Ubuntu fans debunk Windows win of power test

Our recent power story reporting that Windows Server 2008 eked out a narrow two-watt power savings over Ubuntu 8.04 Long Term Support has emitted some sparks of protest from Ubuntu fans. The latest is from Fred Marsico, the chief technology officer of Quantum Mechanics R&D in Corvallis, Ore., and a Ubuntu desktop user.

Like another reader who responded to the story but preferred to remain anonymous, Marsico said the test would have been more meaningful if it had compared energy use while the servers were active rather than in idle mode and if the test had been done on multiple hardware platforms instead of just one. We agree in principle with Marsico, but once you open the door to testing on different applications, the task would be endless. (This doesn’t mean Marsico is wrong, of course.)

Michael Larabel, the editor of the Phoronix website that tests Linux hardware, was kind enough to add a test of the respective servers in time for our story. No one claims the test is definitive. But its results were surprising, given Windows’ reputation for bloatware and Linux’s for minimalist agility.

Thanks for writing, readers. Keep the comments coming.

If a Linux distribution is not named after a Red Hat, does it still exist? Do sports teams improve their chances with Linux-inspired monikers? Do Linux administrators need to learn fencing to keep up with the tech industry?

No, I’m not trying to throw you back into the fog that was the college philosophy class in which the only question on the final exam was “Why?” Rather, as a former philosophy student working as an assistant site editor at SearchEnterpriseLinux.com, I have pondered these questions of late.

Many Linux distributions have names that one would not expect of an open source software product, and some of these names have begun to grow into the broader culture because of it.

The Boston Celtics, for example, recently adopted the word Ubuntu. The word Ubuntu is South African for “a philosophy of life that promotes the greater good rather than individual success.”  CNET cited Ubuntu as also having the connotation, “I am what I am because of who we all are.”

Apparently, athletes and open source software developers draw from the same inspirational pool. Perhaps they operate on the same principles.

Before making that jump, though, let’s take a look at the differences between sports and open source software.

Athletes are well paid; open source developers are lucky to have a salary. Athletes are viewed as social and sexual heroes; open source developers are not. Athletes each play a defined role on a team to achieve a win, while open source software developers work independently to lose all limitations upon their engineering creativity. Athletes have simplified public personas and often resort to assuming imaginative names to represent themselves to society; open source developers do … too.

Red Sox, Red Hat; EnGarde, Cavaliers; Ubuntu, Saints; Seattle Seahawks, Linux Penguin.

All right, so the last one might stretch things a bit. Yet all of this name talk highlights a broader fact: Creativity is green and made of paper in these fields. Both the Linux software developers who succeed and the athletes who do the same cast their work in mythical terms.

If you’re looking for a sports team or a Linux distribution on which to place your bets, look at the stats. Read the records. Then consider the options and choose the one with the Odyssean name.

Ubuntu fans may be passionate geeks when it comes to free software, but last night’s happy love fest at the Globe Bar & Grill in Copley Place was more about enjoying the moment and being together than serial computer installs. Nearly two dozen members of the Massachusetts Ubuntu LoCo (Local Community) cozied into the mezzanine of the downtown Boston night spot to celebrate the launch of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Long-Term Support) for desktops and servers.

“I’m here for the cake,” joked Craig Andrews, a software engineer with girlfriend in tow. “I want to see who’s here. This is a social opportunity.”

And Andrews got his wish.

A highlight of the event was the arrival of Jono Bacon and his London entourage midway through the event. Bacon, the Ubuntu community leader worldwide, made his way from the office in Lexington, Mass., which he had been visiting on business, and stopped in to mingle with the crowd and cheer the troops. No doubt, Bacon’s appearance was due in part to the hard work by the active, certified local chapter, which generally meets across the river, in Cambridge at MIT.

Although there were a few laptops running Ubuntu 8.04 on tables about the room, the kickoff event was more about clusters of Ubuntu fans, mostly longtime users but also a smattering of newbies, talking up the new release and sharing the excitement of Ubuntu’s growing popularity and added features.

