The introduction of Linux into the data center has brought with it the promise of a new level of cost-efficiency and flexibility for enterprise data center environments. IT professionals prefer Linux for their data centers because it's highly customizable and can be adapted to address specific issues more easily than any other operating system.

There's a great deal of interest in open source software development these days. While the concept of open source (if not the name itself) is hardly new - people have been freely sharing source code since the beginning of the computer industry - the convergence of commercial interest in open source participation along with the maturation of open source development processes and governance models have greatly raised the visibility of open source development during the past several years.

Trolltech, Acrodea, ETRI, Huawei and Purple Labs have joined the LiMo Foundation started a year ago by Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Samsung Electronics and Vodafone to deliver a mobile Linux platform. Said platform would perforce have to compete against the Linux-based Google-organized Android platform.

Data corruption is an insidious problem in storage. While there are many forms of corruption, there are also many ways to prevent them. For example, enterprise class servers use error checking and correcting caches and memory to protect against single and double bit errors. System buses have similar protective measures such as parity. Communications going over the network are protected by checksums.

Google's new-year special logo, which went live briefly as 2008 began, celebrated the 25th anniversary of TCP/IP - adopted by Arpanet on January 1st, 1983. While 'invisible' to most users, many of the layers built on top of TCP/IP are well-known even to laymen: HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol), FTP (the File Transfer Protocol), SMTP and POP3, and IRC.

Kevin Carmony, recently-resigned CEO for desktop Linux vendor Linspire, unveiled his new venture, Dating DNA, LLC. Dating DNA provides free and open Web Services which bring 1-click compatibility scoring and other sophisticated dating features to Social Networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and Craigslist, as well as to Internet devices such as Apple's iPhone and the Chumby web appliance.

Although it has not yet hopped on the server virtualization bandwagon, the New York Stock Exchange - as it builds out the NYSE Hybrid Market trading system that it launched last year - is betting big on Linux. NYSE Euronext CIO Steve Rubinow told a reporter that the NYSE is investing heavily in x86-based Linux systems and blade servers. He is well aware of the fact that Unix has been around far longer, 'but it's polished enough for us,' Runinow said. His remarks were reported yesterday morning in The New York Times.

In a surprise move Thursday Red Hat named the former COO of Delta Airlines Jim Whitehurst president and CEO, replacing Matthew Szulik who remains chairman. Szulik said he was stepping down after almost 10 years with the company because of serious health issues with his family that he has to pay attention to, a noble thing to do considering he'd rather be CEO of Red Hat. Well, if nothing else, it'll give Dell vice-chairman and CFO Donald Carthy somebody to talk to. Cathy was president of American Airlines before being pluck from Dell's board amid its crisis and given his current job.

Dell said Tuesday morning that it would start buying back a gargantuan $10 billion worth of its stock. To no avail. Its price dropped to below where it was in January before Michael Dell returned as CEO, recouping only a little since then. Dell has $15 billion in the bank and generates a billion dollars a quarter. Meanwhile, the WPP Group, the world's second-largest, advertising and pr agency, is going to set up an agency just for Dell and Dell is going to shovel $4.5 billion through it over the next three years.

In keeping with the longstanding SYS-CON tradition of being at the very forefront of software development with all its online and offline resources, SYS-CON Media & Events jointly today announced a double whammy, launching both 'Open Web Developer's Journal' (htt p://openweb.sys-con.com) and 'Open Web Developer Summit' (http://openweb.s ys-con.com) - to be held for the first time in New York City April 21-22, 2008.

The Linux Foundation, currently home to Linus Torvalds, has named Ted Ts'o, the Linux filesystem maintainer and very first Linux kernel developer in North America, a Fellow and chief platform strategist. Shifting over from IBM where he led the creation of an enterprise-level real-time Linux solution, he will work full-time for the organization for the next two years on a broad set of Linux technologies including the Linux Standard Base, an initiative he helped organize. He will then return to IBM.

How Christmas-y! Nudged, it would appear, by China - well, at least it's doing something - the English-language Korean trade press reports that North and South Korea agreed last week at a conference in China to develop a single version of Linux tentatively called Hana Linux and set standards. (We figure from the Internet that Hana must mean 'one.') They're also gonna work on OpenOffice. They're supposed to set up a tripartite Special Duties Committee and work up a detailed plan complete with expert working groups.

