Gauri Shiv Enterprises, Committed to share knowledge

Red Hat delivered its latest major operating platform release, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, in November 2010, representing a new standard of flexibility, efficiency and control for customers’ commercial open source environments. The release included features applicable to all computing environments — from physical to virtual to the cloud – with improvements in performance, scalability and reliability. The platform has been well-received by customers and we announced earlier this week that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 has already set a new standard in storage performance based on internal testing by Red Hat engineering.

Today, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 takes another step forward with the availability of the beta for the first update to the platform. The beta includes new features, bug fixes and support for new hardware from our key partners. We encourage our customers, partners and the community to install the beta and share your feedback on this latest update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 with us. To access the beta, visit here, and to read the Release Notes for the beta, visit here.

Notable improvements in the beta include:

• Virtualization performance optimizations – objective is to minimize virtualization overhead in comparison to bare metal operation
  • Network latency speedups by moving this functionality into kernel routines
  • Disk I/O latency enhancements via ioeventfd
  • Metadata caching of qcow2 images reducing I/O overhead
  • FPU register use optimizations
• New hardware enablement – supporting the current generation of multicore processors and peripherals as well as improving reliability
  • Processor scheduler enhancements increasing the NUMA hardware topology awareness
  • Ability to dynamically add memory and processors on certain systems
  • Support for PCI express 3.0, enabling higher bandwidth
  • Updates to a range of device drivers: network, disk, graphics
• Operational efficiency – improved system services, resource control and performance
  • Cgroup resource controls augmented with I/O rate limiting capability
  • More efficient network processing across multi-core systems via packet flow steering
  • Performance improvements in device-mapper-multipath’s handling of failed storage
  • Enhancements in network storage including FCoE datacenter bridging and iSCSI offloading
  • Improved IPv6 support across virtual networks and DHCP services
  • Transparent proxy of services using squid
  • Netgroup support, renewal for kerberos credentials
• Development and monitoring tools – augmenting diagnostic capabilities
  systemtap tracing enhancements
  • Gdb debugger has improved C++ and python handling
  • Valgrind memory tracing enhancements to better match multi-core processors
  • Eclipse development environment includes enhanced breakpoint and code generation for C/C++ and Java
• High Availability – improvements in this Add-On option include:
  • Ability to use the high availability infrastructure to failover KVM virtual guests
  • NFSv4 resource agent monitoring
  • Substantial documentation enhancement

To learn more about Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, visit here, and to read a technical deep-dive on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, visit here.

The Red Hat Summit, taking place in Boston May 3-6, 2011, will feature sessions, labs and opportunities for collaboration focused around Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Visit here to see the full list of sessions focused on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The entire world is impressed by the courage and determination of the Japanese people as they approach the challenge of relief and recovery. We at Red Hat, along with millions of people around the world, seek ways where we can constructively and immediately help their efforts. Talking with our colleagues, friends and partners in Japan, it became clear that we could help, in some small way, by doing what we do best: delivering strong technology. It turns out that information technology is a key tool in planning, communicating and implementing disaster relief and recovery activities.

And this is a clear case where cloud computing shines. Cloud computing allows for the rapid deployment of new computing capacity, in response to unexpected demand. Without the time, complexity and cost of setting up new computers and datacenters. Red Hat is proud to have joined with our Certified Cloud Provider partners in Japan to provide free cloud computing capacity (including the free use of our software) to assist in disaster relief and recovery. Red Hat and our partners are reaching out to agencies and individuals in Japan to make them aware of these services.

In addition to offering cloud technologies in assistance, Red Hat has also made a monetary donation and is matching portions of employee donations to help with the relief efforts in Japan.

When we released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 in November 2010, we discussed the many performance improvements featured in the release – these included improvements in network rates, multi-user filesystem workloads and virtualization I/O enhancements allowing for increased consolidation while simultaneously reducing I/O overhead in comparison to baremetal.

Today, we’re excited to announce that in internal testing conducted by Red Hat engineering, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 has set a new standard in storage performance. The combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Intel-based systems and Fusion-io Solid State Storage devices delivered results measuring 30 percent faster performance than previously published results* based on proprietary systems.

Database performance is often dependent on fast data throughput from storage. In order to test the capabilities of the latest hardware and operating system, Red Hat engineering simulated scaling up of a database workload on the some of the latest industry-standard systems. Our internal results showed 1.32 million IO/second for 8KB reads, a 30 percent jump over previously reported results.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is optimized for managing complex systems with increased core counts, large memory and high-throughput networking. Red Hat engineering tested the scalability and balance of the platform and operating system by systematically increasing both the workload and the storage. Running on commercially available Intel Boxboro EX 32-core (64 way with HT) and 128GB of memory, the raw performance scaled with eight Fusion-io ioDrive Duo cards to match the peak capabilities of the cards at 2. Million IO/sec at 1KB to achieve a sustained throughput of 12.5GB/s at transfer sizes greater than 16KB.

Pushing systems to their limits during internal testing benefits our customers in multiple ways. This offers customers an example of how to get the most from their hardware investments, while also demonstrating the stability offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux under extreme loads. The results of this internal performance test place Red Hat Enterprise Linux among the leaders in operating platform data performance.

We worked closely with Fusion-io on the performance testing, and Tyler Smith, vice president of Alliances at Fusion-io, said this:
Close collaboration with Red Hat in the early engineering phases has helped to leverage Fusion’s ioMemory to deliver optimized application performance on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. We expect the Red Hat Enterprise Linux community will benefit greatly from these efforts and we’re proud that our work with Red Hat’s outstanding team is delivering such impressive results.

For more information about Red Hat Enterprise Linux, visit www.redhat.com.

