Article by Arun Kumar, MVP at brighthub.com
Cloud clients refers to the cloud service providers that offer cloud computing services. Based on their popularity and feedback on Internet, I have handpicked some of the best cloud clients so that you can decide which one suits your needs.
Showing posts with label Ubuntu. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ubuntu. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Shuttleworth's Ubuntu makes like Space Shuttle I'm a Rocketman. Again
Shuttleworth's Ubuntu makes like Space Shuttle
I'm a Rocketman. Again
Posted in Enterprise, 25th November 2010 05:00 GMT
It looks like astronaut and tech magnate Mark Shuttleworth's investment in the Ubuntu commercial Linux distribution is about to pay off. Ubuntu is taking off like a rocket, and the sale of Novell [1] to Attachmate plus the higher prices [2] Red Hat is charging for its Enterprise Linux 6 are probably going to fuel Ubuntu's adoption even more in the data centers of the world.
The third Long Term Support release, Ubuntu 10.04, came out in April and seems to have been a turning point for the Ubuntu distribution. With that release, Canonical demonstrated that it could tame the Debian variant of Linux and put together a polished desktop and server operating system with commercial-grade support options like those available through Red Hat and Novell. On the server front, the server variant of the 10.04 LTS release had all of the new or impending x64 processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices baked into it as well as a fully integrated variant of the Eucalyptus cloud framework for creating cloudy infrastructure for applications to romp around.
Neil Levine, vice president of corporate services at Canonical, said that the initial LTS release, 6.06, put a stake in the ground, establishing the five-year support guarantee for servers and three-year term for desktops. LTS 8.04 saw a healthy uptake among corporations looking for alternatives to Solaris, RHEL, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and even Windows sometimes and proved the quality of the distro that Canonical could bring to market. With the 10.04 LTS release, Canonical proved to companies that the two-year cadence for new LTS releases was real and that Ubuntu could be trusted to run with the big boys.
So how is Canonical doing money-wise now that 10.04 LTS has been out for seven months? Stellar, apparently.
"We see a great, great year financially for my division," Levine told El Reg in an interview. The prior two LTS releases as well as the interim releases are being deployed by programmers and system administrators as companies build out applications - the same way that proprietary minicomputers, Unix machines, and Windows boxes all made their way into the data center in their successive waves over the past three decades. "When people realize they have a hundred servers running Ubuntu, they realize they need a commercial relationship with Canonical."
And thus, for the past three calendar quarters, the number of support contracts for Ubuntu's desktop and server distributions collectively have been doubling each quarter. Levine is projecting a three-fold increase in support revenues at Canonical in the company's current fiscal year, which ends in March 2011. Interestingly, the server revenue stream is growing a lot faster these days than the overall support contract revenue growth, says Levine, and is approaching a 50-50 split.
Server support contracts cost a lot more and are therefore driving that revenue growth. This was the long-term plan that Shuttleworth always had, of course. Step One: Build a Windows alternative for desktops, seed the market with Ubuntu enthusiasts. Step Two: Build a Unix and Windows alternative for servers, seed the market with more enthusiasts. Step Three: Profits!
As you know, Canonical does not put call-home programs in its Ubuntu Server editions, so it actually is clueless how many people are using Ubuntu Server. And being a private company, it is certainly not going to share the revenue numbers and customer counts it has for companies that have bought Ubuntu Server support contracts. But Levine did provide El Reg with some outside data from Netcraft, the Web server counters, to show how Ubuntu is doing at least as well as El Reg's world-famous PARIS [3] Vulture 1 paper spaceplane.
You want to see some stratosphere? Take a look at the same data for just the EMEA Web server space:
Novell's SUSE Linux has done better than RHEL for Web serving because it was at least a European distro, even after Novell bought it. But after a very aggressive ramp since the second Ubuntu Server LTS release in 2008, Canonical's Linux reached parity with RHEL and SLES in terms of Web site count and in the past two months has exploded almost straight up.
Maybe Attachmate should have bought Canonical?
