As Linux moves in everywhere within enterprise computing - in embedded solutions, on the desktop, in distributed applications, and on mainframes - the Linux Business Week News Desk brings you all the latest developments.
HA-OSCAR 1.0 Beta Release
(Ruston, Louisiana) - The eXtreme Computing Research (XCR) group at Louisiana Tech University is pleased to announce the first public release HA-OSCAR 1.0 beta. High Availability Open Source Cluster Application Resource (HA-OSCAR) is an open source project that aims for nonstop services in the HPC environment through a combined power of high availability and performance computing solutions. The goal is to enhance a Beowulf cluster system for mission-critical applications and downtime-sensitive HPC infrastructures. To achieve high availability, component redundancy is adopted in an HA-OSCAR cluster to eliminate single point of failures, especially at the head node. HA-OSCAR also incorporates a self-healing mechanism; failure detection and recovery; automatic failover; and fail-back.
The 1.0 beta release supports new high-availability capabilities for Linux Beowulf clusters based on OSCAR 3.0. It provides an installation wizard GUI and a Web-based administration tool that allows a user to create and configure a multihead Beowulf cluster. A default set of monitoring services is included to ensure that critical services, hardware components, and important resources are always available at the control node. New services can be configured and added via a WebMin-based HA-OSCAR administration tool.
http://xcr.cenit.latech.edu/ha-oscar
DataMAX Software Group, Inc., and AML Announce Global Partnership
(Euless, TX) - AML, a developer and manufacturer of data collection products, has announced a global partnership with The DataMAX Software Group, Inc. Under the new partnership, DataMAX becomes a worldwide distributor for AML's RF data collection hardware and will offer AML hardware to its existing VAR channel and customers.
"AML is delighted to announce our worldwide distributor agreement with DataMAX Software Group," said Mike Kearby, AML president. "Our new partnership with DataMAX provides an exceptional opportunity to work with a market leader in ADC development systems to extend the availability of AML wireless data collection hardware to a worldwide customer base."
AML is a manufacturer of high-performance bar code and data collection products. Since 1983, AML and its partners have helped companies increase business efficiency and productivity - in manufacturing, warehousing, retail, health care, finance, government, and education. AML products are made in the United States and backed with lifetime, toll-free technical support.
www.amltd.com
LPI-US Launches National Linux Training Partner Program
(Hattiesburg, MS) - The Linux Professional Institute's United States Affiliate (LPI-US) is pleased to announce that The Training Camp has been approved to receive designation as an LPI-US Approved Training Partner (LATP).
"The LATP program was established to identify and support professional IT training centers that demonstrate a higher level of commitment to LPI and IT professionals," said LPI-US program manager Wesley Duffee-Braun. "We have tremendous support for the LATP program throughout the country, and we're pleased and honored to have The Training Camp serve as the inaugural member."
Participation in the LATP program requires that the training center use third- party approved training materials, use LPI certified instructors, and adhere to the LPI Training and Academic Code of Ethics.
"The LATP designation shows that a training center is committed to offering the highest level of professional Linux training," said Duffee-Braun. "By partnering with LPI-US as a LATP, The Training Camp has committed to leading the way for vendor-neutral Linux certification in the United States.
www.trainingcamp.com
www.lpi-us.org
Novell Announces Expanded Commercial Agreement With IBM
(Salt Lake City) - Novell has announced an agreement with IBM enabling IBM to ship SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server, which customers license from Novell, with IBM's servers. This agreement will provide Novell an exciting new channel to supply SUSE LINUX to businesses around the world.
As part of the agreement, IBM can ship or preload SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server across its entire server line, including IBM eServer iSeries, pSeries, xSeries, and zSeries, as well as IBM's eServer BladeCenter systems. The parties have extended IBM's existing agreement with SUSE LINUX, and Novell will continue to develop and support SUSE LINUX on all IBM server platforms.
"The momentum behind Linux in the marketplace continues to grow," said Jack Messman, chairman and CEO of Novell. "Novell is working with companies like IBM to deliver the powerful, fully supported SUSE LINUX platform on leading enterprise servers. Customers know that they're getting top-quality performance backed by the global technical support and services they need from Novell. This marks a critical step in making Linux mainstream in the corporate data center."
www.novell.com
www.ibm.com
MontaVista Software Unveils Embedded Linux Board Support Toolkit and Certification Program
(Sunnyvale, CA) - MontaVista Software, Inc., has announced the establishment of the MontaVista LSP Certification Program. In support of the program, which is the first of its kind in the embedded Linux industry, MontaVista Software has also announced the MontaVista Board Support Toolkit (BST) for MontaVista Linux Professional Edition. Designed for Independent Hardware Vendors (IHVs) and embedded developers, the BST delivers the test and verification tools needed to accelerate generation of custom Linux support packages (LSPs) for certification with MontaVista Linux.