*As reported in Enterprise Storage Forum

While Red Hat has long worked to address the problem that software patents pose for innovation by promoting patent reform through legislative means throughout the world and submitting amicus briefs in important U.S. patent cases, we have also made clear that we have been developing a defensive patent portfolio to deter those not interested in the success of open source software from using their patents to attack Red Hat and the open source community. We believe that the possibility of a patent countersuit from Red Hat will dampen the enthusiasm of such competitors to open source software to use their patents aggressively against the open source community. With that goal in mind, we are pleased to learn that The Patent Board™, an independent company that regularly publishes a Patent Scorecard™ ranking the strength of the top 163 patent portfolios in the IT Industry, ranked Red Hat’s patent portfolio as the 50th strongest in the industry on March 11, 2011. This ranking reflects not only the growth in the number of patents Red Hat has obtained (now including 137 granted U.S. Patents), but also the quality of those patents.

The ranking of Red Hat’s patent portfolio as the 50th strongest in IT represents a jump of 16 spots from The Patent Board’s previous ranking on November 5, 2010. In producing its rankings, The Patent Board tracks the United States and European patent portfolios of more than 2,700 of the world’s top technology firms. Among the factors that The Patent Board tracks in its studies to produce these rankings are the following:

• Industry Impact™ — indicates the extent to which others are building upon a portfolio of issued US utility patents as compared to the total set of utility patents.
• Technology Strength™ — ranking measure to indicate an overall strength of the company’s patent portfolio holdings with a combined measure of quality and quantity.

The Patent Board has produced the following chart illustrating its tracking of these metrics against Red Hat’s patent portfolio over the past year (the lower number the better for Technology Strength™ Rank, the higher number the better for Industry Impact™):

While Red Hat is proud of this independent assessment of the strength of our patent portfolio, we remain committed to using our patent portfolio defensively in the interests of open source software. Specifically, Red Hat years ago pioneered a first-of-its-kind commitment to such defensive use in its Patent Promise, which is still the most comprehensive commitment of its kind by any technology company. Generally, our Patent Promise provides that the technology covered by any of our patents can be used by anyone in any software distributed under some of the leading open source licenses (including various versions of the GPL and LGPL), unless that person institutes patent litigation against Red Hat.

At the same time, Red Hat continues to fight for software patent reform. For example, Red Hat recently joined a large group of companies in filing an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in February 2011 in the case of Microsoft v i4i Limited Partnership, explaining that the burden of proof that a patent challenger must meet to invalidate a patent impedes innovation and should be lowered. Red Hat also filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in October 2009 in the case of Bilski v. Kappos, asking the Supreme Court to exclude software from patentability.

We are pleased with the development of our patent portfolio. We will maintain our commitment to its defensive use in the interests of the open source community as we continue to be a voice representing the open source community on patent reform.

The great telecommunications expansion of the 21st century continues unabated with new generations of smart phones and other devices reaching more consumers than ever. And many wireless industry analysts are putting the growth of Internet-connected devices at one trillion by 2013, with the vast majority of this growth coming from mobile devices and smart phones. Mobile devices are now an “always on” technology. Just like light switches, we turn them on and expect a functional service, and demand that software and firmware upgrades integrate seamlessly with our usage patterns.

Key to meeting these ever-growing demands is an IT infrastructure integrated with business processes, one that is clearly understood, codified and ready to go to work at moment’s notice. In too many cases, even today, IT applications and data assets are not integrated and are tightly connected with brittle links. In these situations, customers do not receive the services they expect and need in a timely manner… or at all.

The Fast Pace of the Telecommunications Revolution

Dramatic improvements in capability and speed have provided the smart phone market with robust competition amongst device manufacturers and network providers. A wide range of capabilities must now be configured, serviced, updated and extended on hundreds of millions of devices around the world. User growth remains impressive. If customers do not receive a rich feature set, high performance and a high quality of service, they can switch carriers. Of the many players in this market, the network service provider is one area where the rubber meets the road on an hourly basis with millions of subscribers.

This robust ecosystem with high qualities of service would not be possible without flexible, integrated IT infrastructures, services and applications. Users go to physical stores and service provider websites looking for the latest mobile devices or upgrades to existing phones and service packages. These many facets of user interaction force network service providers to exist at multiple levels in the market, from local areas and specialized services to regional, national and international providers.

Struggling to Keep Up The Old Fashioned Way

Since the inception of the smart phone, telecommunication companies have been called upon to more quickly respond to customer needs. However, several service providers still rely on some manual processes or brittle integration architectures that use old-fashioned enterprise application integration (EAI) and hard-coded data integration. As we illustrate below, these situations can lead to high costs and dissatisfied customers. While true to life, this problem is diminishing in frequency as telecommunications companies update their IT infrastructures to modern service-oriented and event-driven architectures (SOA and EDA).

In this example, customers use a website or portal to purchase new smart phones or service plans. The customer goes to a website, fills out an application or service request/update form and then submits it through the web browser. Increasingly, this interaction is conducted on a wide range of devices, from PCs to smart phones and tablets.

In a better case scenario, the applications are connected with hard-coded EAI or messaging links. However, these applications are not easily changeable and require significant custom code to extend the EAI or messaging to work with the business events, data transformation, workflow, business rules and data integration, usually as an afterthought.

In a less desirable scenario, the front-end web applications are not integrated with back-end databases or provisioning and billing applications. In this situation, employees receive the web application forms online and must print them out to enter data into a variety of databases, requiring the provisioning and billing applications to be run against the new data sets representing a new customer. Given the time requirements, the people driving this part of the business are likely to become bottlenecks.

Additionally, service providers will run into the wall of human error – spelling mistakes, typos, and incorrect information about services requested, prices/specials, and even the service packages themselves. These errors drive delay, cost and customer dissatisfaction as shown below.

