Server virtualization is rapidly becoming a common undertaking for IT departments. As a matter of fact, many organizations are now taking the next step: evaluating their virtualization investment to see whether it's helped them achieve the server consolidation goals they previously set. And along the way many IT departments have had some surprises such as a 'performance tax,' a reduction in server or application performance as a result of virtualizing applications using hardware virtualization technology. With the advent of operating system virtualization, this evaluation process is starting to reveal that some deployments and uses are perfectly suited to hardware virtualization, while others are more suited to OS virtualization.

I often wonder what happens to data when it gets erased. Just where does it go? What happens to it? Does it 'vanish' completely, or does it still exist somewhere, perhaps in the memory bank of the expanding universe?

It seems that Linux is everywhere you look these days. Among enterprise, desktop, even wireless users, Linux's versatility and portability have rapidly made it the operating system of choice. At academic institutions in particular, Linux is quickly becoming the Lingua Franca through which researchers investigate and collaborate, and Linux-based clusters have become a prerequisite for many modern research environments.

At LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco, it occurred to me that I had overlooked a very important Open Source business model, the Membership Model. Confronted by a keynote speech by Stuart Cohen, the leader of the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) (www.osdl.org), it became clear that I had jumped into the Advertising and Conversion Models too quickly and had to back up and deal with the membership phenomenon.

At the Open Source Business Conference, the Free Standards Group, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to developing and promoting open source software standards, and the Linux Standard Base (LSB) workgroup announced that the LSB has achieved unanimous official approval as an ISO standard, an important milestone signifying the maturity and scope of both the LSB and the Linux operating system.

In today's complex, multiplatform enterprise, unifying systems management under a common infrastructure is a significant force driving many business decisions. With Linux projects providing specialized applications and functionality, Unix resources running mission-critical systems, and the inevitable Windows network serving the needs of the rank-and-file end user, the challenge facing IT departments is to manage all these disparate resources in the most economical, secure, and efficient manner possible.

Over the past few years, many IT organizations have begun to adopt internal service level agreements (SLAs) designed to ensure the performance and accountability of IT systems that support critical business functions. If you don't already have an internal SLA for your Linux/Unix server performance and availability, chances are you probably will very soon. The following best practices for managing your Linux/Unix system performance provide useful guidelines that help you set expectations in your organization and establish the metrics on which your performance will be judged.

Costa Mesa, CA, based Emulex Corp., announced that future version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 will support the networking company's drivers for its host bus adapter (HBA) boards.

We know that many of our readers work in smaller, high-tech startups and are trying to grow businesses based on Linux and open source software (or are thinking about it!). We thought this article on helping smaller companies like these with visibility and strategies for their businesses might be fun and useful.

Innovation is the lifeblood of the technology industry. With every new technical innovation comes a whole new crop of companies riding the wave of change as they try to build companies (and sometimes even whole industries) out of the Next Big Thing.

(July 16, 2003) - One question on everybody’s mind when they are thinking about Linux and how it will fit into the enterprise mold is that of whether the number of known distributions — believed to have reached approximately 130 — is helping or hurting Linux. This week at “CA World” in Las Vegas, a handful of the Linux world’s most influential activists gave their viewpoints on that issue.

A Sun engineer addresses a portion of How Sun can pull out of its slump in which author Paul Murphy calls attention to a perceived problem with SPARC and scientific computing. In fact, although there is something to be learned from the square-root summation example, it is not what Murphy concluded.

Robert McMillan talks to Marc Sachs of the White House Cyberspace Security Office about the current and future role of open-source technologies in U.S. government departments. (2,200 words)

So you know your Beatles from your Beach Boys, do you? And Elvis from Elvis Costello? Do you pontificate on the fine differences between Bebop and Hard Bop? Tired of DJs that don't know anything about the music they are playing and who never play the songs you want to hear?

Richard Stallman is easily the most controversial figure associated with Linux and the open source movement. And the controversy begins with this very terminology. Stallman, fairly or not, believes the operating system is and should be called GNU/Linux, and the movement that he is a part of is not favoring 'open source' but 'free software.'

'Linux? Step to the back of the bus, please. This section is reserved for Windows users only.' That's the message everyone but Microsoft Windows users get when they wish to do more than browse the FCC's Web site. Ironic that an agency bearing the name 'communications' does such a lousy job of it. (1,200 words)