Open Source & Linux Monitor

Fedora 14 Evolves Leading-Edge Open Source Technologies in Free Distribution

2010-11-02T13:30:00.000-07:00

The Fedora Project, a Red Hat, sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration, today announced the availability of Fedora 14, the latest version of its free open source operating system distribution. The Fedora Projects leads the advancement of free and open source software with a new distribution released approximately every six months. A complete list of Fedora 14 features is available on the Fedora community's release announcement. Watch the Fedora 14 release video here to learn more about new features and the Fedora community. Premiering alongside Fedora 14 is a new re-design of Fedora's community-supported website, fedoraproject.org. The new site is a culmination of work completed within multiple areas of the Fedora community including the Design, Websites, Marketing, Translation and Infrastructure teams. The new website showcases the capabilities Fedora offers for many different types of users, including developers, designers, general productivity users and more. It was designed and created entirely using free and open source software that is available in the Fedora repository, and maintained and translated by a team of contributors, collaborating from around the world.

Wind River Updates VxWorks MILS Platform With High Assurance Network Stack & Linux Guest OS

2010-08-30T17:09:00.000-07:00

Wind River announced an updated version of its VxWorks MILS Platform, featuring an optional high assurance network stack and support for Wind River Linux as a guest operating system (OS). VxWorks MILS Platform 2.1 is designed for high security ensuring customers have a protected platform for developing high assurance applications. A high assurance network stack enabling MILS-based secure networking, which is a critical component for cross domain solutions (CDS) and multilevel secure (MLS) connected devices. “VxWorks MILS Platform is the foundation of information assurance (IA) systems for consolidation of applications when multiple security domains are required,” said Marc Brown, vice president of marketing and strategy for VxWorks products at Wind River. “Leveraging VxWorks MILS to combine multiple systems into one platform can lead to significant cost savings and reduction in size, weight and power (SWaP) requirements. Wind River is committed to the safety and security needs of the aerospace and defense markets by evolving our VxWorks MILS Platform 2.1 to include increased functionality and additional safety-critical components with a high assurance of protection from threats.”

“Wind River and Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing have collaborated to offer VxWorks MILS Platform 2.1 on Curtiss-Wright’s VPX6-185 and VPX3-127 boards, which will enable our VxWorks customers to create secure applications while providing the option to integrate a Linux-based operating system,” said Lynn Bamford, vice president and general manager of Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing. “We believe Wind River has a unique place in the market with this new offering, demonstrating Wind River’s continued investment in high assurance security architectures.”

Open Source Software in Enterprise Application Infrastructure Market

2010-08-20T14:18:00.000-07:00

Research and Markets announced the addition of the "Open Source Software in Enterprise Application Infrastructure Market" report to their offering. ScopeOpen Source Software (OSS) has been a part of the IT market for over two decades. Recently, the commoditization of IT markets, changing attitudes to the production and distribution of intellectual property, and the recession have put the OSS firmly in focus, particularly in the application infrastructure part of the stack. Report highlights include: 1) Driven by the ongoing commoditization of IT and the shifting attitudes to IP creation and distribution, OSS is certainly not a new trend. Against the backdrop of the global recession, IT vendors and enterprises alike are looking to the OSS application infrastructure technologies to solve their current challenges, 2) As a technology paradigm predicated upon a specific IP regime that ensures the freedom to obtain, inspect, modify and distribute code, OSS has evolved into a compelling production and distribution model particularly apposite for the delivery of flexible, modular and cost-effective enterprise application infrastructure, and 3) Ovum concludes that OSS is now an integral component of the enterprise application infrastructures market. While the adoption of application infrastructure OSS is set to rise, its stakeholders have to contend with specific set of challenges such as increased competition between OSS projects or deeply entrenched procurement practices.

ChipWrights Stacks Linux ADK with Major Enhancements for IPTV Set-Top Boxes and IP Cameras

2010-08-18T16:12:00.000-07:00

ChipWrights, Inc.—part of AD Group—New Linux® Application Development Kit for the CW5631 System-on-Chip provides the components to develop low-cost IPTV set-top boxes and IP cameras and significantly improve time to market. The Kit—based on the OpenEmbedded build system—leverages thousands of open source packages. “H.264 main profile provides better quality video for a given bit rate or lower bit rate for a given quality metrics. It allows service providers to achieve more efficient bandwidth usage,” says Halil Padir, Director of Software at ChipWrights. Most of the video content on the Internet is H.264 main profile these days. “By supporting this feature, our customers can develop IP camera and media player products with better performance and provide coverage for most of the video services,” he adds. Another key enhancement is ChipWrights’ image processing and encoding application, which provides full source code. “VideoKit is an ideal platform for customers who are developing advanced dewarping camera or videoconferencing applications,” says Padir. The source code provides examples for several image processing functions available on the ChipWrights DSP, plus, an example of using open-source projects FFMPEG and Live555 to stream live video from a CW5631-based device.