There is a Better Way with JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform and JBoss Enterprise Data Services Platform

A SOA built with JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform and/or JBoss Enterprise Data Services Platform can help an enterprise deliver better results. The enterprise service bus (ESB) provides the foundation for intelligent business event handling, linking data presented from the data virtualization engine and applications in a seamless manner, adding value to existing or new messaging deployments. This architecture helps minimize pain points associated with non-integrated applications and data and frees personnel to work on higher-value activities like improving products and services. Instead of taking days to recover from errors, the telecommunications company can respond in minutes, reducing time and costs to offer an improved customer experience.

JBoss Enterprise Middleware subscriptions offer this business value in a more affordable and higher-quality fashion. The open source community drives higher quality and easier-to-use platforms while the Red Hat testing and certification processes gives users confidence that these open source platforms can run telecommunications processes and integrate these applications and data in a safe, IT consumable and supportable manner. JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform and JBoss Enterprise Data Services Platform offer this value to the telecommunications industry, as well as and many others.

For more information, please visit our JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform and JBoss Enterprise Data Services Platform pages.

The 2011 Innovation Awards, which recognize the achievements of companies breaking new ground with Red Hat and JBoss solutions, are now underway. As a judge for the fifth consecutive year, I am always eager to discover the innovative ways our customers and partners are utilizing Red Hat and JBoss technologies to confront today’s challenging business issues. Major paradigm shifts are occurring as companies increasingly examine efficiencies enabled by new cloud and virtualized architectures. It’s exciting to see what companies are doing to leap ahead of conventional IT infrastructure.

Reviewing these stories from our customers and partners leveraging the full advantage of the open source development model to overcome challenges and create value continues to impress me. Your success is important, and I encourage you to share your story by submitting a nomination for the 2011 Innovation Awards. Nominations will remain open until March 11, 2011. Winners will be recognized at the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World taking place May 3-6, 2011 in Boston, MA.

Given the economic climate over the past few years, it has become vital for CIOs to become laser-focused on keeping their IT spending in check, while at the same time, deliver the necessary technology to become and remain a high-performing organization. Over the years, I have been fortunate enough to review award-winning submissions from organizations that are doing just that, including leading enterprises such as Hill Air Force Base, Comcast, Citigroup, Travel Channel, Nationwide and Whole Foods, just to name a few. Each year, I am always impressed to see the performance and ROI improvements highlighted in submissions by organizations in numerous industries around the world.

For example, 2010 Innovation Award winner Travel Channel was recognized for its implementation of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and JBoss Operations Network. Utilizing open source solutions, Travel Channel enhanced risk management and capacity planning, increased throughput and and increased application availability. Read the full submission. In addition, 2009 Innovation Award winner Whole Foods Market was recognized for its use of Red Hat Satellite to manage its Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems that resulted in reduced costs, reallocated resources and an opportunity for the Whole Foods IT department to focus more on strategic business initiatives. Read the full submission.

Lastly, the Innovation Awards are open to all Red Hat and JBoss customers and partners worldwide. I am looking forward to reviewing your submission, and good luck!

I joined Red Hat in 2001, naive yet undaunted about the potential to transform the IT industry through open source. Our engineering group at the time was no more than 50 people. How could our relatively small team compete in the land of giants? Simple. Because the license Richard Stallman wrote, and Linus Torvalds selected for Linux, nearly 20 years ago, and Linus’ benevolent leadership of the kernel since, was key in creating a model for open collaboration.

Nearly 10 years later, our engineering ranks have grown to over 1,000. Our customers see benefits which a decade ago were only an aspiration: better reliability, greater performance and scale, and solutions that are modular and manageable. All of which result in the transformation of commodity hardware into engines that power enterprises across the majority of the Fortune 500, while returning dollars back to the CIO for investment in their core business.

Our beliefs and policies around open collaboration have only strengthened. We are proud that we have been the top commercial contributor to great open communities such as GNOME and the Linux kernel. From those contributions, our company has benefited, our customers have benefited, our Linux-based commercial competitors have benefited, and the community at large is more vibrant.

Red Hat often talks about upstream first, the practice of openly developing kernel features and bug fixes as part of the most recent upstream kernel before we ship them in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We know the value of getting code open from day one, debating it in the public forum, and letting it mature through a cycle long before it reaches our customers’ data centers. As the kernel community is well aware, it is standard practice for Red Hat to submit fixes that we find in supporting our customers.

We believe that the open source development model produces the best software on the planet, and Red Hat will continue to increase the resources invested in openly developing software. Furthermore, we maintain that our business is ‘not about the bits’. Rather, our business is to provide services to our customers under a subscription model. This includes proactive streams of security, bug fixes, features, and hardware enablement, supported in many cases for up to 10 years after the initial release. We also provide support delivered over the phone, but increasingly online and through our forums. This includes documentation, reference architectures, tips & tricks, best practices, and developer podcasts. The purpose of this knowledge is to enable the success of our customers.

Recently, Jonathan Corbet, respected kernel community member and editor at LWN, commented on our change in kernel RPM packaging. When we released RHEL 6 approximately four months ago, we changed the release of the kernel package to have all our patches pre-applied. Why did we make this change? To speak bluntly, the competitive landscape has changed. Our competitors in the Enterprise Linux market have changed their commercial approach from building and competing on their own customized Linux distributions, to one where they directly approach our customers offering to support RHEL.

Frankly, our response is to compete. Essential knowledge that our customers have relied on to support their RHEL environments will increasingly only be available under subscription. The itemization of kernel patches that correlate with articles in our knowledge base is no longer available to our competitors, but rather only to our customers who have recognized the value of RHEL and have thus indirectly funded Red Hat’s contributions to open source that will advance their business now and in the future.