For building applications, BundleWorks includes ant tasks and command line tools to allow developers to build standard bundles for both custom and third-party applications. For testing, BundleWorks allows a developer to create and manage multiple environments to test multiple versions of applications. For deployment, BundleWorks supports local and remote deployment and provides a library of functions to handle common deployment tasks. For maintentance, BundleWorks tracks all bundle actions and configuration changes providing a complete history of activity.

Likewise Software, formerly Centeris, has released Likewise Open, an open source community project that enables core Active Directory authentication for Linux systems by joining them to Active Directory domains. Likewise Open provides organizations that are struggling with homegrown and do-it-yourself solutions with a proven enterprise solution for authentication.

A critical part of Sun's virtualization portfolio, Sun xVM Ops Center reduces datacenter management complexity by combining a range of lifecycle management functionality into an all-in-one tool. Sun xVM Ops Center helps simplify discovery, monitoring, operating system provisioning, comprehensive updates and patch management, firmware updates, and hardware management from power up to production in cross-platform Linux and Solaris(TM) Operating System-based x86 and SPARC(R) environments. As a result, Sun xVM Ops Center allows enterprises to streamline their data center operations, helping to lower costs and more easily manage rapid growth, data center consolidation and compliance requirements.

Software virtualization is the ability to run multiple operating systems at the same time on the same computer. The basic premise is that for most of the day your server is basically idle and the CPU and memory are not tasked with processes all day long, the server has excess capacity and virtualization allows you to maximize your investment by installing another full version of an operating system on your hardware at the same time.

The world's second-largest retailer after Wal-Mart Carrefour has stores practically everywhere; 5,832 in Europe alone so 365 is just a drop in the bucket. With the Carrefour deal, its first European mass merchandiser, Dell counts 10,000 shops worldwide carrying its wares including Staples in the US, Courts in Singapore, Gome in China, Bic Camera in Japan, Carphone Warehouse in the UK and Wal-Mart in the US, Canada, Brazil and Mexico. Like Harrods, Carrefour stores include a supermarket and it was said to have done more for socialism in France than any French politician when it put a generic brand on biscuits, milk, oil and pasta back in 1976 and cut prices

Within minutes of my blog entry, I received the strangest email notification, alerting me to another blog written by Alan Zeichick, 'co-founder and editorial director of BZ Media, which publishes SD Times and Software Test & Performance, and which also produces the Software Security Summit, Software Test & Performance Conference, and EclipseWorld. Also president and principal analyst of Camden Associates.' That's what his bio says.

Red Hat said Monday that the public beta of its operating system on the newfangled Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) was available. Amazon has taken to peddling resizable time, utility-style, on its own data center to other people and Red Hat arranged for its customers to run their certified apps on the thing under the Red Hat Network management service if they had a mind to. One buys whatever capacity one needs for $19 a month per account plus 21-94 cents an hour depending on the size of the instance plus bandwidth and storage fees.

My money is on targeting iPhones and WM devices until Android actually shows up live and in the wild on more than 500,000 devices. Also, don't be fooled about the Android developer challenge. That's not $10million in prize money, that's a $10 million bribe in order to obtain the critical mass of engaged developers they know will be required for anything useful to come out of the Android project. If they don't have truckloads of developers begging to get their apps onto the phone, their framework will fail and all the mobile partners will go back to business as usual.

Sure, Oracle has its award-winning Fusion Middleware SOA-driven tools to integrate these sources. And Oracle already has a roadmap that ultimately merges/migrates its acquired customers into the Oracle fold. But what does an organization do while its waiting for the Fusion-driven SOA effort to reach critical mass before users can get the answers they need? Just wait? And should we tell this same organization to wait for the ERP migration to be completed before it tries to launch new information-driven initiatives? Of course not. As the kissin' cousin of databases and applications and the next door neighbor of SOAs and portals, mashups are the nimble-and-quick complement to these larger efforts. Mash and publish, growth and innovation continues.