Counting clouds
When Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS was launched back in April, Levine said that as far as Canonical could tell from watching unique IP addresses hitting its image repository the first time customers fired up its Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud variant, there were 12,000 clouds running its code. (UEC embeds the Eucalyptus framework into the server edition for deploying Xen or KVM virtual machines for hosting virtual server images in a manner that is compatible with Amazon's EC2 compute cloud.) Obviously, the great majority of those UEC clouds were prototypes and proofs-of-concepts, but it is nonetheless a very large number. Levine says that since 10.04 LTS came out in April, the monthly install rate looks to be around 1,200, which means by the end of this year, another 10,000 or so clouds will be fired up.
Even though Canonical will be putting in support for the OpenStack alternative to Eucalyptus with the 11.04 release next year, Levine said that Eucalyptus was the first to market and was more established and is therefore still in demand. It will be interesting to see if over the next few years, Eucalyptus suffers the same fate as the Xen hypervisor, which has been usurped by KVM for both Red Hat and Canonical in their Linux distros.
Levine cautions against such analogies, saying that OpenStack and Eucalyptus "are addressing very different parts of the market." Canonical's philosophy is that whatever customers want to use to build clouds, it wants them to do it with Ubuntu, not RHEL or SLES.
In a related announcement, Canonical and open source virtualization tool maker Convirture are teaming up to take on the ESX Server hypervisor and vCenter console combination from VMware, offering a fully open source alternative. While Canonical has the Landscape tool for managing server images and Ubuntu has the libvirt and virt-manager tools for managing virtual machines, the latter tools are more like applets than they are virtualization management consoles.
And so, Canonical has added the ConVirt 2.0 Open Source console to the Ubuntu Partner Repository, which is the first step perhaps to including it in the full Ubuntu distribution in the future like the Eucalyptus framework is now. ConVirt is a console for provisioning, managing, and monitoring Xen and KVM virtual machines, and as El Regalready told you back in July [6], it now comes in an Enterprise Edition that has some closed-source features that Ubuntu shops probably want. We're talking about timetable-based provisioning and decommissioning of VMs; role-based access control for admins and multi-tenant security; a command line interface and programmable APIs; high availability and disaster recovery overlays for the Xen and KVM hypervisors; resource limiting; a virtual appliance catalog for self-service VM deployment; and alerting and notification features to bug admins.
If Canonical wanted to do something interesting, it would buy Convirture and merge the Enterprise version of ConVirt 2.0 with its Landscape management tool and embed the open source version in Ubuntu Server. Clearly, Shuttleworth has the money, after shelling out $31.5m for a New York apartment [7]. ®
The third Long Term Support release, Ubuntu 10.04, came out in April and seems to have been a turning point for the Ubuntu distribution. With that release, Canonical demonstrated that it could tame the Debian variant of Linux and put together a polished desktop and server operating system with commercial-grade support options like those available through Red Hat and Novell. On the server front, the server variant of the 10.04 LTS release had all of the new or impending x64 processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices baked into it as well as a fully integrated variant of the Eucalyptus cloud framework for creating cloudy infrastructure for applications to romp around.
Neil Levine, vice president of corporate services at Canonical, said that the initial LTS release, 6.06, put a stake in the ground, establishing the five-year support guarantee for servers and three-year term for desktops. LTS 8.04 saw a healthy uptake among corporations looking for alternatives to Solaris, RHEL, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and even Windows sometimes and proved the quality of the distro that Canonical could bring to market. With the 10.04 LTS release, Canonical proved to companies that the two-year cadence for new LTS releases was real and that Ubuntu could be trusted to run with the big boys.
So how is Canonical doing money-wise now that 10.04 LTS has been out for seven months? Stellar, apparently.
"We see a great, great year financially for my division," Levine told El Reg in an interview. The prior two LTS releases as well as the interim releases are being deployed by programmers and system administrators as companies build out applications - the same way that proprietary minicomputers, Unix machines, and Windows boxes all made their way into the data center in their successive waves over the past three decades. "When people realize they have a hundred servers running Ubuntu, they realize they need a commercial relationship with Canonical."
And thus, for the past three calendar quarters, the number of support contracts for Ubuntu's desktop and server distributions collectively have been doubling each quarter. Levine is projecting a three-fold increase in support revenues at Canonical in the company's current fiscal year, which ends in March 2011. Interestingly, the server revenue stream is growing a lot faster these days than the overall support contract revenue growth, says Levine, and is approaching a 50-50 split.
