Virtualization Conference & Expo is the leading event covering the booming market of Virtualization for the enterprise, with experts on server, storage, application and desktop technologies. The conference will contain multiple sessions on how to improve application efficiency and lower costs by leveraging network and computing resources. Combined with SOA, Virtualization will help you take your applications and platforms to the next level. At the first international Virtualization Conference & Expo, you will hear from industry experts already out in the field on how to use Virtualization to increase uptime; accelerate storage and application speed; lower costs, improve utilization; and make your infrastructure strong, flexible and secure.

Novell today announced that Sumitomo Electric Industries is using SUSE(R) Linux Enterprise Server from Novell(R) with integrated Xen* virtualization software to extend the useful life of its platforms, minimize additional hardware investment through more efficient use of resources, and operate an effective disaster recovery site. By running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Xen on hardware containing Dual-Core Intel* Xeon* processors with Intel Virtualization Technology, Sumitomo Electric Industries is extending the life of valued applications on virtual servers, thus optimizing data center resources and running a more efficient business.

Richard Stallman just delivered extensive remarks about the state of open source and the GPL, and now a survey shows that there may be a 50/50 split within the open source community concerning whether the GPLv3 will be a good thing.

In order to understand the GNU General Public License, first you have to understand what free software means. Free Software means software that respects the users' freedom. Software that's not free is proprietary software. Non-free software, user subjugating software, is distributed in a social system that keeps the users the divided and helpless.

'It's really important to understand the issues and opportunities for Linux in multiple environments, and the addition of Marvell, Nokia and VirtualLogix will deepen our understanding and help us all push the envelope even further,' said Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation. 'We're looking forward to rolling up our sleeves with these new members in the coming months, including at our first Member Meeting this June.'

After 70% of the people who wrote into its newfangled IdeaStorm suggestion box said they would use a Dell with Linux, Dell said Wednesday that it will start offering Linux pre-installed on select desktops and notebooks. It hasn't said yet what machines or what Linux distribution or distributions. It promises an answer in the 'coming weeks.' It added, however, that people posted comments on its Direct2Dell blog indicating that they were less concerned about a specific distribution than about support at the kernel level and getting open non-proprietary drivers. Dell, which is evidently responding to purists, says it's working on that too.

As much as it may pain Red Hat, Oracle, - and maybe now IBM - it seems that Novell is actually in resurgence. According to a new survey by the Yankee Group due out next week, 14% of the nearly 1,000 IT managers and C-level executives polled said they will deploy SUSE Linux. Yankee thinks, 'This is one of the first indicators that Novell's technically elegant and highly reliable Linux distribution may mount a serious threat to Red Hat's heretofore unassailable dominance of the Linux market.'

The computing industry goes in cycles. The latest trend, growing in buzz over the past year, is server consolidation aided by virtualization software. Virtualization software for a computer allows a single machine to behave as though it were many different, separate computing systems; each virtualized instance behaves almost identically to an independent physical machine. Using virtualization software, a roomful of servers can be consolidated onto a single physical box (provided it's powerful enough). Pundits claim this trend is cyclical because it's returning us to the old days of a single large, powerful computer (a la the mainframe) running all of the tasks in an organization. Although the modern consolidated, virtualized server is unlikely to look anything like the old mainframes, it's instructive to examine the virtualization trend in light of this mainframe comparison to see if there are any lessons to be learned.

Novell says SUSE with its Xen virtualization is now certified on SAP NetWeaver and mySAP. SUSE's high-availability storage infrastructure, developed with SAP's LinuxLab, and including clustering software that monitors parts of an enterprise system like SAP apps and initiates failover, is also available for the SAP stuff.

New York Times published a story on Linux. This wasn't an article on technical advancement: no new kernel or distribution had been released. It wasn't financial; there wasn't yet another impressive quarter from one of the many companies that build their business around Linux. Thankfully, it wasn't another piece of FUD about open source legal issues and dubious patent assertions from desperate competitors. Instead the article simply stated: 'The Linux industry has united to compete against proprietary platforms.' The Linux Foundation was born.