As an open source company, Red Hat is held to high standards. We embrace this. In 2011 you can expect us to increase our investment in open source contributions, while simultaneously competing with companies who are threatened by the continuing disruptive advancement of open source in the enterprise.

Today, Red Hat announced the availability of Extended Lifecycle Support (ELS) for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, in line with the one-year notification of the end-of-life of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, which is scheduled to occur on February 29, 2012. ELS, an optional Add-On for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, extends an existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription for an additional three years over its standard seven year life-cycle. As a result, subscription customers have a choice of purchasing ELS to extend their use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, or to upgrade to a more recent Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 or 6 version.

ELS is suitable for customers who do not wish to upgrade to a newer version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, perhaps because their systems and applications are still running well and do not warrant upgrading, or maybe because of contractual requirements. An important use for ELS will be in virtualized environments. One way to enable an older, stable system to run on modern hardware is to virtualize it. The virtualization software supports the modern hardware and is able to host the older system. With ELS, the older system has an even longer supported lifecycle while taking advantage of the latest hardware.

To learn more about ELS, visit here.

The steady delivery of new and updated Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases continues today with the immediate availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.9. This release follows on the heels of the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 in January, and the delivery of the newest major version of the platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, released in November 2010. Red Hat delivers updates to its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, 5 and 6 platforms to enable choice and stability for customers and their unique deployment needs through the lifecycle of each release.

With the availability of 4.9, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 platform, first released in 2005, now transitions into its third lifecycle phase – Production 3. During the Production 3 phase, systems continue to receive security and bug fixes, but the introduction of new features and hardware support, which is provided in earlier phases, ceases. Customers wishing to continue using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 beyond Production 3 and its end-of-life date of February 29, 2012 should review Red Hat’s Extended Lifecycle Support options. And, of course, subscription customers may upgrade their systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 or 6 at any time for no additional fee.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.9 update provides resolutions for approximately 200 issues covering a number of components, including the kernel, the shell environment, Logical Volume Manager (LVM) and NFS filesystem. Also included in the update is a refresh of SystemTap kernel tracing capabilities, with additional example scripts and listing modes that allow kernel probe points to be listed.

For more information about Red Hat Enterprise Linux, visit www.redhat.com/rhel.

Custom applications are vital to any business; there’s no argument there. But, it can be very difficult to determine the costs and benefits of the middleware necessary to develop, deploy, and manage those custom applications. So how do you know if your middleware is really delivering value?

And what is “value” anyway? Is it low upfront acquisition costs? Ease-of-use that contributes to better productivity? High-quality products and support services? The ability to refocus resources to do more? What about actually adding top-line revenue? In short, it’s really all of these things.

So, how valuable is your application platform? It’s probably fair to say that most people intuitively believe that open source has much lower upfront costs. But making the case for greater productivity, flexibility, and all the other components of value, especially to senior management, can be a challenge.

However, this hurdle just became a lot easier with the recent release of the IDC study – The Business Value of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (Doc.#226338, Dec. 2010) . At Red Hat’s sponsorship, IDC studied the business value of adopting the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform for six JBoss customers. IDC’s study showed that on average, companies that use JBoss Enterprise Application Platform save more than $6 million each year in financial benefits than when using traditional, proprietary application servers.

In addition to pure cost savings, the study showed that organizations that switched to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform from traditional proprietary application servers also realized:

• An average of $3.5 million in additional annual revenue
• More efficient application development, resulting in the ability to develop 51% more applications per year
• A 65% reduction in infrastructure costs, supporting application development
• An 89% reduction in costs to manage applications post deployment
• 569% ROI generated over a three-year period, with an initial pay back in less than six months after deployment

The study concludes by getting right to the point. “For many years, the tension between the proprietary source application server vendors and open source has revolved around the idea of enterprise-class performance. The larger, proprietary source vendors try to scare their customers from adopting open source, particularly JBoss, telling them the software is too hard to use and too hard to configure and does not scale. Based on the results of this study, that is clearly not the case.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. So how valuable is your application platform? If it’s not worth $6 million to your business, maybe you should find one that is.

Learn more: In addition to reading the study, you can also hear the study’s methodology and key findings from the author, Maureen Fleming, program vice president for IDC’s Business Process Management and Middleware Research area by registering for her on-demand webinar – “The Business Value of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.”

JUDCon, May 2-3 in Boston, is one of the premier JBoss developer events. Last year’s JUDCon Boston attracted many of the best and brightest to exchange ideas on JBoss Community projects, Java EE, and cloud. And last October, JUDCon Berlin built on that momentum.

Got something to say? Say it at JUDCon Boston 2011.

The JUDCon call for papers is open now through March 4, and session tracks include:

• JBoss Application Server & Java EE 6
• Beyond Java & Java EE
• Programming, Developing & Testing
• Scalability & Cloud

Session formats include:

• Speaking session (60 minutes) – Speaking sessions will be single-topic, technical sessions, with a suggested time breakout of approximately 45 minutes for the presentation and 10 minutes for Q&A.
• Lightning talks (3-5 minutes) – Lightning talks will be brief talks held after dinner on May 2, 2011, and are primarily designed to be a launching pad into hacking, contributing, or discussing technical hot topics. Lightning talk ideas will be posted to a whiteboard at the event, so come prepared with your ideas.

Your speaking session submission should include:

• The proposed track for your submission
• Your session title
• A 30-word (max) summary of the presentation
• A 200-word (max) description of your session
• Your name and a brief biography
• Names and bios of any co-presenters

How to enter your submission:

• Submit your speaking session proposals via email to judconboston2011@redhat.com with “JUDCON SESSION: [title]” in the email subject.
• Include all of the required session information in the body of the email.
• Please only send us your complete submissions. Don’t leave out the details or we might leave out your session.
• All submissions must be submitted no later than March 4, 2011, at 11:59 p.m. ET.