Using the MontaVista Board Support Toolkit, board and system vendors can now create custom Linux support packages for their specific chips and boards, which can then be certified by MontaVista. MontaVista Software will provide direct technical customer support for all such certified LSPs.
Embedded developers building devices powered by MontaVista Linux can use the BST to do their own debugging and Q&A, accelerate their product time-to-market, and mitigate unnecessary risk. They can test LSPs on their own custom hardware platforms and improve the efficiency of the porting process while leveraging their own in-house expertise to validate their own LSPs for MontaVista Linux.
The MontaVista LSP Certification Program lets IHVs recognize the competitive advantage of supporting MontaVista Linux. More important, they can control their own development schedule and costs, streamlining time-to-market and focusing resources on their own unique value-add.
www.mvista.com
TimeSys Delivers Embedded Linux RTOS and TimeStorm Development Tools for the Pentek Model 4294 VME Board
(San Francisco) - TimeSys Corporation has announced that it has delivered a ready-to-run Linux RTOS Software Development Kit (SDK) and TimeStorm tools for Pentek's Model 4294 VME Board, a high-performance VME bus single-board computer used in applications requiring supercomputing power and intensive communications capabilities. The new TimeSys Linux RTOS SDK and TimeStorm development and testing tools will help embedded system developers to more quickly and easily develop embedded Linux applications on the Pentek Model 4294 VME platform.
Pentek's Model 4294 Quad PowerPC AltiVec 6U VME board incorporates a unique blend of powerful resources coupled through high-speed data paths to revolutionize next-generation, real-time embedded DSP systems. To accelerate development cycles for products utilizing the Pentek board, the new Linux RTOS SDK from TimeSys provides a single-kernel Linux real-time operating system, certified device drivers, Windows- and Linux-hosted cross-platform GNU tool chains, hundreds of Linux utilities and libraries, and the powerful GUI-based development tool, TimeStorm IDE.
www.timesys.com
Storix, Inc., Announces Version 5.1 and a New Licensing Option
(San Diego) - Storix, Inc., has announced the release of Storix System Backup Administrator (SBA) version 5.1, a backup and disaster recovery solution for AIX and Linux. In addition to the many new product features, Storix has added an affordable licensing option for Linux desktop users.
"The benefits of using the Linux operating system are no longer limited to the business community. We are noticing the migration from MS Windows to Linux and we have tailored our new version 5.1 to not only meet the demands of business, but also meet the needs of the home user," explained Anthony Johnson, president and CEO of Storix, Inc.
One of the major changes implemented was the support of spare disks as a backup medium. "Home users do not usually own expensive tape drives, but they often have a spare hard disk that they could use to store backup data. The purchase of a spare disk is often far less expensive than most tape drives," explained Rich Turner, director of product development at Storix, Inc. "SBA version 5.1 adds the ability to send full-system backups to a bootable spare hard disk, from which the user can reinstall the entire system or restore selective files. For corporate users, this provides the ability to clone or migrate systems to new hardware using SAN attached or removable hard disks."
www.storix.com
Mobility Electronics Announces Support for Red Hat Linux Operating System
(Scottsdale, AZ) - Mobility Electronics, Inc., a leading provider of innovative portable computing solutions for the mobile electronics device user, has announced that it has added support for the Red Hat Linux 9 operating system in its MAGMA PCI-to-PCI Expansion Systems.
In the past, Mobility Electronics' MAGMA operating system support has backed the Windows, Mac OS, and Solaris environments. Adding Red Hat Linux to the list of supported operating systems will allow Mobility Electronics to support a substantial user base with a new method to add more PCI slots to their Linux-based desktop computer or server.
Mobility Electronics' MAGMA-branded line of patented PCI expansion products provide a cost-effective method to add additional PCI slots to desktop computers and servers, and eliminate the need to purchase a high-end, expensive host machine.