Oracle, which of course has Linux ambitions - and anti-Red Hat ones at that - has become a licensee of the Open Invention Network (OIN), the non-profit IP house set up by IBM to acquire patents and make sure they're available royalty-free to Linux. The real idea is to amass critical IP that could be used offensively against anybody - (and you know who you are) - that would dare to charge Linux with patent infringement.

Penguin Computing, the leader in Linux Cluster Virtualization, today announced that it has closed $9 million in Series 2 financing, led by vSpring Capital, with participation from existing investors, San Francisco Equity Partners, Weber Capital and Convergence Partners. The injection of funds will help Penguin Computing take advantage of the increasing demand for Linux High Performance Computing (HPC) solutions, both among its strong customer base in the commercial, government and academic fields, and beyond to rapidly expanding enterprise markets such as web infrastructure. In connection with the transaction, Ed Ekstrom, managing director at vSpring, has joined Penguin Computing's Board of Directors.

Keeping in step with the Linux kernel development, the OpenVZ project announced availability of its operating system (OS) server virtualization software for the most recent stable Linux kernel 2.6.20 -- introduced last month. This new Linux kernel includes a number of bug fixes and improvements, along with support for the latest hardware. 'Linux 2.6.20 is also the basis for the next Ubuntu distribution, which potentially would enable us a smooth transition to add OpenVZ virtualization,' said Kir Kolyshkin, manager of the OpenVZ project. 'With this latest release of OpenVZ software, we've made a number of improvements to benefit our users in the open source community.'

Novell is going into the thin client business with a server-based version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and an image-creation toolkit that resellers can configure, sort of like a poor man's Citrix or Sun Ray. A California school district put its 2,000 machines on the stuff, saying its hardware costs were cut 75% and its software costs by 95%. Novell claims to be the only enterprise Linux that can easily configure and manage desktop images.

Rackable Systems, Inc., a provider of servers and storage products for large-scale data centers, has announced its first sale of Concentro, Rackable Systems' new modular, containerized data center product.

Earlier this year, at the LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit in NYC (February 14-15, 2007), event organizers IDG World Expo was proud to announce that 'More Than 600 Attendees Flock To New York For The First Ever LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit' - but AJAXWorld 2007 East has more than 1,000 delgates registered to atend the show as of Monday morning. Does this tell us more about the relative strength of the technologies involved or about that of the organizations behind the two events?

Red Hat Wednesday pushed out Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5), the first major update of its operating system in a couple of years, a rev on which much hangs considering the threatening noises coming from the direction of Oracle, Sun, Microsoft-Novell and Ubuntu. That being so we're supposed to understand RHEL 5 as being more grandiose than just simply a next release, Red Hat said. More 'next generation' and it's segmented the operating system and packaged up some new services to expand its reach and tickle its revenue base. Its goal is ubiquity. At the introduction, Red Hat head of engineering Paul Cormier suggested Microsoft spent a half a billion dollars rolling out Vista only for it to fall flat in the marketplace.

Remember JOnAS, the European consortium-backed open source J2EE-based application server that had Red Hat's backing there for a while until Red Hat up and bought JBoss? Well, sans Red Hat, JOnAS 4.8, the first enterprise edition, has just been released, promising to be a cornerstone of SOA. It comes complements of the recently reconstituted OW2 Consortium that formed in January when the ObjectWeb open source middleware project merged with its Chinese open source middleware counterpart, Orientware. The ObjectWeb charter, originally put together by France Telecom, Bull and the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control, expired at the end of 2006.

Sourcefire Inc, the intrusion detection and prevention house whose mojo is based on the popular open source Snort system, went public last Friday at $15 a share, higher than the $12-$14 initially proposed and raising $71.8 million. Despite the turbulence of the market this week, it held its own and, despite some initial ups and downs, remains a few bucks ahead of its opening price. The company has joined a very exclusive club of open source companies that have gone public: Red Hat, VA Linux, TurboLinux, Mandriva, Trolltech and when it was still open source, Caldera, now the open source-loathed SCO. MySQL has IPO designs and could be next.