BeyondTrust Partners with Red Hat for Secure Mission-Critical Linux

2010-08-10T15:48:00.000-07:00

BeyondTrust Software announced a formal partnership with Red Hat. BeyondTrust will join Red Hat’s ISV Partner Program and create joint solutions aimed at offering Red Hat users a tightly aligned package of the Privileged Identity Management (PIM) tools needed for mission-critical servers. The combination of BeyondTrust and Red Hat solutions is designed to enhance efficiency in managing hypervisors and guest deployments, improve compliance and reporting on industry-specific requirements, and provide greater security of mission-critical systems, data and applications. Additionally, BeyondTrust’s inclusion in the Red Hat ISV ecosystem helps remove key obstacles for Red Hat customers and channel partners looking to adopt virtual and cloud infrastructure for mission-critical data and applications. The certification of PowerBroker with Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers customers the ability to configure and enforce granular policies related to delegated systems privileges, to monitor and record privileged system activity down to the keystroke, and to report on privileged entitlements.“Through our work with Red Hat and the Red Hat Ready program, we’re offering expanded cost reduction, security and sustainability for Red Hat Enterprise Linux users in combination with our solutions,” said John Mutch, CEO of BeyondTrust. “We’re excited to support Red Hat’s upcoming Enterprise Linux 6 release, which is expected to introduce even more advanced features to bring Red Hat onto an enterprise’s most important servers in the data center that run critical applications.”

Wind River Introduces First Embedded Linux Operating System to Be Accepted for EAL4+ Certification

2010-07-20T15:40:00.000-07:00

Wind River announced that Wind River Linux Secure, a secure embedded Linux, is in evaluation by the National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP) to be certified to Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level 4+ (EAL4+), conforming to the General Purpose Operating System Protection Profile. In addition, Wind River Linux Secure is officially listed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology as a cryptographic module accepted for evaluation to the FIPS 140-2 standard. Wind River Linux Secure is expected to be available in the first half of 2011 pending certification completion.

“Wind River is committed to delivering software designed to comply with national security criteria to meet diverse customer needs,” said Chip Downing, director for aerospace and defense at Wind River. “As the first and only commercial Linux vendor to produce an embedded Linux solution in evaluation to Common Criteria EAL 4+, Wind River will be providing customers with a wide choice of hardware platforms for secure applications such as military communications and software-defined radio systems. Additionally, with security mandates and tighter regulations on the rise across industries, the potential to use embedded Linux in secure solutions for networking infrastructure, energy and medical systems is tremendous. ”Upon certification completion to Common Criteria EAL4+, Wind River Linux Secure is expected to be the first commercial embedded Linux operating system accepted by NIAP, enabling Linux to be deployed securely on hardware from multiple vendors, including Freescale, Intel, and Texas Instruments Incorporated. The certified open standards platform, with full traceability to source code for all Linux modules, will provide greater flexibility, interoperability and transparency in developing secure software systems, resulting in faster time-to-market and lower development costs.

Yahoo! Advances Hadoop From Science to the Internet Deployment to Mainstream Business Use

2010-06-30T19:35:00.000-07:00

Yahoo! Inc., a leading developer of Apache Hadoop, announced significant enhancements to the open source software, accelerating the potential for enterprise-wide adoption by mainstream businesses. Hadoop is the open source technology at the epicenter of big data and cloud computing, helping companies get value from their data and better manage their businesses. “Hadoop is where science meets big data – it’s the technical underpinning that powers our innovative consumer and advertiser products on the world’s most-advanced digital canvas,” said Blake Irving, Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer at Yahoo!. “Yahoo!’s cloud and Hadoop make it possible for Yahoo! to rapidly personalize our content and advertising, and deliver highly relevant experiences, while maintaining the trust of our 600 million users.” As Internet usage continues to grow, data proliferates, making it challenging for businesses of all sizes to manage data in secure and useful ways. Yahoo!, one of the largest online companies in the world, initially used Hadoop for applied science projects and has built it into an enterprise-class platform being used across its business to develop increasingly personalized consumer experiences, built on relevance and trust. Hadoop plays a key role in Yahoo!’s popular global home page, Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Mail, and many more.