If your proposal is accepted, you will be notified via email by March 11, 2011, when the JUDCon agenda is also posted on www.jboss.org.

Important Dates:

• March 4, 2011: Call for papers ends
• March 11, 2011: Selected speakers will be notified and the agenda will be posted at http://www.jboss.org/
• May 2-3, 2011: JUDCon Boston 2011 (just before 2011 JBoss World)

If you have any questions about the process or your proposal, send an email to judconboston2011@redhat.com with “JUDCON QUESTION” in the email subject.

The Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) project is pleased to announce the release of EPEL 6. A community project, EPEL 6 is a collection of open source projects packaged specifically for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, which was released in November 2010, and other compatible systems. These supplementary applications, tools and libraries are maintained and supported by volunteers for the convenience and advancement of the community. Though EPEL is under the umbrella of the Fedora Project, it is not commercially supported by Red Hat.

This milestone marks the delivery of more than 2,500 source packages and 5,600 binary rpms in a single convenient repository. The EPEL maintainers began work on the EPEL 6 packages shortly after the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Beta was released in April 2010. The first EPEL 6 packages were built and pushed out to the EPEL community in early May.

Limited only by the number of volunteer maintainers, EPEL’s packages span the many uses of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Some highlights include:

• Project Management and Personal Productivity
  • rt3 – The Request Tracker Bug and Ticket tracking system
  • trac – Project management system
  • vym – graphical organization and thought mapping
• System and Network Administration
  • BackupPC, rdiff-backup and other backup clients
  • collectd, munin, nagios and cacti monitoring solutions
  • rkhunter and chkrootkit security scanners
• Datacenter Applications
  • haproxy, varnish and lighttpd proxies and web servers
  • Spamassassin plugins, clamav and other mail server and filtering solutions
• Developer Support
  • Specialty compilers
  • Numerous Ruby, perl and python packages
• Scientific Applications
  • Math libraries
  • life sciences
  • electronic systems design tools

The EPEL project was started back in 2007 when many in the community realized that the same infrastructure and packages used in Fedora could be built and maintained as add-on packages to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Much of the early driving force was Fedora infrastructure packages that were needed for Fedora, but it has grown from there to a large community of people who want to help maintain packages for the good of all. In total, there are currently more than 430 maintainers maintaining packages in EPEL. The output of the EPEL project is limited only by maintainers eager and willing to maintain packages.

The EPEL 6 project is looking for a few good maintainers! Interested in joining the effort or just learning more about the project? Please visit https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL for more information.

Information on using EPEL 6 is available from https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL6-FAQ#How_do_I_use_it.3F.

Red Hat’s Makara team is pleased to announce the availability of the Makara Cloud Application Platform – Developer Preview. Makara is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that allows you to deploy, manage, monitor and auto-scale your new or existing Java and PHP applications in the cloud with little or no modifications. With this release: Makara is now available on the Rackspace Cloud, we’ve introduced a new MongoDB cartridge, support for Amazon micro-instances, 64-bit instance types across all clouds, plus a new security feature that gives administrators the ability to manage their organization’s user accounts across multiple clouds, clusters and applications.

Makara has been supporting the Amazon public cloud for almost a year now, but we kept hearing from devops folks and app developers that they would love to see Makara available on the Rackspace Cloud. Ask and you shall receive! Getting started with Makara on the Rackspace Cloud is easy. Just head on over to the Try-It link on makara.com to get your trial started. For those of you not familiar with Makara and who’d like to learn more about how it works, check out our Resources page for videos, tutorials and how-to guides. The Rackspace Cloud team is also hosting a webinar on March 17, 2011 at 12 p.m. PT where Issac Roth, director of product marketing, Cloud Solutions for Red Hat, who joined the company via Makara, will be demonstrating how to deploy, manage, monitor and scale your Java or PHP app on the Rackspace Cloud. Plus, he’ll cover the new features in this release.

And speaking of features, we are really excited to offer native support for MongoDB. We got some great insight from the folks over at 10Gen on where the pain points were in deploying, managing and scaling MongoDB, and we listened. In this release you gain the “point and click” ability to deploy a MongoDB cluster onto the cloud, including routers, config, shard and replica servers. Being that this is our first release with support for MongoDB, we know it might be a little rough around the edges, but we are planning on building out the feature set with your feedback and help. Please let us know what you think by engaging the Makara team and other users on IRC at irc.freenode.net, room #makara or on our JBoss.org community page.

In this release we’ve also added support for Amazon’s micro-instances, as well as 64-bit instance types across all clouds. This means both more affordable instances and bigger instances with more memory, bigger caches and better performance.

The other cool feature in this release is the introduction of the concept of “organizations”. With Makara, a single user who is designated as an organization’s administrator can have an interface to manage all the organization’s developer accounts across clouds, clusters and applications. This means that an administrator can gain visibility and control around how cloud resources are being accessed and consumed.

Finally, as many of you know, Makara was acquired by Red Hat in November 2010. Under Red Hat, we are providing the current version of the Makara Cloud Application Platform as a free Developer Preview. This Developer Preview is unsupported, though we will participate in community forums and IRC to offer advice and discussion. We expect that future versions will be incorporated into the upcoming Red Hat PaaS offering — stay tuned for more exciting news on this. For more information concerning Red Hat’s PaaS and Cloud Foundations offerings, visit the Cloud Foundations website.