Open source-based software developer Novell has released the new version of Suse Linux Enterprise Real Time 10, the open source enterprise operating system, to cater to the financial market. According to Novell, the new version of Suse includes enterprise open source technologies and features such as CPU shielding, priority inheritance, sleeping spinlocks, interrupt threads, high-resolution timers and OpenFabrics enterprise distribution for commodity high-speed interconnects.

Python, the open source programming language that sees itself as an alternative to Java and brags about being used at Google, Industrial Light & Magic and NASA, will be having its PyCon user conference March 14-16 at the Crowne Plaza Chicago O'Hare Hotel. Python creator Guido van Rossum, now working for Google, is supposed to present the next-generation Python 3000 in the works for two years. See http://us.python.org.

'Our continuing support commitment has been amply demonstrated with all of our previous acquisitions, including PeopleSoft and Siebel. BEA will be no different,' he said. 'The acquisition of BEA by Oracle will enable an increase in engineering resources that will in turn accelerate the development of our world-class suite of middleware. Both Oracle and BEA customers will benefit from this increase in engineering investment as they migrate to modern SOA technologies.' BEA, whose stock was down around $11 a couple months ago before Icahn entered the picture and is still in the midst of a backdating mess, isn't picking up the phone to callers and has yet to issue any public statements.

Oracle owns PeopleSoft and JD Edwards; they own SleepyCat; they own BEA; and of course they have their own enterprise database. This means they have the stack from top to bottom, with the exception of an operating system. They can take the CRM and banking and insurance and end-user apps that they now own, host them on an entire stack, and basically squeeze the middleware vendors out of existence.

Here are my thoughts on this. I was expecting Alfred - who is known to be an arrogant and incompetent CEO - to run away from Larry as fast as he could. But this movie usually ends as follows. First, history repeats itself. By that I mean that Alfred should remember Larry's PeopleSoft hunt, which ended up with the PeopleSoft's CEO's head on a stick. In my humble opinion, in Act 2 of Larry's BEA hunt, we will see Alfred's head on a stick and the BEA shareholders will make the wedding plans, as always happens when Larry plans another marriage for his baby Oracle.

After Google's Android announcement, at least four big guys should be irritated: Sun Microsystems, Apple, Adobe and Microsoft.Google approaches telephony from the open source side - Linux-based platform, uses Java but does not care about sticking to Java ME - they are planning to use fast OpenGL libraries and are not afraid to be hardware-specific.

I asked what she did for a living. She said she was a software engineer working with SOA. I did not think about my plane ride much until I arrived in San Francisco to attend the SOA World Conference & Expo this past Monday and Tuesday. The first day of the conference as I walked into the hotel, guess who I saw? My friend who I met on the Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul. What a small world, isn't it? Her company was one of the sponsors of the event.

Oracle has announced Oracle VM, server virtualization software that supports both Oracle and non-Oracle applications. Key Oracle products including Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Applications are certified with Oracle VM. Customers have a single point of support for their entire virtualization environments, including the Linux operating system and Oracle products.

David Patrick, CEO of Ximian before it was sold to Novell in 2003 and then general manager of Novell's Linux, NetWare and open source operation, has turned up as CEO of Xkoto, a clustered grid-scale database load balancing start-up. Coincidently, the company just got a $7.5 million B round led by GrandBanks Capital to add to its initial $10 million funding. Patrick replaces co-founder Albert Lee, who become Xkoto's chief strategy officer. The two-year-old company's in Toronto. Patrick, a WordStar, Ashton-Tate and Lotus survivor, will be in Boston.

Novell is closing down its direct sales offices in Israel, Belgium, Luxembourg, Norway and Turkey to focus on 10 larger European countries as part of a yearlong shift to a more indirect approach globally that it signaled last December. Novell says it was largely partner-led in these countries anyhow and doesn't anticipate any change in its ability to sell there or support customers.

I installed Ubuntu on the Toshiba laptop. Ubuntu installed in 15 minutes - 49 for Windows XP and 125 for Windows Vista. Ubuntu's desktop came right up. I opened the pre-installed Firefox browser and found I could browse the Web immediately. Ubuntu installed a network adaptor for the Toshiba laptop. I shake my head at this Windows foolishness!