“There’s more people than I thought,” said Martin Owens, a programmer and one of the leaders of the group. “I see a lot of new faces.”

Owens, who prides himself on “not working for anybody who doesn’t use Linux,” added that he particularly appreciates that the new release includes a Likewise Open plug-in to Microsoft’s Active Directory.

Michael Rushton, leader of the group, said the event was one of many worldwide all celebrating the new Ubuntu software release.

Rushton explained his love for Linux in just a few words. “You install it,” he said. “And it just works.”

The refreshments may have been a mite on the skimpy side, but the “Hardy Heron” cake was a feast, indeed.

You have to run pretty fast to keep up with Red Hat these days.

The leading open source vendor just broke two speed records for the financial industry. First, it broke the gold standard for real-time status by processing updates in less than one millisecond, completing a single transaction in .9 of a millisecond. Typically, the fastest processing rates are 10 milliseconds to 20 milliseconds per transaction.

Second, Red Hat had the lowest standard deviation ever recorded or less than .5 milliseconds, which in layman’s terms translates into greater consistency. And third, a single server with a stacked Reuters Market Data System (RMDS) completed a very high ‑- but not record-breaking ­­­­­- volume of transactions, 5.8 million updates per second.

The Securities Technology Analysis Center, which provides performance measurement services to the financial service industry, performed the tests, running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, the latest version, with RDMS 6.0 on IBM BladeCenter H and 10 gigabit Ethernet.

“In financial services, speed is the difference between making money and losing money,” said Scott Crenshaw, vice president of Red Hat’s platform business unit. “The result is clear: more data, faster data, means better trades and better decisions.”

As if that weren’t enough, Crenshaw struck a blow to proprietary software. “We were 2.4 times faster than Sun Microsystems,” he crowed, comparing Red Hat’s 5.8 million updates with Sun Solaris’ record of 2.4 million updates.

Go, open source! Guess you should have been here for the Boston Marathon!

At the MySQL conference in Santa Clara, Calif., Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green, Sun’s senior vice president of software, dropped in unexpectedly in an informal dinner organized by the open source community and spent several hours chatting up the crowd.

Beyond the photo op and blogging opportunity, the visit was encouraging to the group, according to Zack Urlocker, Sun’s vice president of MySQL products. “It was a very nice touch, showing that they are actively listening to the community and understand its importance in the open source world,” he said.

The success of open source software (OSS) has software giants like Microsoft running scared, OSS pioneer Bruce Perens says. Although most IT shops today use OSS such as Nagios, Samba, Apache and other programs, the open source community is still in a vulnerable spot, as software vendors use their patents to gain unfair market advantage and even take control of OSS products and standards.

I talked with Perens recently, and our topic was what IT managers need to know and do about the state of open source software. Perens says that IT managers are in the best position to lobby proprietary software vendors to protect and not attack the OSS community. IT shops are those vendors’ customers, after all, and have some clout; whereas, the large majority of open source developers — mostly self-employed or volunteers — are poorly equipped to stand up to major corporations that are trying to grab ownership of OSS.

Proprietary software vendors are both co-opting open source and, as stealthily as possible, trying to destroy OSS with software patent threats. If proprietary software vendors succeed in stymieing OSS development, technology innovation will slow down, and interoperability in heterogeneous environments will be difficult, if not impossible, to attain.

Protecting OSS will help IT organizations retain the ability “to purchase software without becoming tied to that [software vendor] for other software” to manage or complement it, Perens told me.

The protection of open standards should also be on IT pros’ agenda. Once a proprietary software vendor gets hold of rights to software standards, there are few obstacles to that vendor expanding those rights. Perens urges IT organizations to support the International Standards Organization (ISO). Established to govern the process of patent distribution, ISO working to adapt standards to the reality of the current marketplace. Most companies need interoperable software for many functions, from exchanging Microsoft Office documents to sharing databases across systems. The ISO needs the support of IT leaders in order to support the development of software interoperability amid pressure applied by proprietary vendors.