If you still have questions, drop us a line, we’d love to hear from you.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization made solid progress during 2010. We delivered Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2 and the first release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Desktops. We announced that several enterprise clouds, such as IBM’s, would be built on our virtualization platform. And we announced a string of customer wins. Along with these advances came widespread acknowledgment from the press and analyst communities that Red Hat’s virtualization portfolio was becoming established as a potent force in the market. Now, keeping up the momentum, we’re kicking off 2011 with a pair of leading virtualization performance results.

In this blog, we’ll discuss progress in the area of virtualization benchmarks. Whether we’re reading Consumer Reports or cruising Internet forums, we all consider external tests and reviews when choosing the products we wish to purchase, and virtualization is no exception. In fact, for many customers, performance benchmark results are a required checklist item in their product assessment and purchase process.

In the case of virtualization, the availability of independent benchmark results has been lacking, and is still only improving slowly. In the days when VMware was the only mainstream virtualization vendor, its performance was, not unreasonably, measured by its own VMmark benchmark. However, today, with multiple vendors and products to choose from, a fully open, independent benchmark is needed. That need is starting to be met by the recently introduced SPECvirt benchmark, created through a collaboration of leading virtualization vendors, including Red Hat, Microsoft and VMware, and the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC). It’s currently the only industry-standard benchmark that measures virtualization performance and scalability.

The SPECvirt benchmark measures the ability of a system to host virtual machines that are running a set of typical server applications (web, application, mail, etc.) – it’s modeled to look like a customer’s real environment. As described on the SPEC website, the benchmark “measures the end-to-end performance of all system components including the hardware, virtualization platform and the virtualized guest operating system and application software. The benchmark supports hardware virtualization, operating system virtualization and hardware partitioning schemes.”

The metric for SPECvirt is the SPECvirt_sc2010, which is a composite number derived from the performance of the virtualized applications and a Quality of Service (QoS) requirement. Every published result also shows how many virtual machines were used to achieve the SPECvirt_sc2010 figure. To simplify benchmark setup, six virtual machines, each running a different application, are grouped into a tile. The benchmark run increases the number of tiles deployed until the QoS metric can no longer be met or until the total performance no longer increases.

This relatively sophisticated setup provides a flexible test environment, although the potential for different benchmarks to be running different applications (e.g. different web servers or different application servers) means that reviewers must take care to ensure that product-to-product comparisons are valid. Also, as with any benchmark, it is important to compare the different hardware platforms used – a bigger system should deliver a more impressive result.

At this time, only five SPECvirt results have been published. Four for Red Hat virtualization, based on the KVM hypervisor, and one by VMware, based on ESX 4.1. See here for the full listing of results.

The two most recent world-record results, published by IBM in November 2010, used Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 virtualization running on IBM xSeries servers:

• IBM x3850: 64 cores (128 threads), 2TB:
  Result: 5466.58@336 (SPECvirt_sc2010@VMs)
• IBM x3690: 16 cores (32 threads), 1TB:
  Result: 1763.68@108 (SPECvirt_sc2010@VMs)

These results are delivered on the largest systems yet published – systems on which no other virtualization vendor can run except Red Hat with our KVM technology, which leverages the power of the Linux kernel. The results show how rapidly the performance envelope for virtualization is growing. In comparison, the first result, published in June 2010, based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 and a much smaller IBM x3650, achieved less than a quarter of the performance of the latest result. In fact, the benchmark-leading system – the large IBM x3850 – is not yet supported by all the virtualization products on the market today due to its large memory and CPU configuration.

During 2011 we hope to see a greatly increased set of SPECvirt results published, covering systems of varying sizes running a range of different virtual server applications. No doubt the classic game of benchmark leapfrog by the various vendors will occur, resulting in faster development of virtualization technology and improved solutions for customers. Also, two other SPECvirt benchmark criteria have been defined, which measure performance per watt of power consumed by the server and the storage. Although power consumption is a vital consideration for IT departments today, no results have yet been published using these criteria. There is still much work to do to provide customers with comprehensive benchmark results that help them choose the most appropriate virtualization solution for their environment, but SPECvirt is on its way to filling this need.

Cloud computing needs governance — which is to say that cloud computing needs processes, policies, and procedures. In a way this is no different from IT more broadly. But virtualization, dynamically moving workloads and an increased reliance on third parties for many types of IT functions mean that well thought-out and documented processes, policies and procedures tend to be more important in cloud computing than with a more static and manual environment.

When people talk about security or risk in the cloud, they’re usually talking about governance. Security procedures and technology are part of governance, but governance is a broader concept. Legal and regulatory procedures, transparency, service levels, indemnification, notification and portability are all part of this bigger picture, especially as the discussion widens to include public cloud infrastructure providers and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendors.

Consistency and portability are two of the most important pillars supporting well-governed cloud architectures whether on-premise, public or a hybrid architecture. These concepts are closely related, but they’re not the same thing.

Consistency refers to having a consistent runtime environment (such as an operating system or middleware) in different clouds, private and public. The same application should be able to run in both places. For starters, this means that you can take a given Linux, Java, PHP or whatever application and the target environment(s) will have the supporting software and hardware infrastructure that allows that application to run in the same way in all these places. The bottom line is that the user of that application should not be able to tell where it is running. (Of course, the IT operations people need to know where workloads are running as well as specifying up-front where different workloads are allowed to run.)

One of the ways that consistency breaks down is that public clouds encourage ad hoc development that doesn’t necessarily comply with an organization’s standards for applications run on-premise. This may be fine for prototyping or other work that is throwaway by design. However, it’s far too easy for prototypes to evolve into something more—as often happened in the case of early visual programming languages—and the result is applications that either have to be rewritten or that may have support, reliability or scalability issues down the road. Just because developers find that a given public cloud environment offers the cheapest and easiest path to write and test an application doesn’t mean total application lifecycle costs will be lower. Public cloud-based development will happen though, so the best strategy is to recognize this inevitability and channel it in a way that fits within organizational standards.