Red Hat, which has made its fortune displacing Solaris, is now going to collaborate with Sun to advance open source Java, which Red Hat is particularly partial to given its JBoss investment. This is the third time this year that Sun has laid down with one of its enemies. It also cut deals with Microsoft and IBM. Red Hat will get a fully compatible open source Java Development Kit (JDK) for its Linux operating system out of the deal. All it has to do now is build it - and that includes a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) - and optimize the runtime for JBoss-on-Linux. Red Hat's IcedTea project - which brings together Fedora, the early access version of Red Hat Linux, and JBoss.org technologies on Linux - gets pushed. It's supposed to supply free alternatives to some of the pieces of the OpenJDK project that are still proprietary.

As enterprises gain comfort with the principles of service orientation and begin adopting SOA for large-scale, business-critical applications, they must invariably grapple with the traditional 'ilities,' e.g., reliability, scalability, and agility that challenge the architects of demanding applications. In this presentation we explore an emerging solution to these challenges - grid-based service virtualization frameworks. By providing a runtime distributed service container that abstracts service instances from the infrastructure on which they run, service virtualization approaches are enabling savvy enterprises to achieve high qualities of service for their Java, .NET, and C/C++ services.

The astonishingly rapid rise of virtualization technology has made it a vital component of any Enterprise IT strategy today. And the technology is triggering dramatic changes in product offerings and business practices to support virtualized operational models. These breakneck speed developments have lead to a plethora of solutions, with the attendant confusion that typically surrounds fast moving technologies. In this presentation Mr Stevens will outline current trends in virtualization technologies and examine their potential impact on, and benefits for, future Enterprise IT deployments. Topics will include tradeoffs between open source and proprietary solutions, hardware integration efforts, deployment models, and long-term, high-volume serviceability/security considerations.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with integrated virtualization, provides a seamless deployment solution bridging both on-premise and cloud computing. As part of this solution, Red Hat Network offers a common set of management and automation tools across on-premises deployments and the Amazon EC2 cloud computing environment. Red Hat will provide technical support and maintenance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2. This is the first commercially supported operating system available on Amazon EC2.

When it comes to cutting I/O cost, power, management and real estate requirements in blade servers, the ideal I/O solution is a single, unified I/O adapter that can provide required services for all data center traffic types - LAN, SAN and IPC. This is because blade server form factors by nature are limited on space, power and cost requirements. While I/O may be unified on the server using a high performance converged I/O adapter, the demands on the LAN and SAN infrastructure sides of the data center are different. Ethernet and Fibre Channels will coexist in the infrastructure. Finally, there are issues around separation of management domains of the compute servers, LAN infrastructure and SAN infrastructure because they are managed by different groups and capacity scaling and budgetary cycles are independent of each other. All of the above make consolidation of I/O on the blade servers a daunting challenge.

Open source provides an incredible amount of technical leverage for small companies. No matter who productive your rock-star programmers are and no matter how much judo you apply to your problems, solid infrastructure takes a long time and benefits immensely from broad involvement. It really does take a village to raise great infrastructure. The Ruby on Rails framework of today is a lot more productive than the one I was using before it was open sourced. I use features every day created by others, enjoy polish done by others, evade bugs caught by others. All work I would otherwise have to do myself. So I simply get more done for less effort than it would otherwise have taken. The same holds true for the other open source projects that have been cultivated in 37signals, like Prototype and Capistrano.

My own personal install of Leopard seems to be having periodic trouble completing a shutdown on the 17' MBP. Annoying? Yes. Worthy of posting something inflammatory such as 'wrong with Leopard's spots'? Doubtful. So, in looking at eWeek's Microsoft Watch's latest article, I leave you with this parting thought: If it walks like a shill, acts like a shill, and smells like a shill....

My recent switch to a single-boot Ubuntu setup on my Thinkpad T60 simply floors me on a regular basis. Most recently it's had to do with the experience of maintaining the software. Fresh from a very long Windows 2000 experience and a four-month Windows XP experience along with a long-time Linux sys admin role puts me in a great position to assess Ubuntu. Three prior attempts over the years at using Linux as my daily desktop OS had me primed for failure. Well, Ubuntu takes Linux where I've long hoped it would go - easy to use, reliable, dependable, great applications too but more on that later. It has some elegance to it - bet you never heard that about a Linux desktop before.