Server support contracts cost a lot more and are therefore driving that revenue growth. This was the long-term plan that Shuttleworth always had, of course. Step One: Build a Windows alternative for desktops, seed the market with Ubuntu enthusiasts. Step Two: Build a Unix and Windows alternative for servers, seed the market with more enthusiasts. Step Three: Profits!
As you know, Canonical does not put call-home programs in its Ubuntu Server editions, so it actually is clueless how many people are using Ubuntu Server. And being a private company, it is certainly not going to share the revenue numbers and customer counts it has for companies that have bought Ubuntu Server support contracts. But Levine did provide El Reg with some outside data from Netcraft, the Web server counters, to show how Ubuntu is doing at least as well as El Reg's world-famous PARIS [3] Vulture 1 paper spaceplane.
The numbers
Here's some trend data on Linux-based hosts worldwide, but the Linux variant they use to host one or more Web sites:
The Netcraft data counts up the total hosts supported by a Web server. Rd hat is flatlining out there on the Intertubes as far as Web site count is concerned, and in the past several months, Ubuntu has hockey-sticked so aggressively that if this was an actual hockey game Canonical would be called for high sticking.
You want to see some stratosphere? Take a look at the same data for just the EMEA Web server space:
[5]
EMEA Linux-based Web sites, by distro (click to enlarge)
Maybe Attachmate should have bought Canonical?
Counting clouds
When Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS was launched back in April, Levine said that as far as Canonical could tell from watching unique IP addresses hitting its image repository the first time customers fired up its Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud variant, there were 12,000 clouds running its code. (UEC embeds the Eucalyptus framework into the server edition for deploying Xen or KVM virtual machines for hosting virtual server images in a manner that is compatible with Amazon's EC2 compute cloud.) Obviously, the great majority of those UEC clouds were prototypes and proofs-of-concepts, but it is nonetheless a very large number. Levine says that since 10.04 LTS came out in April, the monthly install rate looks to be around 1,200, which means by the end of this year, another 10,000 or so clouds will be fired up.
Even though Canonical will be putting in support for the OpenStack alternative to Eucalyptus with the 11.04 release next year, Levine said that Eucalyptus was the first to market and was more established and is therefore still in demand. It will be interesting to see if over the next few years, Eucalyptus suffers the same fate as the Xen hypervisor, which has been usurped by KVM for both Red Hat and Canonical in their Linux distros.
Levine cautions against such analogies, saying that OpenStack and Eucalyptus "are addressing very different parts of the market." Canonical's philosophy is that whatever customers want to use to build clouds, it wants them to do it with Ubuntu, not RHEL or SLES.
In a related announcement, Canonical and open source virtualization tool maker Convirture are teaming up to take on the ESX Server hypervisor and vCenter console combination from VMware, offering a fully open source alternative. While Canonical has the Landscape tool for managing server images and Ubuntu has the libvirt and virt-manager tools for managing virtual machines, the latter tools are more like applets than they are virtualization management consoles.
And so, Canonical has added the ConVirt 2.0 Open Source console to the Ubuntu Partner Repository, which is the first step perhaps to including it in the full Ubuntu distribution in the future like the Eucalyptus framework is now. ConVirt is a console for provisioning, managing, and monitoring Xen and KVM virtual machines, and as El Regalready told you back in July [6], it now comes in an Enterprise Edition that has some closed-source features that Ubuntu shops probably want. We're talking about timetable-based provisioning and decommissioning of VMs; role-based access control for admins and multi-tenant security; a command line interface and programmable APIs; high availability and disaster recovery overlays for the Xen and KVM hypervisors; resource limiting; a virtual appliance catalog for self-service VM deployment; and alerting and notification features to bug admins.
If Canonical wanted to do something interesting, it would buy Convirture and merge the Enterprise version of ConVirt 2.0 with its Landscape management tool and embed the open source version in Ubuntu Server. Clearly, Shuttleworth has the money, after shelling out $31.5m for a New York apartment [7]. ®
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Why Ubuntu Linux Is a Good Business Choice
Why Ubuntu Linux Is a Good Business Choice
By Ken Hess, PC World
Chances are good that if someone walked into your office right now and peeked over your shoulder, they would see a Windows operating system on your computer. But, did you know that you have a choice of something other than Windows for that computer on your desk, and that you have the same choice for the servers in your data center?One of those choices is Ubuntu Linux, a greatly enhanced Debian-based Linux distribution that installs easily, has the familiar Windows look and feel, and operates well on older hardware (expensive upgrade not required). Linux fans tout the positive attributes, often at high decibel levels, of Ubuntu Linux, which is perhaps the world's most popular Linux distribution. But, is it business worthy?
