Practical Technology

for practical people.

September 23, 2010
by sjvn01
1 Comment

VMware’s Novell SUSE Linux buy out runs into a snag

There’s no doubt about it. VMware wants to buy Novell’s SUSE Linux and open-source divisions. But, according to a Reuters report, Novell’s board really wants to sell NetWare and the identity management divisions at the same time, and no one wants to pay serious money for them.

In addition, I’ve heard that other companies are interested in buying Novell’s SUSE Linux business. VMware may yet find itself in a Linux bidding war.

I haven’t heard any names. Or, to be more exact, I haven’t heard any names that I think are likely to be serious bidders. Jay Lyman, the open-source analyst for The 451 Group, thinks VMware remains among the likely candidates, as does IBM or CA.” He doesn’t think Oracle will be in the mix. “Oracle’s still on the Red Hat path. But, “Another wild-card for SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) is Microsoft. We will see.”

I still see VMware as the front-runner. IBM likes to use and service Linux, the company has never had any interest in the Linux distribution business. I can’t imagine Microsoft, with Steve Ballmer at its head, buying a Linux company. Ask me again after Microsoft’s get some fresh blood at the top and it may be a different story.

More >

September 22, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Red Hat: The 1st billion-dollar open-source company?

A few months back Glyn Moody, noted open-source journalist, asked the question, "Why No Billion-Dollar Open Source Companies?" Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat‘s CEO answered, "Red Hat could get to $5 billion in due course, but that this entailed ‘replacing $50 billion of revenue’ currently enjoyed by other computer companies. Guess what? Red Hat is on its way.

In its latest quarter, Red Hat’s total revenue was $219.8 million, an increase of 20% from the year ago quarter. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Subscription revenue for the quarter was $186.2 million, up 19% year-over-year. I guess Oracle’s attempt to snatch Red Hat’s business away with a re-branded RHEL really hasn’t worked.

In a statement Whitehurst said, "We continued to benefit from new project spending, expansion and cross selling of our product solutions and strong renewals in our top accounts. Our sales execution in the quarter resulted in organic revenue growth of 20% and the best billings growth rate in two years. During the quarter, we introduced our Cloud Foundations portfolio in an effort to help our customers take advantage of the benefits from cloud computing in an open and cost effective way. Our flexible cloud stack will enable customers to run enterprise applications across physical servers, virtual platforms, private clouds and multiple public clouds. We are beginning to see solid interest in our cloud and virtualization initiatives as well as some early deal activity, including our first private cloud management deal over a million dollars."

And, where is Red Hat getting those customers from? In part, it’s from Oracle and other big-name proprietary software companies. As Moody wrote when he spoke to Whitehurst, he admitted "Something rather profound: that open-source solutions save money for customers by doing away with the fat margins for existing computer companies–and thus shrink the overall market."

Exactly. Open source and Linux is good news for customers and open-source companies, but it’s not good for companies that want iron-control over their customers’ software, such as Oracle.

Red Hat’s net income was, of course, no where near as high as its gross income. The net income for the quarter was $23.7 million, or $0.12 per diluted share. This was down from $28.9 million, or $0.15 per diluted share, in the year ago quarter. But, that drop is something of an illusion. That year ago quarter included a one time tax benefit of $7.3 million, or approximately $0.04 per diluted share.

In terms of being a billion dollar company, it looks to me like Red Hat is well on its way. As Charlie Peters, Red Hat’s Executive VP and CFO wrote in a statement, "Our revenue and operating income growth continued this quarter with strong double digit gains in both, despite the foreign currency head wind." Pretty darn good for this economy wouldn’t you say? Peters continued, "It is clear that our value proposition is resonating with customers." He’s got that right.

As it is, Red Hat’s total cash, cash equivalents and investments as of August 31, 2010 was $1.05 billion. Yes, you read that right; Red Hat already has a cool billion socked away. Even if Red Hat’s growth cools off, and I don’t think it will, by this time next year Red Hat, which is now in fiscal year 2011, will be well on its way to being the first billion-dollar pure-play open-source company for its fiscal year 2012.

Sigh. Its times like this that I’m sorry I can’t own any technology firm stocks, or I’d be betting hot and heavy on Red Hat.

This story first appeared in ComputerWorld.

September 22, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Beyond 802.11n: Gigabit Wi-Fi

If you set up 802.11n Wi-Fi just right, you can get remarkable speeds from it. But, as fast as 802.11n can go, up to 300Mbps, Gigabit Wi-Fi promises to more than triple that speed. Vroom!

That’s the good news. The bad news is that it’s going to be a while before we see Gigabit Wi-Fi. It’s not that the technology isn’t available to pull this kind of speed off. If anything the problem is that there are too many technologies that Wi-Fi chip vendors can use to deliver the 1Gbps (Gigabit per second) goods.

All-together, there are three proposed Gigabyte Wi-Fi standards. These are IEEE 802.11ac, 802.11ad and Wireless Gigabit aka WiGig.

More >

September 21, 2010
by sjvn01
1 Comment

It’s official: Carrier Pigeons are faster than rural Internet

Take 10 carrier pigeons, strap each one with a 30GB USB keys and then race them against a typical rural Internet connection starting from a Yorkshire farm in the United Kingdom. Who do you think will win? Well, I’ll tell you. The pigeons reached their destination, 120 miles away, in an hour and fifteen minutes. The Internet? It hadn’t even delivered a quarter of the 300GB video file.

