the Mainframe…  http://www.linuxvm.org

 

Improving Retail TCO with Linux – did you miss it?

Did you miss the webinar entitled “Improving Retail TCO with Linux” that was held on February 22, 2007?  If so, you don’t have to worry… it was recorded.  You can access the presentation and download the slides from this website.

The focus of the presentation was in learning how to “cut TCO with SUSE Linux Enterprise in all tiers of your IT environment”.  Remember, that when you think of the retail industry, you can apply Linux technology in far more places than simply the front-end point-of-service machines.  In addition to POS, Linux can help with kiosks, in-store servers, in-store desktops, in-store applications, and of course data center databases or applications.

 

Hines Corp makes the move to SUSE Linux

Hines Corp, based in Michigan, had a mixed environment of Microsoft, Novell, Unix and Linux (Red Hat).  They decided to “streamline” and adopt more and more Linux in their environment; to be more precise, they chose SUSE Linux.  As a result of this strategy, they have seen improved security, improved reliability and substantial cost savings.

“…moving to Linux has saved Hines almost a million dollars on ERP costs alone. ‘Say if we went with Microsoft’s ERP application, compared to what we have today, just the initial cost would be $1.2 million, compared to $400,000. When we proposed the Microsoft solution to corporate and they saw the price tag, they said something I can’t repeat.’ “

Read the entire article from Linux.com here

 

Why switch from Unix to Linux?

It’s a question that comes up often, but it’s also one of the easiest to answer. Linux is a far more open platform than Unix is and the potential for cost savings (hardware, software, support, virtualization, etc.) are nothing short of HUGE!

Here are some articles that you might want to look at…

• SearchTechTarget.com Ask-the-Expert Q&A
• Unix maintenance costs spur Ohio EPA’s Linux adoption
• (more to be added later…)

We’d love to hear why you decided to make a move from Unix to Linux.  Enter your feedback in the comments…

 

Audi cars engineered with SUSE Linux

Who else uses Linux? German automobile maker Audi does. In fact, they are in the process of migrating from more expensive Unix servers to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and hope to be finished in 2007.

“…the company’s IT department chose Linux for three solid reasons: ‘[It runs on] commodity hardware, which is faster; better pricing; hardware-vendor independence.’ ”

This article from Linux.com talks about how Linux is making a difference at Audi.

Here is the official Novell success story for Audi