Consistency goes beyond just technical factors though. Consistency between on-premise and public cloud environments also requires that the full runtime—including the applications running on it—be supported and certified by the same ISVs and others when running in the cloud or in the cloud, a commitment that is as much about business relationships as technical ones.

Portability takes multiple forms. Portable computing creates scalable private clouds that can be federated to a public cloud provider under a unified management framework. Portable applications mean that developers can write once and deploy anywhere, thereby preserving their strategic flexibility and keeping their options open while lowering maintenance and support costs. Portable services simplify development and operations by eliminating the need to re-implement frequently needed functions in private clouds and enable the movement of data and application features across clouds. Portable programming models let existing applications be brought over to cloud environments or be evolved incrementally.

And, as with consistency, there are aspects of portability that aren’t primarily technical—such as whether software subscriptions and licenses can be transferred from one location to another. Consistent support and maintenance environments are also essential elements.

Cloud computing in some form will happen throughout all organizations whether it’s the formal evaluation and adoption of a new CRM platform through a formal IT process, the ad hoc use of public cloud infrastructure by developers, or the “bursting” of an on-premise cloud to a public cloud to gain temporary capacity. Especially given the importance of properly securing data and minimizing lock-in to specific third-party provider, it’s critical to bring cloud computing activity that involves corporate data or production applications under a common governance umbrella.

Cloud computing isn’t “risky” any more than IT more broadly is risky. Rather, like all IT activities, cloud computing projects should be undertaken in a way that both mitigates risk and that considers those projects in the context of IT as a whole.

To learn more about Red Hat cloud computing and portability, visit here.

If you haven’t heard, opensource.com turned one last week! To celebrate its first anniversary, the site launched an inaugural awards program recognizing two top contributors with its Moderator’s Choice and People’s Choice awards.

Moderator’s Choice Award
The Moderator’s Choice award recipient, selected by opensource.com site moderators, was Matt Jadud. Matt is assistant professor of computer science at Allegheny College and a regular contributor to opensource.com’s Education channel. He is a vocal advocate of open source and has authored, contributed to or commented on many articles. His own include:

• Free Texts: Sources
• Allegheny First Years Dive Into Fedora
• Introducing Hands-On Computing in Secondary Education

Congratulations to Matt!

People’s Choice Award
In a voting process open to all opensource.com readers, Máirín Duffy, was selected as the People’s Choice winner. Máirín is a senior interaction designer at Red Hat. She’s highly creative and a great artist, who is also passionate about open source. For Máirín, the two intersect in Inkscape, an open source SVG graphics program. Read how she used it to introduce middle school students to open source.

Máirín puts her skills to work as an active contributor in the Fedora community where she leads the Fedora Design Team. She has also contributed to the GNOME project through its marketing team and co-founded the GNOME Women group. She also teaches a weekly digital media course to middle school Girl Scout troops in the Boston area using Gimp and Inkscape on Fedora live USB sticks.

Congratulations to Máirín!

Thank you to all of the opensource.com contributors who made the site’s first year a success. If you would like to participate and submit an article to opensource.com, please visit opensource.com/how-submit-article.

Registration is now open for the 2011 Red Hat Summit and JBoss World in Boston, May 3-6! We’re counting down the days and hope to see you at this year’s event. Check out the agenda and register for Summit and JBoss World here.

Did you miss the Red Hat Virtual Experience on January 26? Don’t worry, the event is available on-demand for the next three months here.

Want easy, up-to-date information about Red Hat events? Follow us on Twitter.

Global
Red Hat will host several webinars this month. Check out the dates below and register at www.redhat.com/webinars.

February 2: Overview of RHQ and JBoss Operations Network
February 10: Build a Private Cloud – One Step at a Time
February 15: Business Value of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

North America
Join Red Hat at the “You Have a Choice for Virtualization” half-day, complimentary seminar in Raleigh, NC on Wednesday, February 2. Red Hat’s David Huff, solutions architect, will deliver a presentation focused on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. In addition, Gordon Haff, cloud evangelist at Red Hat, will deliver a presentation focused on the value of the cloud. This event is open to any and all Red Hat customers interested in attending. Please learn more about the event and register to attend here.

JBoss, by Red Hat, will be sponsoring JasperWorld in San Francisco, February 7-9. Make sure to stop by the booth to learn more about JBoss SOA and Business Rules Management Systems. To learn more about the event and to register, click here.

Red Hat’s Gunnar Hellekson, chief technology strategist for the Public Sector, will be speaking at Cloud/GOV 2011 on Thursday, February 17 in Washington, DC. Hellekson’s “Cloud Showcase” panel will start at 3:30 p.m. To learn more or register for the event, please visit here.

Karsten Wade, community relations manager at Red Hat, will present “Professors’ Open Source Summer Experience” on Saturday, February 26 at 11:30 a.m. and “Decentralized collaboration with open source tools: technical and cultural implementation,” on Sunday, February 27 at 3:00 p.m. at SCALE 9x. In addition, Ruth Suehle, moderator for opensource.com , will present “Beyond Linux: Changing the world with open source,” on Sunday, February 27 at 4:30 p.m. For more information, visit www.socallinuxexpo.org.

For more information on North American events, click here.

EMEA
The first meeting of the Newcastle JBoss Users Group will be held on Tuesday, February 8 at 6:00 p.m. at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne. The topic will be “The JBoss Project Portfolio” with Jonathan Halliday, JBoss Transactions lead developer. To learn more or register for the event, please visit here.