“Businesses across all sectors are looking for ways to leverage the vast quantities of data they are accumulating, and Apache Hadoop is an efficient solution for processing data at scale. Hadoop has matured and is now becoming an enterprise-ready cloud computing technology with the addition of Kerberos authentication,” said Melanie Posey, research director at IDC Research. “Now organizations of various sizes can leverage Yahoo!'s Hadoop investment and deployments to run it on their own systems and build out their own Hadoop deployments without starting from scratch on internal science experiments.”

Openbravo Takes Small and Mid-Sized Businesses to the Cloud with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

2010-05-03T15:06:00.000-07:00

Openbravo announced that its flagship product, Openbravo ERP SMB Professional 2.50, is available as a native package for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server Edition, Canonical's latest cloud-capable version of its popular Linux-based Ubuntu operating system. Openbravo is the leading developer of web-based open source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), while Canonical is the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, which is rapidly becoming a very popular server platform choice for businesses of all sizes across the globe.

Openbravo ERP 2.50 Professional Subscription for Ubuntu now provides support for the Amazon Cloud through Canonical's Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), delivering its web-based ERP in a form factor that is convenient and easy for SMBs to deploy and maintain. By combining the cost and scalability benefits of public cloud computing with the proven security, stability, and flexibility of Ubuntu, Openbravo and Canonical are bringing enterprise computing into the mainstream.

Paolo Juvara, CTO of Openbravo, said: “Openbravo ERP helps SMBs to simplify and maximize their business, and deploying Openbravo SMB Professional on the cloud with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is a great way to do both. Openbravo's partners and customers are pleased with our tight relationship with Canonical, and I see strategic synergies between the two companies going forward--cloud computing is a natural for our SMB customers, and Canonical is demonstrating clear leadership in this space." Steve George, VP of Corporate Services, Canonical said: “Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server Edition is not only leading the standards-based cloud revolution with its support for Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, it is also a LTS (Long Term Support) release, which means that Canonical supports it for five full years. Mission-critical enterprise applications like Openbravo ERP need to be deployed on a robust, supported technology stack, and Canonical provides exactly that for Openbravo and its ERP customers."

GWOS Launches New Ubuntu-Powered Virtual Appliance for IT Monitoring

2010-04-01T15:18:00.000-07:00

GroundWork Open Source launched the newest version of its Enterprise Quickstart virtual appliance powered by Canonical’s Ubuntu Server 9.10. Targeted as a trial solution for large organizations or as a complete solution for small environments, the $59 annual price is designed to encourage rapid adoption within Ubuntu-based IT environments.

“As Ubuntu Server continues its growth in enterprise environments, GroundWork’s Ubuntu-powered virtual appliance is a great solution for those looking to measure, monitor, and manage their mission critical Ubuntu infrastructure.” One seat in the self-paced, online “Getting Started with GroundWork Monitor” training. “As Ubuntu Server continues its growth in enterprise environments, GroundWork’s Ubuntu-powered virtual appliance is a great solution for those looking to measure, monitor, and manage their mission critical Ubuntu infrastructure,” said John Pugh, Software Partner Manager, at Canonical. “And the virtual appliance form factor has added benefits for those considering cloud computing.”

“The decision to release our Ubuntu-powered Virtual Appliance was driven by the rapid adoption of the platform particularly amongst our customers investing in large virtualization and private cloud initiatives. Based on data from existing GWOS customers the Ubuntu Server is making rapid in-roads into the Enterprise Linux market,” said David Dennis, Sr. Director Marketing & Business Development, GWOS. Visit the GWOS product portal for complete feature and performance details

Red Hat Enterprise Expands Linux 5.5 for Physical, Virtual and Cloud Environments

2010-03-30T15:13:00.000-07:00

Red Hat announced the availability of the fifth update to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5. Adding features designed to operate across physical, virtual and cloud deployments, the update offers enhanced virtualization and interoperability capabilities combined with support for important new hardware platforms. As with all Red Hat updates, application compatibility and certification with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 platform is fully maintained, meaning the broad portfolio of certified applications for Red Hat Enterprise Linux applies to the new update. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 is available to subscribing customers via Red Hat Network today.

