A Red Hat Packed With Dynamite

This quarter was all about constructing the fireworks of the future for Linux vendor Red Hat (NYSE: RHT). You don’t see much happening at the moment, but all the ingredients for a massive eruption are there.

In its first quarter of fiscal 2009, Red Hat produced $0.08 of GAAP earnings per share on revenue of $156.6 million. That’s a 32% sales increase over last year, while profits held steady. But the numbers don’t tell the whole story here.

The open-source software veteran released major updates to four of its key products and re-signed every expired contract with its 25 largest subscribers — for 50% more than the worth of the old deals. It’s always cool to see the big boys upgrading their pacts, don’t you think? Red Hat continues to invest in its global sales and support infrastructure, funding the growth from organic cash flows.

And if you doubt that the hackeriffic Linux platform is ready for a hard sell into the corporate space, consider that NYSE Euronext (NYSE: NYX) now runs its trading operations on Red Hat-powered machines. “Red Hat is as pervasive as water gear,” said NYSE CIO Steve Rubinow, according to Red Hat’s earnings call comments. “It is part and parcel of everything we do here from a computing standpoint.” You can’t ask for a stronger endorsement than that, especially since it comes from the traditional-minded Big Board boys at the heart of Wall Street.

Red Hat’s efforts to scale up its business model positions the company for years of upcoming growth, at a time when Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) seems to have botched its latest and greatest operating system launch. It also helps non-Windows competitors like Novell (Nasdaq: NOVL) and Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: JAVA) in a roundabout way, by growing the Linux/Unix market into spaces where you might not have seen them before.

For now, it’s all about the enterprise space. But remember that Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) ships every Macintosh with a Unix-derivative operating system installed, and common people don’t seem to have any problem adjusting to its quirks and advantages. One day, Red Hat will lead an assault on the consumer space, too, and you ain’t seen nothing yet. This is a packet of explosive growth just waiting for a spark.

http://www.fool.com

Taking Symbian open source

Nokia’s purchase of Symbian, and promise to take it open source, means three quarters of the world’s smartphones could soon be running free software.

Following Nokia’s buy-out of Symbian, three quarters of the world’s smartphones will soon be running free software. Assuming we take into account Nokia’s figures of 200 million users and (the less likely figure) of 4 million developers, Nokia’s purchase of Symbian – and the subsequent open source release of Symbian under the auspices of the non-profit Symbian Foundation – is probably the largest ever donation of software to the free software community.

Symbian, which will now be distributed free, is likely to make large inroads into Microsoft’s tenuous 11 per cent share of the smartphone market, as the proprietary option becomes less appealing for reasons of cost and efficiency.

This is an astounding success for the free and open source software community, and is a direct result of the success of Linux and other open source software solutions in the mobile phone market. Linux has gone from nowhere to being the second most popular platform for smartphones. Experts have predicted a bright future for Linux, with ABI Research suggesting that it will appear on more than 200 million phones by 2012. It has been suggested that the driver for Nokia’s initiative is the competitive threat provided by the Google-led Android consortium and the The LiMo (Linux Mobile) Foundation, which are both sponsored by a number of prominent telecoms and mobile manufacturers.

Nokia denies that this is so. More significant has been the rapid growth of Linux in the mobile sector. Linux brings many advantages for mobile manufacturers that are not necessarily specific to Linux, but derive from free software licensing and the open source development model. The code is modular and visible, which makes it easier to adapt to specialised hardware. Open sourcing Symbian brings the same advantages, new resources, developers, and collaborative input from other manufacturers.

David Rivas, Nokia vice president for devices research and development, notes that: “The natural evolution of the Symbian platform and the mobile industry has been heading in this direction for quite a while. Its encumbent on all of us in the industry to change with the times, so rather than thinking of this as being a direct response to any particular initiative its really a matter of growing with the times and making the overall platform as competitive as it possibly can be.”

The gizmo that rides on top

For some years the drift in the smartphone industry has been towards free software solutions. Unlike the home computing market the OS is transparent and the user interface is fairly limited. Nobody cares which operating system is running behind the interface. Manufacturers of mobile devices operate in a rapidly changing environment with short product life-cycles and shorter time-to-market.

The compelling arguments for manufacturers to deploy Linux on smart phones have been the same as those that apply to HPC and server manufacturers. Pooling knowledge and resources on the technology and feeding back software changes to the community is of mutual advantage to all the players. Sharing the technology improves performance and reduces the overall costs for everybody.