This was done for fun, but it was also to make a serious point. Outside of major cities, Internet connectivity is still awful. I should know. When I first moved to the Blue Ridge mountains outside of Asheville, NC, I had to go back to a dial-up connection. Yes, there are still places where dial-up is all you can do. Let me tell you right now, 56Kbps sucks dead gophers through rusty tail-pipes.

I then tried satellite Internet. The download speed was much better… when they’d let me get it. My maximum download at “High-Speed 3Mbps” each month was for 10-hours. I went through that in a day. After that my satellite network connection gave me 100-200Kbps. On top of that, the latency was dreadful. When your Internet has to go 22,300 miles, at best, straight up for its first hop even the speed of light begins to feel slow.

More >

September 21, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

How to avoid falling into the Twitter security black hole

Twitter has a big problem. A new security design flaw is now being heavily exploited. Here’s what you need to know now.

First, don’t use Twitter. Third-party programs, such as TweetDeck, twhirl, and Twitterfall seem to be immune to the problem.

If you are using Twitter, the security hole will “appear” to be a block of black text. What it actually is though is a tiny JavaScript program. If you even just place your mouse over the text, no need to click, you’ll activate the program. This “mouseover bug” can then launch potentially malicious pop-ups, send you up to third-party sites, or even send out more tweets, thus spreading the problem.

More >

September 20, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Oracle rips Red Hat and ‘sort of’ launches a new Linux

Oracle made a weird announcement at its Oracle OpenWorld love-fest and trade-show. The company announced that it was releasing its own Linux: the Oracle’s Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel for Oracle Linux.

Funny, and I thought Larry Ellison already had his own Linux, Unbreakable Linux, which Oracle introduced not quite four-years ago. Of course, Oracle Unbreakable Linux wasn’t really Oracle’s Linux. It was Red Hat‘s Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with an Oracle Linux logo pasted on the front.

But, this time, Oracle swears its new Oracle Linux is different. The company claims that it’s been optimised for Oracle software and hardware and that Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel is faster than RHEL To be precise, Oracle claims its more than 75 percent faster, as shown by Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) performance tests; 200 percent faster at InfiniBand messaging; and is 137 percent faster at solid state disk access than a "Red Hat Compatible Kernel."

Speaking as the guy who designed and ran the very first Linux server benchmarks back in 1999, I’m not impressed by Oracle’s claims. An expert can make any operating system look like the greatest thing since sliced bread and its rival look like a two-day old dead dog.

I’m sure on Sun/Oracle hardware, tuned Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel can beat un-tuned RHEL. So what? It will take more than Oracle’s employees claiming Oracle’s new Linux is great before I buy it.

Oracle’s Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel for Oracle Linux–what a name!–is based on the stable 2.6.32 mainline Linux kernel. For some reason, a few idiots seem to think this represents a Linux fork. Nope. It doesn’t. When you get past all the hype, Oracle’s new Linux just a Linux distribution that’s been optimized for Sun/Oracle hardware. Specifically, Oracle sees this as their Linux for the company’s Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and high-end, Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) servers.

At the time though, according to Edward Scriven, Oracle’s Chief Corporate Architect, Oracle will continue to sell its RHEL-compatible Linux under the name Oracle Linux. Still, Oracle insists in its press release that "Existing Oracle Linux 5 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 customers can easily upgrade to the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. No reinstall of the operating system is required."

What’s more surprising is that Oracle also asserts that "Third-party applications that run on RHEL 5 should run unchanged on Oracle Linux with the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, while delivering significant performance and reliability improvements for end users."

So what the heck is Oracle Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Linux? It sounds to me like it’s just Oracle-branded RHEL that been tuned up for Oracle’s hardware. Color me totally unimpressed.

Oh, according to reports, Ellison claims that Oracle’s new Linux "will be more modern, it won’t be four years behind the mainline, there’ll be lots of timely enhancements from Oracle and the Linux community, and it will deliver much better performance."

OK, riddle me this. How can you be bleeding edge, offer stability for high-end applications, and stay compatible with a Linux that you claim is four-years behind the time? The answer to this conundrum? You can’t.

Ellison also said, "We [Oracle] spend a lot of time finding and fixing bugs in Red Hat Linux, and we have no problem with that–we do that with lots of operating systems."But sometimes when we fix a Red Hat Linux bug, Red Hat can take a very long time before making the fix. We’d fix the bug for our customers, and we’d send the bug off to Red Hat for them to fix, and sometimes the fix would be made very quickly but sometimes not."

Really? You could have fooled me. Both Red Hat and Oracle are leading Linux development companies, and I’ve not noticed Oracle cleaning up Red Hat’s messes. Red Hat does just fine at cleaning up its own code thank you very much.

My take away from Oracle’s announcement is that Ellison hasn’t been able to damage Red Hat nearly as much as he wanted to. So, now he’s resorting to an announcement that’s more noise than news. Sorry Oracle, RHEL’s that been tuned for your hardware and software is interesting, but it’s not much of a new distribution and the way you’re presenting it will only confuse your customers.

A version of this story first appeared in ComputerWorld.