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AS OF 11/22/2008 5:02AM EST

LinuxWorld Shares Stage With Data Centers
By Alex Handy

August 7, 2008 — When you’re going to an expo called LinuxWorld, it’s reasonable to expect that Ubuntu purveyor Canonical, Novell and Red Hat will all be there hawking their wares. This year’s show had only Canonical on the floor, with the others sending token representatives to spread the word by press announcement rather than by booth.

Novell worked with IBM to report a number of new distribution agreements between them. IBM’s Lotus suite and server tools will now be available to customers with SUSE Enterprise Linux underneath. On the flip side, IBM has given SUSE the go-ahead to include its WebSphere Community Edition, based on Geronimo, with Enterprise Linux installations.

Meanwhile, Red Hat announced the release of the first alpha build of Fedora 10, the slimmed-down version of its flagship Enterprise Linux distribution.

LinuxWorld shared the Moscone center in San Francisco with the Next Generation Data Center conference, where all manner of equipment was demonstrated.

Avant led the way among solid-state drive makers, which were more plentiful at this year’s show than last year’s. The company released a 2.5-inch RAID-Enhanced SSD for Servers and Desktops. The small form-factor drive includes six slots that can be customized with various sizes of flash memory. One of those slots is given over to a RAID controller, allowing each disk to function with striping for more reliability, faster writes and cross-drive redundancy. The drives can be configured to hold between 4 and 512GB.

Kerio showed off a new method for replacing Microsoft Exchange Server with its mail system. The company now offers a migration tool to bring Exchange Server information, mail and calendaring into the Kerio MailServer. The company also announced compatibility with the iPhone’s calendaring, mail and communications stacks.

Super Micro showed off a power supply for 1U cases that it claims offers up to 85 percent power efficiency, thus eliminating much of the wasted juice that can inflate power bills. The new supply is part of the company’s SuperServer 1024 series of cases, which can be rigged to include 2.5-inch drive bays, allowing for more hard drives in less space, with lower power consumption. The 2.5-inch form factor was a major theme at this year’s show; many companies are beginning to offer chassis with optional 2.5-inch bays.

Speaking Literally
Seth Schoen and Jacob Appelbaum gave a terrifying talk on their security research into compromising encrypted hard disks. The pair described their cold boot attack, which allows them to find encryption keys still living in RAM after a system shutdown.

Because RAM isn’t flushed at shutdown, when a computer sits powerless at room temperature, there is a window of seconds to minutes during which the information still on the RAM can be read out. Schoen and Appelbaum even went so far as to cool the RAM with a blast of freezing air to extend the time period in which info could be read.

Luke Kaines, the creator of Puppet, gave a talk about his configuration management framework. Kaines described common use cases for Puppet and explained how to use the system’s declarative language to describe installation and configuration needs.

Scott Drummond, VMware group benchmarking manager in product marketing, gave a talk on improving the performance of Java and Oracle in virtualized environments. He suggested setting the memory requirements for each Java Virtual Machine ahead of time with locked-down memory, thus preventing the hypervisor from stealing back RAM and disrupting operations when things get tight.

Drummond also said that swapping due to ballooning, when the hypervisor steals RAM back from the guest environment, is the most common point of latency in virtualized environments. He advocated the use of shared memory in all VMware virtual machines, saying his extensive research has determined that the process saves memory while consuming only 2 percent of CPU power.

Related Search Term(s): data centers, e-mail, Linux, power, security, storage hardware, virtualization, Avant, Canonical, IBM, Kerio, Novell, Red Hat, Super Micro, VMware

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