The market is highly competitive, and every new product comes to market with a new range of features. The availability of a memory-efficient modular operating system that is easily adapted to new hardware environments is an invaluable commodity, and the profit margins being what they are, freedom, “as in beer”, is hard to compete with. The industry has recognised the advantages of free software for some time, and has dispensed with out-dated reservations. What matters is that the software is cheap and efficient, and gives you a competitive edge over your rivals.

Software at the OS level, and much higher up the stack, is not what distinguishes the product. The product is distinguished by the gizmos that ride on top. The OS affects time-to-market, the cost of hardware and software development, the limits of battery life and memory, and the flexibility and reliability of the product, and this is where Linux and free software have proved themselves.

Gaining an education

Linux, even on a mobile device, is more scalable than many of the systems with which it is in close competition. This is because of the modular and scalable pattern that has dominated Linux development since the beginning. With a bit of tweaking here and there you can run it on any device, and if doesn’t quite work, you can strip it down, and pick at the code and find out why. Development is therefore much faster, and support can be found from an expanding ecosystem of developers and companies who specialise in producing hardened versions of Linux for mobile devices.

This is what Nokia hopes to replicate. Symbian is the market leader, and was developed specifically for the kind of devices that Nokia and its partners in The Symbian Foundation manufacture and sell. It has many advantages over Linux, which is the precocious upstart in this market, and for this reason, the first reaction of many to the news that Symbian was to be open sourced has been to assume that there might be a slowdown in the uptake of Linux on smartphones.

This is possible but may not happen for a number of reasons. Linux has some powerful allies in the mobile phone market. More importantly, it has an existing infrastructure of developers who have proved themselves willing to devote their resources to Linux.

Symbian has a large commercial infrastructure, and a large body of supporters amongst the manufacturers, many of whom, including Nokia, also produce Linux-based devices. Building a wider community of developers may prove to be a more difficult task, and this is important because, if Symbian is to put a brake on the impetus of Linux in the smartphone market, it has to develop at a faster rate, and show itself not just to be equal to, but better than, Linux. Linux brings with it a rapidly expanding suite of tools and software that were developed specifically to run on Linux, but Symbian has a longer history in this market, and tools that are more familiar to the market.

More contentiously, Nokia may need to be “educated” as to the prevalent attitude of free and open source software developers towards the imposition of “DRM, IPR, SIM locks and subsidised business models” on their software, as this is an important element in the philosophy that drives many open source developers. DRM is a no-go area for many developers, and “IPR” is a concept that is poorly understood in many sectors of industry.

On another level, competition for dominance of the smartphone market between two “open source” operating systems can only be a good thing for Linux, for Symbian and for the free software community.

“The opportunity for garnering innovation increases as you open up the platform,” notes Rivas, “and you can’t discount the effect that royalties have on the competitiveness of the platform, and how people consider whether or not to use a particular platform. Certainly we hope that this move makes Symbian S60 that much more competitive.”

A changing industry

Symbian is being released under the Eclipse Public License (EPL), a licence which is approved by the Free Software Foundation, but is not compatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL), which is a pity as it may impede some cross-platform developments. However, the the choice of the EPL is seen as a positive choice.

“There are two issues here for us,” says Rivas. “We wanted a license that was respected and understood by the open source community. We didn’t want to devise a new open source licence simply to handle what we were doing. The specific choice of the EPL has everything to do with the form of copyright that is utilised in the EPL. We felt it was important that there was some kind of requirement to share modifications to the underlying source code, as this is about building a community around software that is going to be made available to others. We also felt that it was important that the software should be able to sit alongside other software, so developers need not fear that their application would not automatically become an open source application. The Eclipse licence satisfies both of those goals, and that’s why we chose it.”

Nokia has shown some commitment to open source development in other areas of its business, having recently purchased Trolltech, the company that produces qt, the graphical toolkit which is a fundamental part of the KDE desktop environment on Linux, and also produces specialised software for the mobile phone market. Nokia also funds maemo.org, a developer community based around Debian GNU/Linux, which produces software for Nokia’s N800 series of tablet devices.

Although Symbian currently has more than 60 per cent of the smart phone market, and Linux only has a 12 per cent share, the decision to release Symbian to the open source community is an acknowledgement that realities in the software development industry are changing, and that Linux is beginning to challenge the assumptions of the mobile device manufacturers.

“We’re watching the industry change,” says Rivas. “Business models are changing along with it, and this feels very much like the right approach to deal with the change, and capture as much innovation as possible. Open source business models and software development are changing the software development industry right in front of us, and it’s important to be in a position to ensure that if someone wants to participate in innovating on a platform they can easily do it.”

