Practical Technology

for practical people.

March 16, 2012
by sjvn01
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Amazon EC2 cloud is made up of almost half-a-million Linux servers

We know that Linux on servers is big and getting bigger. We also knew that Linux, thanks to open-source cloud programs like Eucalyptus and OpenStack, was growing fast on clouds. What he hadn’t know that Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), had close to half-a-million servers already running on a Red Hat Linux variant.

Huang Liu, a Research Manager with Accenture Technology Lab with a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering whose has done extensive work on cloud-computing, analyzed EC2’s infrastructure and found that Amazon EC2 is currently made up of 454,400 servers.

While Amazon has never officially said what it’s running as EC2’s base operating system, it’s generally accepted that it’s a customized version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). On top of that, for the virtual machines, Amazon uses the Xen hypervisor to host Linux; OpenSolaris; Solaris; Windows 2003 and 2008; and FreeBSD and NetBSD virtual machine instances.

Amazon also doesn’t talk about how many servers their popular cloud is made up of, so Huang had to work it out. He explained, “Figuring out EC2’s size is not trivial.

Amazon EC2 cloud is made up of almost half-a-million Linux servers. More >

March 15, 2012
by sjvn01
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Linux servers keep growing, Windows & Unix keep shrinking

In 2011, we saw, according to IDC’s latest Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, factory revenue in the worldwide server market grew for Linux while it shrank for Windows and Unix. What I find especially interesting about this is that IDC doesn’t measure when you or your company install Linux on a bare-metal server or a re-purposed server, which is historically how Linux got into companies, but only servers with Linux already pre-installed.

That means more and more customers are asking IBM, HP and Dell, the big three server hardware vendors, for Linux on their hardware. Specifically, IDC found that “Linux server demand was positively impacted by high performance computing (HPC) and cloud infrastructure deployments, as hardware revenue improved 2.2% year over year in 4Q11 to $2.6 billion. Linux servers now represent 18.4% of all server revenue, up 1.7 points when compared with the fourth quarter of 2010.

Its competitors? “Windows server demand subsided slightly in 4Q11 as hardware revenue decreased 1.5% year over year. Quarterly revenue of $6.5 billion for Windows servers represented 45.8% of overall quarterly factory revenue, up 2.6 points over the prior year’s quarter.”

As has long been the case, Unix is the server operating system that really got knocked around. “Unix servers experienced a revenue decline of 10.7% year over year to $3.4 billion representing 24.2% of quarterly server revenue for the quarter. IBM grew Unix server revenue 2.5% year-over-year and gained 7.9 points of Unix server market share when compared with the fourth quarter of 2010.”

Linux servers keep growing, Windows & Unix keep shrinking. More >

March 15, 2012
by sjvn01
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The Neutrino Network

With 802.11n, you can see Wi-Fi networking speeds above 100 Megabits per second (Mbps) with a range up to 70-meters. With the just shipping now 802.11ac, you can get more than a Gigabit per second (Gbps) speeds with a range of about 35-meters. 802.11ad, which is still coming together, may give us 7Gbps speed but at a range of only five-meters. Or, if laboratory experiments by University of Rochester and North Carolina State University work out, we may someday be able to use neutrino networks at ranges of tens of thousands of kilometers.

Scientists from the school were able to use neutrinos–nearly massless particles that travel at almost the speed of light–to send the binary message “Neutrino” to a receiver that was just over a kilometer away and that included 240 meters of stone in the way.” Try that with any other wireless technology!

The Neutrino Network. More >

March 14, 2012
by sjvn01
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Is Ubuntu becoming a big name in enterprise Linux servers?

When you think of Ubuntu Linux, what do you think of? I would guess you think about the Linux desktop. While Ubuntu is certainly a big player—maybe the biggest—when it comes to the Linux desktop, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu wants you to know that “A remarkable thing happened this year: companies started adopting Ubuntu over RHEL for large-scale enterprise workloads, in droves.”

Shuttleworth makes this claim because, according to W3Tech, which surveys technologies used on the Web, shows that since July 2011 Ubuntu has overtaken Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for Web servers. According to W3Techs, as of February, “Ubuntu s now used on 6% of all Web servers, up from 4% one year ago.”

Shuttleworth choose Web servers for his benchmark because “Web services are a public affair.” Nevertheless, Shuttleworth claims that “the trend is even starker if you look at what we know of new-style services, like clouds and big data.”

He may be on to something.

Is Ubuntu becoming a big name in enterprise Linux servers? More >

March 14, 2012
by sjvn01
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Good-bye Encyclopedia Britannica: Good-bye to the printed record

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury the print Encyclopedia Britannica, not to praise it. The evil that books do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.”

Oh I could praise it, but what good would that do? After 244 years, dozens of editions and millions of sets sold, no new editions will be placed on paper. We knew this would happen. E-books sales are sky-rocketing and encyclopedia sales have dwindled to next to nothing. Today, the print edition counted for less than 1% of ’s revenue.

True, the Britannica will live on online, but it’s long been over-shadowed by Wikipedia. Its days are numbered.

Good-bye Encyclopedia Britannica: Good-bye to the printed record

March 13, 2012
by sjvn01
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16 Linux Server Monitoring Commands You Really Need To Know

Want to know what’s really going on with your server? Then you need to know these essential commands. Once you’ve mastered them, you’ll be well on your way to being an expert Linux system administrator.

Depending on the Linux distribution, you can run pull up much of the information that these shell commands can give you from a GUI program. SUSE Linux, for example, has an excellent, graphical configuration and management tool, YaST, and KDE‘s KDE System Guard is also excellent.

However, it’s a Linux administrator truism that you should run a GUI on a server only when you absolutely must. That’s because Linux GUIs take up system resources that could be better used elsewhere. So, while using a GUI program is fine for basic server health checkups, if you want to know what’s really happening, turn off the GUI and use these tools from the Linux command shell.


16 Linux Server Monitoring Commands You Really Need To Know. More >