“Software patents are a problem especially for open standards, because they may prevent a standard from being usable by everyone,” Perens told me. ” If there’s a royalty or discriminatory licensing to the patent, that usually rules out open source implementations.”

With ISO/IEC 26300, Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0., the ISO did address business software interoperability in 2006. This requires all office documents to be able to be sent from one software system to a competing software system without having to be re-formatted.
In the U.S., it has been hard to stop software vendors from filing or expanding software patents that lack integrity and bankrupting OSS startups with lawsuits. U.S. “lawmakers are so in thrall to big-media lobbyists that they do not even realize that counterarguments to copyright extensions exist,” said Professor at Stanford Law School and founder of the Center for Internet and Society Lawrence Lessig.

U.S. antitrust suits have gotten few results; but, in 2007, the European Commission filed the largest antitrust suit against Microsoft yet, for withholding information that would let rival vendors defend themselves from product integration, rolling out a penalty of $1.3 billion.

But, Perens pointed out, this was merely one step forward in a larger struggle.

The Novell-sponsored openSUSE Build Service recently added support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS. This community project provides a development platform for future openSUSE Linux distributions . This is in addition to distributions including Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu and others. With this build service framework, developers can make packages with increased compatibility across distributions. The openSUSE build service with additional distribution compatibility is available now.

The management of the openSUSE Build Service has a direct line to Novell for influence of future releases. More information on the new compatibility can be found at the openSUSE news site.

The up-and-coming LiMo Foundation recently announced that, in March of 2008, a Linux-based platform for mobile computing platform will be available.

A development application programming interface (API)  specification available now for third-party developers to make packages for the platform. Basic characteristics of the platform include embracing open-source code and being modular and portable. More information on the platform release can be found at the LiMo website.

While computing in general is in the midst of smassive change with regards to virtualization, 64-bit computing available to Linux and Windows platforms, processing cores and very high RAM quantities, storage is about to go through something big as well, thanks to CleverSafe. 

CleverSafe provides an open-source storage grid that slices data across many datastores through a proprietary algorithm. The figure below shows the basic principle in a greatly distributed sliced-storage grid across 9 international datastores:

While jumping into something like this would require some major planning and a buy-in, enterprises have the option of running just the Slicestors server on one system for the purposes of evaluation. The Slicestors system role would install an iSCSI adapter into your system to connect to storage, and once configuration is complete, normal mount commands would be used for access. Also, Cleversafe works best with CentOS, if you’re interested.

Exploring Cleversafe
Cleversafe is a few years old, but you can expect to see some product maturation soon, as I predict this will become even more popular with enterprises. I will see Cleversafe at Technosium 2008 tomorrow in Santa Clara, California and will be sure to follow-up on this.

I was faced with the decision to implement an additional system on the RHEL 4.x series, or make our first jump to the version 5 releases. I decided to have this additional system to stay on RHEL 4.x because of our support situation. As admins are aware, there are many factors that affect a decision like this one.

RHEL 4.x vs. RHEL 5
RHEL is a stable platform among its competition. At just over a year old, its latest build, RHEL 5, is still new to the scene. But RHEL version5.1 was recently released and has enjoyed initial success thus far. The biggest factor in choosing to remain on the 4.x platform was Red Hat’s recent release of version 4.6, keeping the 4.x a current product. With this release, all of our versions remain within the realm of support, so our internal support requirements have not been impacted by another platform. This also keeps us in line with base configuration of applications that are running on the RHEL systems.

You can’t stay on version 4.x forever!
I know, but we made the decision based on what we can best support internally by not multiplying our scope of platforms. But, the version 5.x test bed is just around the corner, and we will increase our comfort with version 5.x (curiously awaiting a 5.2). At that point we would welcome version 5.x by ceasing the version 4.x installs, and migrating to version 5.x if possible.

What is your strategy?
Do you have multiple versions running in your enterprise? What is your thought process in regards to introducing a new distribution? Share your strategies below in a comment.