"Red Hat Linux support has been released in response to customer demand to use our PCI-to-PCI Expansion products with host computers running under the Linux operating system," said Charlie Mollo, chief executive officer of Mobility Electronics. "By offering support to the Linux community, we will be able to target new customers in robust application environments used by the military, scientific, and university markets."
www.mobilityelectronics.com
Strathclyde University Scientists to Deliver Faster Research Projects with New SGI Altix 3000
(Mountain View, CA, and London) - Silicon Graphics has announced that physics, chemistry, mathematics, and biology researchers at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, will run a wide range of applications on a new SGI Altix 3000 supercluster, which was installed in December 2003. Deployed by the academic consortium of the Faculty of Science, headed by the Department of Physics, the Linux OS-based SGI Altix 3000 system will help university scientists to develop a number of research projects with the help of high-performance parallel computing. The new Altix system is powered by 28 Intel Itanium 2 processors and 36GB of system memory, and leverages an SGI InfiniteStorage solution with 1TB of capacity.
The university is using the Altix system's open source environment to make it easily available to high-performance computing (HPC) applications in multiple disciplines, including mathematics, statistics, virtual photonics, atomic physics, chemistry, biology, and even architecture. Strathclyde selected Altix 3000 over a PC-based cluster solution because of its flexibility in accepting different numerical codes, easy administration, low latency, and peak power performance.
The SGI Altix 3000 supercluster offers global shared memory across multiple nodes, scaling to hundreds of Intel Itanium 2 microprocessors. Each node in an SGI Altix 3000 supercluster can combine up to 256 processors in a single Linux operating system image. With its unique global shared-memory capabilities and industry-leading SGI NUMAlink interconnect fabric, the SGI Altix 3000 supercluster is ideal for managing complex data sets and complete workflows, enabling the highest levels of innovation for technical users. The Parallel Computing Research Infrastructure (PCRI) project at Strathclyde University covers a multitude of scientific projects. For instance, researchers will leverage the SGI Altix 3000 supercluster to study virtual photonics, in which numerical models simulate new laser systems.
Launched at the beginning of 2003, the SGI Altix 3000 family of products has already been adopted by more than 200 customers, including more than 25 major research organizations around the world, such as the University of Tokyo's Earthquake Research Institute, the Queensland Parallel Supercomputer Foundation, the University of Cambridge's COSMOS project, and the UK academic supercomputing service, CSAR, based at the University of Manchester.
www.sgi.com
NetZyme Enterprise Version 6 - 'Any to Any' Middleware
(San Jose, CA) - Creative Science Systems, Inc., has announced that it will begin shipping the latest version of its flagship product, NetZyme Enterprise Version 6. NetZyme Enterprise is an integration middleware that seamlessly integrates systems across platforms, protocols, and programming languages. NetZyme Enterprise can be operated on any version of Windows, any flavor of Unix and Linux, and mainframes.
NetZyme Enterprise resolves the toughest and most prevalent enterprise application integration (EAI) problem: the real-time convergence of data between hardware, software, communication paradigms, and mobile as well as embedded devices. NetZyme Enterprise is a fully extensible integration broker middleware that allows legacy applications to be transformed automatically, such that multiple distributed clients can access their data and functionality dynamically, bi-directionally, securely, in real time, and with mission-critical reliability.
www.creativescience.com
Novell to Cross NetWare with SUSE to Create Hybrid
Novell talked up a combined NetWare-SUSE product dubbed Open Enterprise Server (OES) at its recent BrainShare user conference. It expects to have it in the can at the end of the year. It says this bridge between its past and future will deliver networking capabilities associated with NetWare 7, SUSE Enterprise Server 9, and Ximian.
The once-great NetWare, whose demise has been announced as many times as Frank Sinatra retired, is now supposed to vanish as a stand-alone product at the end of the year. As the foundation of this new OES stuff, however, it'll keep being upgraded, Novell said.
Novell said NetWare 7 won't be ready until the end of the year, which is a year better than the schedule.
Novell said the hybrid will provide all the components necessary to establish a manageable, low-cost infrastructure for hosting mission-critical networking services.
Novell's new Nterprise Linux Services is supposed to transparently interoperate between the two environments. For example, if you have NetWare servers delivering print services and SUSE servers running the file system, or vice versa, you can print between the two, independent of where the files are.
The company said Open Enterprise Server is packaged to get NetWare customers to start migrating to Linux. It's supposed to let them move at their own pace. Novell is converging the license used with NetWare to cover both operating systems.
There are no prices yet, but the widgetry is supposed to be free to NetWare customers under maintenance and available on either a per-user or per-server basis to new implementations. Novell will be sending maintenance customers a copy of Linux to warm them up.
Credit Suisse says comparing the prices of OES against Red Hat will be "extremely difficult," but considers Novell/SUSE more pragmatic about pricing than Red Hat, whose Enterprise pricing is "less granular."
The broker is expecting Novell to take market share in Linux by converting some of its NetWare base to SUSE and to take some share outside its base in Linux servers used for infrastructure services.
www.novell.com
www.suse.com
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