SWsoft said from CeBit that it was going to bundle its open source-based Virtuozzo server virtualization software with a standard distribution of SUSE 10 and deliver it through SWsoft channels. It's supposed to be available next quarter and run on both x86 and Itanium machines. SWsoft will support it, backed up by Novell for all the unmodified components. Novell is interested in expanding its customer base, according to the head of SUSE product management Holger Dyroff. Of course, SUSE is already bundled with the open source Xen but Virtuozzo is supposed to be lighter weight than Xen. It can dynamically partition a single Linux instance into hundreds of VMs on a single server.

T6 Broadband is a Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP) offering Internet, VoIP, and television service to 3,000 customers within a 3,000-square-mile area of North Central Illinois and Southern Wisconsin. At the core of its growing success is its point-to-multi-point wireless network that supports growing customer demands for fast, reliable Internet service.

ACCESS Systems Americas, Inc., a member of the ACCESS CO., LTD., group of companies, is participating in EclipseCon 2007, March 5 - 8, as a Silver Sponsor. The conference is being held at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. Located in booth 600, ACCESS will be showcasing the ACCESS Linux Platform Development Suite (SDK & Developer Tools) for ACCESS Linux Platform(TM) v1.0. The Company will also demonstrate a number of applications running on ACCESS Linux Platform.

PolyServe, announced that it has earned membership in the Red Hat Advanced Software Partner Program. Membership in the program ensures customers that PolyServe's shared data clustering software solutions for Linux have been tested for and are certified with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, are supported under the Technical Support Alliance Network (TSANet) cooperative support forum, and are compliant with Red Hat's guidelines for interoperability.

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.

SplendidCRM Software announced the release of SplendidCRM 1.2 for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and SplendidCRM 1.1 for Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10. With these two new releases, SplendidCRM has created the ideal cross-platform CRM for companies that wish to tightly integrate a CRM with their back-office systems.

Virtual Bridges announced the release of a major upgrade to its Win4Lin Pro product. Win4Lin Pro Desktop allows Linux users to run Windows applications from the security of the Linux desktop. Win4Lin Virtual Desktop Server is the enterprise/SMB product for delivering Windows applications on thin clients via a Linux server.

Altiris announced the addition of new Linux1 patch and virtual server management capabilities to help secure and manage heterogeneous server environments. Altiris also announced updates to integrated deployment, patch and monitoring capabilities for Dell servers.

The significance of blogging is not the word 'blog' whether used as a verb or a noun, but its role as a harbinger of the game-changing Web-as-platform revolution. In particular, the migration of blogging from the individual toward the enterprise...

There's a common misconception among many end-users, consumers, and developers that AJAX is the ultimate solution for the Web, and that it can provide all the same functionality as a rich desktop solution. Sure, AJAX can cover most of our expectations for a rich client, mimicking functionality provided by a desktop application, but there's still one area that has yet to be fully integrated: scalable, server-initiated message delivery - Enterprise Comet. Comet is an advanced technique to enable real-time messaging from a Web server to one or more browsers, even if some of those browsers are behind a firewall or proxy server.

Rich Internet Applications (RIA) describe what the software development community aims to do; break out of primitive Web delivery to deliver robust functionality, exciting data visualization and 'thicker,' role-based and process-oriented user interfaces. These types of RIAs are now possible.