The Fedora Project will be at FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium, February 5-6. FOSDEM is one of the premier open-source conferences in Europe. Fedora will have a booth at the conference, and several Fedora community members will be speaking at FOSDEM. Learn more here.

For more information on Red Hat EMEA events, click here.

APJ
For more information on Red Hat’s events in the Asia Pacific region, click here.

LATAM
For more information on Red Hat’s events in Latin America and South America, click here.

Interested in speaking to Red Hat at or about one of these events? Email press@redhat.com.

Red Hat training and certifications are highly respected across the industry as enterprises, governments and other organizations continue turning to open source to meet mission-critical IT needs. With the growth of open source, it’s becoming increasingly important for organizations to have a workforce that is trained and savvy in open source solutions.

Red Hat training equips IT organizations and professionals with the knowledge and hands-on skills to successfully support Red Hat and JBoss deployments. As a testament to the strength of open source and Red Hat’s training and certifications, we’ve once again been recognized by IDC, ranking in the leader category of its IDC MarketScape: Worldwide IT Education and Training 2011 Vendor Analysis (IDC #226469) for the fourth time.

IDC’s study assessed eleven vendors participating in the IT education and certification market. Red Hat was placed in the “Leader” category, with Lawson, HP and Cisco. Evaluations were based on a framework and set of parameters that assessed vendors relative to one another and to factors expected to be most conducive to success in a given market during the short and long term. Other vendors included in the study were CA Technologies, Cisco, Citrix, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Lawson, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and Symantec.

Red Hat Training offers a rich array of hands-on courses in many locations across the world. Courses cover the full range of Red Hat’s products and beyond, from Linux system administration to enterprise application development, security, LAMP, development and more. In addition, our award-winning certifications include Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA), Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE), Red Hat Certified Virtualization Administrator, JBoss Certified Application Administrator, advanced level Certificates of Expertise, and Red Hat Certified Architect (RHCA).

Want to learn more about Red Hat Training? Visit us at www.redhat.com/training.

The Fedora Project has partnered with Arizona State University on its annual Fedora Users and Developers Conference (FUDCon). FUDCon gathers together Fedora contributors for technical sessions, code sprint sessions, hackfests and workshops focused on Fedora features, projects and community building. This year’s North America FUDCon will be held at Arizona State University in Tempe, Jan. 29-31, 2011.

“Arizona State is committed to providing its students with opportunities to explore, participate and contribute to open source software and communities,” said Ronald Askin, Director, School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering, “We are pleased to support the Fedora Project and host FUDCon on campus, and look forward to many ASU students attending.”

Open source has been integrated in ASU’s Computer Science and Engineering curriculum and research programs. An example is what Nicholas Radtke, an ASU Ph.D. candidate and occasional open source contributor, is doing. His research, supervised by Dr. James Collofello, is to use agent-based modeling in concert with data from open source repositories like SourceForge to gain a better understanding of the open source development process. “Much of what is done in open source development is contrary to what is considered best practice in traditional software engineering,” states Radtke, “yet much of the software included in the Fedora distribution – most notably Linux – is very high quality and successful.” This is the exception, notes Radtke, as most open source projects are abandoned before producing useful software. “One of our goals through modeling is to better understand the factors that cause some open source projects to be successful, possibly even predict from an early stage which projects will thrive.”

FUDCon will include many sessions on topics ranging from SELinux and Fedora Spins to BoxGrinder, the Fedora Security Lab and how the Fedora Ambassador program has evolved over the years. This year’s event will also include a robust Legal track with sessions devoted to what Red Hat does to protect and enforce the Fedora trademark, special legal issues faced by many open source projects and how Red Hat’s legal team makes decisions affecting Fedora, including the company’s obligations to Fedora. A full schedule of sessions and events for FUDCon is available at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Tempe_2011.

“The goal of FUDCon is to bring together several groups to share knowledge and plan for the next generation of open source technologies,” said Jared Smith, Fedora Project Leader. “It is very fitting to hold the event at Arizona State University, a premier higher education institution where new ideas and concepts are encouraged and innovation comes to life.”

The Fedora Project holds FUDCons at various locations around the globe. Its 2010 FUDCon schedule included locations such as Santiago, Chile and Zurich Switzerland. As with all Fedora events, FUDCon is free to attend. To register for FUDCon, please visit https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Tempe_2011#Pre-registration.

Hope to see you in sunny Arizona this weekend!

Red Hat provides an industry-leading support experience for thousands of open source applications and solutions. An exciting addition to Red Hat’s Support delivery capabilities is a new fault detection framework, Andreas, a toolchain designed to automatically identify customer problems based on the data sent to us through normal case resolution.

Andreas inspects data that our customers send to us as part of case attachments and automatically identifies when a customer problem is caused by a product bug, identifies if the bug is new or known, and gets all of the debugging information directly to development engineers. This workflow substantially expedites case resolution and patch delivery, improving both the product and our customers’ experiences.

Andreas currently detects bugs in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 cases, and is expected to quickly expand to include additional products, including earlier versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and our JBoss Enterprise Middleware product suite.

Andreas forms a cornerstone of Red Hat’s support capabilities for cloud users and providers, providing generic problem reporting to solution mapping and real-time analytics on the state of the cloud. We intend to expand the current bug discovery capabilities of Andreas to include generic problem to solution mapping designed to deliver resolutions to problems without requiring customers to open a case. Unlike traditional support, customers will be able to access this information on-demand, with an option to follow up with world-class support engineers if needed.

Following the release of the Customer Portal in June 2010, and our unified case management system in September 2010, Andreas is another case of Red Hat’s leadership in delivering value for our customers and leading innovation in the open source industry.

Visit the Customer Portal to see new videos and other content and look forward to more diagnostic tools and knowledge coming your way as part of your Red Hat subscription.