Open sourcing Symbian and giving it away free may have been the only option if Nokia was to ensure the continued development of its primary operating system.

http://www.itpro.co.uk

Storage and network planning takeaways from Iowa virtualization user group meeting

Sean Clark is a VMware Certified Professional (VCP) and a member of the Des Moines, Iowa-based Central Iowa Virtualization Users’ Group (CIVUG). The CIVUG emerged from the Central Iowa Linux Users’ Group as a way for virtualization users to learn more without being tied to one vendor. That is, the CIVUG discusses Hyper-V and Citrix Systems’ Xen in addition to VMware.

Clark has cut his teeth on VMware and other virtualization platforms as a solutions architect at Alliance Technologies, where he works with small and medium—sized businesses and some enterprise businesses to develop strategies to best implement virtualization, be it storage, server or application virtualization. Clark posted notes on a presentation he did at a recent meeting on Red Hat Network File System (NFS) configuration being used with VMotion, High Availability (HA) and Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS).

NFS vs. Fibre Channel and iSCSI
The NFS configuration how-to Clark followed was posted by Mike Laverick on RTFM Education and was chosen for the demo not only because of it’s easy configuration, but also because implementing Red Hat NFS is a good low-cost alternative to shelling out big cash for more expensive devices for virtual machines (VM) storage. “Most people think that you need a Fibre Channel SAN [storage area network] or an iSCSI SAN; you’ll spend at least 20 or 30 grand on that device. But all you really need is a reasonably new server with some pretty fast discs, and you can basically have a SAN for the cost of your hardware.”

Clark also says that despite what some benchmarking stats say, performance won’t suffer on the cheaper NFS. “If you do your homework, you’ll find that in many benchmarks when you compare the performance of NFS versus iSCSI, they’re almost nearly identical. You can spin your benchmarking tasks so that one will come out on top every time, but for the majority of uses out there, and especially for test and dev, NFS is just as good as iSCSI.”

The storage system lines blur when you scale out to enterprise-level requirements because the needs go beyond the hardware and software backing your VM storage. Clark says that it’s really about having enough discs. “It doesn’t matter if you have NFS, Fibre Channel or iSCSI if you don’t have enough discs to meet the I/O demand that the number of virtual machines can put on a SAN. Most of the time, it becomes almost a religious decision — whatever you’re most comfortable with.”

HA snafu highlights proper network configuration
After walking through the NFS configuration, Clark went on to demo VMotion, HA and DRS, but ran into some problems with the HA portion. At his home in Pella, Iowa, Clark has a small test lab of two 1U servers running two ESX VMs, which he brought to Des Moines for his presentation.

With little time to reconfigure the servers (Clark was asked only a few days prior to the meeting to give the presentation), Clark decided against bringing his PC that he had used as his NFS server in favor of a Red Hat VM running on his laptop, which served as the basis for his presentation. Although both the ESX servers were able to see the Red Hat VM through a little Linksys switch, the demonstration came to a standstill during the HA portion.

The problem? Because the conference room that the VUG meets in is an island network, there is no default gateway address available as there was at Clark’s lab in Pella. An available, ping-able gateway address is required for HA to work. This is because when HA is set up, each ESX server establishes and communicates through a heartbeat and that’s how it determines whether each server is awake or not. If that heartbeat ceases, then HA makes a decision to restart the VMs that are running on a different ESX server. Sometimes the network becomes unavailable, but the other ESX server continues to run.

The isolation address was the pain point in Clark’s HA demo. The default gateway that used to exist in Pella didn’t exist and HA failed. As Clark explains, “It’s just an additional IP address that an ESX server can gain to say, ‘OK, I lost my buddy, but I need to make sure that the network is still up.’ So as long as it can reach that other IP address, then it can assume that the other host is actually truly dead and that it needs to restart its failed VMs.”

Proper planning and redundancy is key to successful deployments
Clark says that he almost never has problems because he is careful to use VMware-supported hardware and plans out each deployment carefully. But not all IT departments are so careful. “I ran into a customer the other day that didn’t want to invest in redundant networking; they had a four-host cluster and all their networking was going through one physical switch. They had HA set up, and when that switch went down, ever single VM that was on one of their ESX servers powered down.”

Clark says that this can happen as a result of not properly planning your configuration. “One of the configuration options for HA [concerns] what to do if an ESX host becomes isolated. Because it lost its network, there wasn’t a second physical switch for redundancy. Each host, even though it was still running, became isolated according to the HA configuration. It was probably a default setting at the time when they set up the HA cluster, and it powered down all the VMs.” Clark says that with proper preparation, the ESX hosts may not have appeared isolated to HA and this organization may have been able to save the headache of restarting all its VMs and troubleshooting what caused the power-down.

itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com

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