XenSource, Inc., the leader in infrastructure virtualization solutions based on the open source Xen(TM) hypervisor, today announced a comprehensive family of server virtualization products supported and maintained by the company leading the evolution of Xen. Designed to meet the needs of a broad range of users, the XenSource XenServer product family includes the recently announced XenEnterprise(TM), the market's first enterprise-grade commercially-packaged Xen virtualization solution supporting both Microsoft Windows® and Linux guests. New additions include XenServer(TM), for Windows standard server environments; and, XenExpress(TM), a free, production-ready product which enables anyone to quickly get started with Xen virtualization. Available now, all three products share the same architecture, delivering bare metal performance and facilitating easy migration and upgrades. Additionally, the new products offer a broad array of hardware device support, giving customers hardware investment protection and high utility. With extensive code contributions from Intel and AMD to optimize Xen performance on their newest CPUs, the new products immediately enable users to leverage the power of the Xen paravirtualized architecture and processors with Intel VT and AMD Virtualization(TM) -- which include hardware virtualization support for superior performance.

Stratus Technologies, Inc., a leader in IT technology and services for continuous availability, and XenSource, Inc., the leader in infrastructure virtualization solutions based on the open source Xen(TM) hypervisor, today announced they have signed a collaborative agreement with the goal of fusing continuous availability and virtualization technologies to create new IT infrastructure solutions with superior reliability, flexibility and manageability.

The Eclipse platform is an open source, integrated system of application development tools that you implement and extend using a plug-in interface. The Eclipse Business Intelligence Reporting Tool (BIRT) is a set of plug-in extensions that enable a developer to add reporting functionality to an application. BIRT provides a Report Engine API that a developer can use to create a customized report generator application. The org.eclipse.birt.repo rt.engine.api package contains a set of interfaces and implementation classes that supports integrating the runtime part of BIRT into an application.

Novell announced the industry's first enterprise Linux-based virtualization solution built on Xen, optimized for Intel Virtualization Technology. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 from Novell running on Dual-Core Intel Xeon platforms will provide customers with a low-cost, high-performing virtualization solution that has the ability to host Linux environments without the need to modify the guest operating systems.

Sun Microsystems has outlined its three-pronged approach to virtualization: harnessing commodity technologies, delivering Sun's own advanced products and technologies, and leveraging Sun's global expertise in providing systems and software. Sun will continue to help customers use virtualization to cost-effectively gain better synergy and productivity out of their computing infrastructure.

Companies are finding it increasingly difficult to manage their enterprise data centers as they become highly complex, expensive to build out, and difficult to reconfigure as needs change. In an effort to address these challenges, many IT professionals are turning to virtualization technologies.

I think it's going to be a great year for IT. I think it's going to be a whole new ballgame though compared to the spending habits of the dot.com era. I think IT is back but I qualify that as 'smart IT' where purchases are scrutinized and value solutions win out over long time trusted names that come with hefty price tags.

Pop quiz: what company both doubled its annual revenue in 2006 and closed a $26.25 million round of funding? Clue: it also tracked 290,000 downloads of its RIA platform and lined up IBM, Walmart.com, H&R Block, Monster, Barclays Global and Pandora as customers. Extra clue: it also announced project 'Orbit' which will allow developers using its platform to compile into Java Mobile and run it on devices.

NEC Corporation today announced the launch of a new Virtual PC-Class Thin Client System(1). The new system includes the next generation of Thin Client computing device, the US100, which provides a high level of IP telephony and video processing quality in the smallest thin client footprint. The device is designed to achieve the impressive multimedia performance through the employment of NetClient(TM), the advanced system-on-a-chip solution that incorporates leading-edge technologies from NEC and ServerEngines(TM) LLC. The new system also features VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure pre-installed and pre-integrated with NEC systems through collaboration established under the VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Alliance program.

a new suite of next generation,cross-platform and cross-service, workflow-driven and rules-based,management products and integration frameworks. The suite enables datacenter managers and system administrators, with typical Windowsadministration skills, to configure and support an optimal mix of Linux,Unix, and Windows platforms, systems, and services in today's demanding anddiverse computing environments. Without such sophisticated 'bridgingtools,' a heterogeneous computing environment can devolve into anunmanageable and costly-to-administer set of silo infrastructurecomponents.