Let's first consider Ubuntu as a replacement for your Windows desktop or laptop operating system. Computer owners generally use an Internet browser, a word processing program, the occasional spreadsheet, an email application and almost nothing else. These computer owners may not realize that they're paying $150 to $300 for the OS and another $300 or more for the office suite--most of which they'll never use. Why add hundreds of dollars to a computer system that has a life expectancy of three to four years? Software costs often exceed hardware costs by two or three times. Small businesses resort to piracy or doing without needed software to compensate for those costs. Neither is a good choice.
The alternative puts you at odds with the accepted philosophy that Windows is your only choice for desktop computers and servers. The Linux concept requires that you step outside the standard box that Microsoft has placed you in, and realize that you have a choice that makes sense for you, your bank account, and your business.
Your Windows computers need an anti-virus program that hinders performance, anti-spyware software that you have to run manually to scan for all the nasties that invade your computing habitat, and a personal firewall to ward off those over-the-network attackers.
Alternatively, Ubuntu is free. You can download any version of it and use it for any purpose. Upgrades are also free. There's no need for any anti-virus software or anti-spyware applications on Linux, which comes with a personal firewall, if you want to use it.
Linux also comes to you with a free office suite, OpenOffice.org that includes Microsoft-compatible applications. They look and behave so much like Microsoft's office suite that you may never realize any difference between the two.
The rest of the article at PC World.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Linux Mint 9 Isadora in May
- Linux Mint 9: “Isadora”
Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:18:12 +0000
Linux Mint 9, based on the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, will be released in May this year under the codename “Isadora”. Of Greco-Latin origin, “Isadora” means “Gift from Isis”.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
French Police Save Millions With Ubuntu, OpenOffice
A recent report has revealed that France's national police force has saved an estimated 50 million euros since 2004 by adopting open source software and migrating a portion of the organization's workstations to Ubuntu Linux. They plan to roll out the Linux distro to all 90,000 of their workstations by 2015.
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
eweek:Ubuntu Remains Best Linux Distribution for Desktops
Ubuntu Remains Best Linux Distribution for Desktops
The latest version of Canonical’s Linux distribution, Ubuntu 8.10, still outshines the Linux desktop offerings from Red Hat and Novell, and is the best open-source alternative to Microsoft and Apple operating systems. However, both Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux and Novell’s SUSE distributions are ahead of Ubuntu 8.10 in the server space.
The latest version of Canonical’s Linux distribution, Ubuntu 8.10, still outshines the Linux desktop offerings from Red Hat and Novell, and is the best open-source alternative to Microsoft and Apple operating systems. However, both Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux and Novell’s SUSE distributions are ahead of Ubuntu 8.10 in the server space.
Canonical's Ubuntu 8.10, the latest version of the popular Linux-based operating system for desktops and servers, hit the Internet in early November bearing a modest assortment of updates to the open-source software components that compose it.
Based on my tests of Ubuntu 8.10—which is more fancifully known as the Intrepid Ibex—I maintain that Ubuntu is, without question, the best Linux distribution available for desktops, and the ablest open-source rival to the more broadly used desktop operating systems from Microsoft and Apple.
That's because, while most Linux distributions come with the same software components, Ubuntu distinguishes itself with its attention to usability, its large selection of ready-to-install software packages, and its large community of users and contributors.
Check out eWEEK Labs' walk-through of Canonical's Ubuntu 8.10.
If there's a piece of Linux-supporting software that you wish to run, the chances are good that it's available in prepackaged form for Ubuntu. The same goes for hardware components, where Ubuntu's support is among the broadest of any Linux distribution.
What's more, through its various platforms for facilitating communication and collaboration among its users and developers, the Ubuntu project does a good job corralling the questions and answers, bug testing, and integration grunt work of its large community into a body of knowledge and solutions that's readily accessible from your search engine of choice.
For instance, I tested Ubuntu 8.10 with an MSI Wind U100 netbook, which ships with a Realtech wireless adapter that none of the Linux kernel's built-in drivers supports. I searched for a suitable driver for Ubuntu, for Red Hat's Fedora and for Novell's OpenSUSE distributions, and found compilation instructions for a suitable driver for all three. However, for Ubuntu, I also found a precompiled, packaged and ready-to-install driver that had been produced by a volunteer community member.
