Open Source

After trashing its public OpenStack cloud efforts Monday in favor of reselling third-party widgetry – and reportedly canning workers in the 300- man group according to TechCrunch – Dell folk who are left were anxious to say that Dell is still in the private OpenStack game, pointing to another press release put out Monday saying that Dell will enable Microsoft’s Windows Server Hyper-V as a viable hypervisor on the OpenStack cloud platform.read more

Mageia has long been what you might call a "best-kept secret" of the Linux world, consistently residing among the top five distributions in DistroWatch's page-hit rankings despite minimal marketing and hoopla.read more

A first stable series 2.2 version of the PHP web framework is now available. The new release includes additions such as a new diagnostic feature for ZFTool and supports dynamic DDL queries

Sony has released proprietary drivers and libraries of its Xperia S smartphone, Xperia Z smartphone and Xperia Tablet Z along with source code from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) to make building custom firmare easier

In a major announcement from Dell yesterday, the company announced that its public cloud ecosystem and strategy will be centered on partners Joyent, ScaleMatrix and ZeroLag, and will emphasize recent acquisition Enstratius. The announcement represents one of the biggest snubs to the open source OpenStack platorm yet, as Dell had previously announced that its whole cloud strategy would be built around OpenStack. According to Dell's announcement: "Dell is launching the Dell Cloud Partner Program to deliver public cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) through an ecosystem of partners. Acting as a single-source supplier, Dell will offer customers a choice of vendors and technology, freedom from lock-in to a single platform or pricing model and a central point of solution integration and control. Sales of Dell’s current in-house multi-tenant public cloud IaaS will be discontinued in the U.S. in favor of best-in-class partner offerings." Wow, that's a far cry from the OpenStack-centric, flexible and open plans that Dell had been discussing.  “Many Dell customers plan to expand their use of public cloud, but in order to truly reap the benefits, they want a choice of providers, flexibility and interoperability across platforms and models, the ability to compare cloud economics and workload performance, and a cohesive way to manage all of it,” said Nnamdi Orakwue, vice president, Dell Cloud, in a statement. All of this is exactly what I was referring to in my recent post "In Five Years, Expect Far Fewer OpenStack Service Providers."  OpenStack has more hype than it does deployments. The OpenStack Foundation is crowded with heavy-hitting sponsors and partners, and in recent months we've seen OpenStack services and announcements from Rackspace, HP, Internap and AT&T. Red Hat and IBM are also diving into the fray, and Dell was a notable participant until now. It seems inevitable that there will be further market shakeouts, and some organizations deploying OpenStack could end up very unhappy with the support and services that they are getting. Support, in particular, is part of why a company like Dell would want to align with partners in the cloud rather than forge its own path. It's hard to support cloud deployments, and some providers of OpenStack services and support are going to confront that issue the hard way. Dell does have big plans for Enstratius, though, including working with some OpenStack deployments by pass through with Enstratius. The company noted the following: "Dell’s newly acquired multi-cloud management platform, Enstratius, will help customers manage both single and multi-cloud environments, and can help integrate the partner offerings into Dell’s end-to-end cloud solutions. Enstratius currently supports more than 20 public and private cloud platforms, including OpenStack, VMware, Rackspace and Windows Azure, with the added flexibility to easily add new clouds." Related Activities Comments (0) Post a Comment Ask a Question Related Blog Posts Rackspace Creates Bridges Between .NET and OpenStack Platforms (post comment) Project Savanna, Bridging Hadoop and OpenStack, Moves Forward (post comment) Now, More Than Ever, VMware Must Embrace Open Source (post comment)

The latest version of the Jira issue tracker revamps the web interface, adds new ways of tracking issues, integrates a mobile interface and adds pre-configured workflows for agile developers

As we've covered before, when it comes to the top open source stories of the last 12 months, it's clear that one of the biggest is the proliferation of tiny, inexpensive Linux-based computers at some of the smallest form factors ever seen. The Linux-based Raspberry Pi, priced at $25 and $35, leads the pack among these devices. But in a new twist on what Raspberry Pi devices are capable of, they're being chained together to form supercomputers and powerful clusters. If it sounds like a joke, you may be surprised at the enormous computing power these lash-ups are capable of. They may even have the power to democratize supercomputing-level data crunching at very low price points. Late last year, as we noted here, news came from the University of Southampton that Professor Simon Cox and his team of researchers had lashed together an actual supercomputer made of 64 credit card-sized Raspberry Pis using Lego pieces as the glue for the cluster.  The imaginative result is shown in the photo above. Professor Cox said: “As soon as we were able to source sufficient Raspberry Pi computers we wanted to see if it was possible to link them together into a supercomputer. We installed and built all of the necessary software on the Pi starting from a standard Debian Wheezy system image and we have published a guide so you can build your own supercomputer.” You can get the guide to making your own Raspberry Pi supercomputer here, and find more information on Cox's version here. Meanwhile, Boise University PhD candidate Joshua Kiepert has mashed up a 32-node cluster from Raspberry Pi devices. He has a great account of his effort and the architecture he used online (PDF). As The Register notes, Kiepert's total bill of materials came to $1967.21, and: "As he contemplated the design for such a cluster, Kipert settled on Arch Linux for its tiny size. He eschewed the Pi's micro-USB port as a power source, as he felt it would complicate cabling, instead using a 5V pin on the machines' I/O headers...The Pis were also overclocked, using Turbo Mode, to give Kiepert the grunt needed to run his simulations." According to Kiepert, "by building my own cluster I could outfit it with anything I might need directly." These lash-ups of many Raspberry Pis working in tandem may sound like novelties, but if you look at Cox's and Kiepert's accounts of their projects it becomes clear that they are harnessing massive compute power at very low price points. There is a need for supercomputers and clusters that can perform ongoing, dedicated computing tasks without racking up huge bills for researchers. The Raspberry Pi may end up being part of the equation that solves for that need.  Photo Credit: University of Southampton and Professor Simon Cox Related Activities Comments (0) Post a Comment Ask a Question Related Blog Posts Mageia 3 Released with Steamy Goodness (post comment) openSUSE 13.1 Off to the Races (post comment) Linux Mint 15 Most Ambitious Release Ever (post comment)

One of Ars Technica's many memcached server graphs. Look at all those misses! This week, memcached, a piece of software that prevents much of the Internet from melting down, turns 10 years old. Despite its age, memcached is still the go-to solution for many programmers and sysadmins managing heavy workloads. Without memcached, Ars Technica would likely be unable to serve this article to you at all. Brad Fitzpatrick wrote memcached for Six Apart's LiveJournal way back in 2003 (check out the initial CVS commit here). While waiting for new hardware to help save the site from being overloaded, Fitzpatrick realized that he had plenty of unused RAM spread across LiveJournal's existing servers. He wrote memcached to take advantage of this spare memory and lighten the load on the site. memcached is a distributed in-memory key-value store that uses a very simple protocol for storing and retrieving arbitrary data from memory instead of from a filesystem. To store a value, a program connects to the memcached server on the default port of 11211 and issues a series of basic commands. (Note: a binary protocol is also supported.) Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The latest version of the live Debian Linux distribution for anonymity and privacy especially in repressive environments is now available with on the fly package updating and support for the latest obfuscation bridges

The latest version of the open source SQL client for Windows brings a query history function, supports search and replace in results and introduces folders that allow users to organise the software's user interface better