Entries tagged with “linux” from Paul Lopez Unwired

With Cisco's acquisition of Tidal Software last week, the company continues to beef up its software portfolio beyond its core networking business. Tidal makes performance monitoring software for enterprise applications like Oracle and SAP that run in large data centers. While $105 million is not a big bet for Cisco, I see this as further convergence of computing and communications in both the enterprise data center and ultimately in the cloud. There is innovation at the core OS level to optimize performance for Intel's new Xeon 5500 processors. Microsoft Hyper-V, Sun Solaris and Red Hat Linux have been extended to enable performance and energy efficiency improvements available using Intel's extended page table memory access. This allows the hypervisor to bypasses kernel software codepaths altogether and map directly to virtual guest instances. Advanced memory management using Intel's QuickPath enables the ability to virtualize previously uncommon I/O workloads such as database & file serving. This is how we will see network layer virtualization evolve, reducing power consumption while creating efficient memory use along the way. All these features, combined with Cisco's California architecture, are coming together to disrupt the computing core. Moving up the data center management stack with tools such as Tidal makes a lot of sense for Cisco, because at the end of the day, the key will be application performance.

Sun is a company that has been in transition from a legacy hardware business to one based on open-source and services. Their exit ramp led to IBM, but will this be a traditional IBM "tuck-in" acquisition or something more? Acquiring Sun for a mere $6.5 billion is only two quarters of $JAVA revenue and if you factor in the $2 billion in cash on their balance sheet, the offer is closer to $4 billion. Sun is exposed to financial services, telecom & manufacturing. They also face secular decline of their Unix servers and tape storage. Newer technology offerings are not scaling up fast enough to offset margin and revenue erosion. IBM will ave difficulty monetizing Sun's open-source software portfolio too. Many application vendors support Linux faster than Solaris, and even with MySQL, they've not been able to get critical mass for OpenSolaris. Maren Mickos, former MySQL CEO bailed from Sun because of the bureaucracy. IBM gets Java but will they keep the way the Java community directs the development of the language? So now IBM will have dueling UNIX banjos. What's the future of AIX? IBM gets an installed base that they can migrate over time but those customers will open up to other competitive choices, so it's no slam dunk. I believe Sun's NetBeans development environment goes by the wayside in favor of IBM's Eclipse. Sun's purchase of Q Layer bolsters their cloud computing offering, but they were just getting started with innovations like Project Caroline. Still, Sun could never show CIOs why they should pay a premium for their products. Sun sells to developers, IBM sells to CIOs. Not sure which one is Billy Redden in this case.

Google announced over the weekend the availability of its long awaited developer kit for mobile devices, called "Android." They have also announced a $10 million developer contest to get the talented Linux programmers away from their day job to code new applications for the platform. Early speculation on a Google phone was premature as the end result has turned out to be a software developer kit (SDK). Google has a good developer site where you can download the kit along with tutorials, documentation and sample code to get you started. The kit is released under the Apache v2 license and comes in Windows, MAC OS and Linux versions - all based on Intel x86 architecture. You have to install an Eclipse plug in to aid in debugging. Some developers think Eclipse can be annoying and would prefer to see a custom IDE (integrated development environment) or Xcode for OS X. Too bad we won't see a Microsoft.Net version or plug in for Visual Studio. Although you can program in Java, you might be able to port from a J# .net source code compilation, but probably not. Google has also helped start a new industry group, The Open Handset Alliance, made of up 34 members including significant operators such as Sprint, Telefonica O2, T-Mobile, KDDI and DoCoMo along with manufacturers such as LG, Samsung and Motorola. So far the SDK is getting moderately positive reviews and Google will generate some creative excitement as it comes out of the gate with an open platform - unlike the iPhone. Now the team is trying to figure out if they can flash the iPhone with Android and make the ideal handset. This seems plausible since the iPhone is also based on Linux at the core. They have some "goodies" on the website including free wallpaper with their new logo. It seems like they should have had a contest to design the graphic art for Android too.

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