Among alternate desktop Linux options, Ubuntu 8.10's stiffest competition is the distribution's elder sibling, Ubuntu 8.04, which is also known as the Hardy Heron release. Version 8.04 was a Long Term Support release, which Canonical pledges to provide with updates and support for three years in its desktop incarnations, and five years in server installations.
Ubuntu 8.10, in contrast, will be supported for 18 months before its update pipeline closes, requiring users to upgrade to a newer version. Fortunately, Ubuntu is very easy to upgrade, either from a bootable CD or USB media, or in-place, using the system's Update Manager.
Friday, October 10, 2008
Wikipedia goes to Ubuntu/Computerworld
Wikipedia simplifies IT infrastructure by moving to one Linux vendor
It's moving 400 servers to Ubuntu Linux from a mix of Red Hat and Fedora
Todd R. Weiss
October 9, 2008 (Computerworld) Since the free, online Wikipedia user-created encyclopedia began in 2001, the Linux-based IT infrastructure behind it has been expanded and lassoed together to keep up with the demands of the popular Web site.
That meant that often it was haphazardly expanded by tossing in a new server with a different operating system each time. Over five years, the servers were running a variety of versions of Red Hat Linux and Red Hat Fedora, making it more complicated to install applications and maintain the servers.
Soon, that problem will be gone.
In a few months, Wikipedia will finish a major transformation by moving from a combination of versions of Red Hat products to Ubuntu Linux Version 8.04 on all 400 of its servers that support the Web site.
The changeover began in 2006 as the growth of the site took off, said Brion Vibber, CTO of the San Francisco-based Wikimedia Foundation Inc., the nonprofit group that supports the online Wikipedia encyclopedia and other projects.
“We had a mix of things: some Red Hat 9, some Fedora – several different versions,” Vibber said. The group used a custom-scripted installation procedure, but found that having a multitude of versions was more difficult to maintain for its small five-person IT staff around the world.
The move to all-Ubuntu was primarily done with the goal of “making our own administration and maintenance simpler,” he said. “We decided that we want to standardize on something.”
The switch has been done over time, starting with caching proxy servers in 2006 and moving on to other servers in segments. Today, the group is continuing to transition its main application Web servers to Ubuntu as part of its regular maintenance schedule, Vibber said.
Most of the group’s 400 servers are in a data center in Tampa, Fla., while a few reside in secondary data centers in South Korea and Amsterdam.
“It definitely has gotten a lot simpler,” Vibber said. Mass upgrades can be done more easily, and the data center can be managed as a unit, he said.
“We can run the same combination everywhere, and it does the same thing” and runs the same software, Vibber said. “Everything is a million times easier.”
Related Blogs
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: Ubuntu scores major Wikipedia win
The mixture of Red Hat operating systems was created as Wikipedia quickly grew, backed by a group of volunteer IT people who created it out of what they had available. In 18 months, the original site went from around 15 servers to 200, making maintenance and operations a whole different ballgame, Vibber said.
Gordon Haff, an analyst at Illuminata Inc. in Nashua, N.H., said Wikimedia’s switch from Red Hat to Ubuntu is also likely a result of Ubuntu’s making the enterprise server and consumer desktop versions of its operating systems available for free to all users, with no lightening of the systems for nonpaying customers.
Red Hat used to do that years ago, but then moved to a model where its free and paid versions differed in some features and abilities, he said. Now the Fedora community Linux project is separate from the flagship enterprise version of the operating system, adding to the factors that must be considered by users, he said.
The problem with having multiple paid, unpaid and community versions is that a customer then has a menagerie of products that may or may not be as easily compatible, Haff said.
Wikipedia could just as easily have made the switchover to all Red Hat, but that would have cost more money, he said. “It would seem to me that if money weren’t an issue here, there wouldn’t be anything keeping them from upgrading everything to Red Hat.”
The collaborative Wikipedia encyclopedia is written by volunteers around the globe. The project includes 75,000 active contributors working on more than 10 million articles in 250 languages, including more than 2.5 million articles in English, according to the group. The site has about 684 million visitors a year. The Ubuntu changes affect all Wikimedia Web sites
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