In addition to overall platform enhancements and bug fixes, this update provides support for new platforms being delivered by several Red Hat partners, including AMD, Dell, HP, IBM and Intel. Newly supported platforms include Intel Nehalem EX, AMD Opteron (TM) 6000 Series (formerly codenamed “Magny Cours”) and IBM Power 7. This allows Red Hat customers to take advantage of some of the industry's most powerful new servers.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux and AMD platforms together provide our customers with compelling datacenter reliability and flexibility,” said Margaret Lewis, director, Software Solutions Marketing at AMD. “The latest technology enhancements in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 combined with our new 8- and 12-Core AMD Opteron 6000 Series platforms offer customers improved performance while still maintaining low power consumption, helping to lower total cost of ownership.” Visit Red Hat's product portal for complete V5.5 feature details

Linux Fragmentation: Planning for Users, ISVs & SaaS Providers (Research & Markets)

2010-03-29T12:51:00.000-07:00

The Linux operating system market faces increasing and significant fragmentation. In this Strategic Perspective, the authors examine a rational scenario of continuing and constant Linux fragmentation, and considers its effects on users and user IT organizations, Linux vendors, software developers and vendors, SaaS and other Cloud-based IT providers, and computing hardware designers and manufacturers. Visit the Research and Markets portal to review the abstract or order this new report

Wind River Extends Reliable Carrier-Grade Linux to Growing Telecom Server Segment

2010-03-09T13:39:00.000-08:00

Wind River has integrated support for HP BladeSystem carrier-grade and enterprise server blades into its industry-leading Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) operating system, tools and build system. Wind River Linux is the first registered CGL 4.0 solution supported on HP ProLiant server blades for HP BladeSystem, allowing customers to standardize on one common carrier-grade operating system platform to build highly reliable network elements across different hardware platforms.

“Typically, a telecom server is simply a server being used as a telecom networking element, often in the core or edge of the network. An operating system specifically designed for carrier-grade deployments would help to maximize the reliability and performance of the entire telecom environment,” said Paul Anderson, vice president, Marketing and Strategy, Linux Products, Wind River. “Bringing Wind River Linux 3.0 to HP BladeSystem server blades gives customers the variety and flexibility they need to build best-in-class products while achieving reliability, cost and performance advantages.”Wind River is committed to the adoption of Linux carrier-grade open platforms for the telecom server segment, allowing equipment providers and operators to achieve cost and time-to-market savings by utilizing a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) approach with volume-based servers and out-of-the-box support for Carrier Grade Linux. Wind River is currently the only embedded Linux provider offering this fully integrated solution for this class of enterprise server.

Zenoss Announces Open Source Virtualization Monitoring for Xen Hypervisor

2010-03-08T12:50:00.000-08:00

Zenoss Inc. announced the general availability of Zenoss Core version 2.5.2 under the GNU General Public License (V2). As part of this release, Zenoss Core now offers new monitoring capabilities for the Xen Hypervisor via the Zenoss Xen monitoring plug-in, or Xen Virtual Hosts ZenPack.

The Xen Virtual Hosts ZenPack discovers guests on Xen para-virtualized hosts and provides monitoring of performance and availability via SSH. While the Xen hosts run on physical servers, the virtual guests are listed per host and linked back to any discovered instances on the network. With this ZenPack, administrators can quickly find the associated hosts and guests and monitor their Xen virtual infrastructure along side their entire physical, virtual, and cloud-based IT environment through a single interface.

“We are committed to making sure Zenoss Core addresses the growing use of virtualization and cloud-based technologies,” said Mark R. Hinkle, Vice President of Community. “By distributing Xen monitoring software as open source, we are enabling a large set of organizations who previously had no tools to manage their virtual assets to monitor virtual and physical IT infrastructure from one powerful, easy to use solution.”

The Future Growth of Russian Open Source Market Ensured

2010-02-19T15:06:00.000-08:00

The global open source market continues to grow sustainably . The Russian market began to develop comparatively later, yet despite this delay today the Russian market is developing dramatically with active support from the Ministry of Communications and Mass Communications.

"Our task is not only to adapt world leading software solutions for the Russian market but also to use the experience and knowledge of Russian programmers to enhance the whole territory, " - Igor Shchegolev said during discussions. A number of Russian universities implemented open source software educational programs . The Russian Association for Open Source Software was established. Bureau Solomatina - a centre where the experience of the world open source leaders is integrated and which provides a single access point for all questions about using open source software in Russia - was founded

Cooperation between global and local vendors is of great importance for developing the Russian open source market.. When creating solutions for Russian organizations it is necessary to provide technical support at the third level as well as interoperability with global vendor software and hardware. At the same time it is also important to satisfy specific requirements of Russian information security legislation when processing confidential information and citizen's personal data.

Rising to meet this task, Red Hat and the All-Russian Research Institute of Control Automation in the Non-Industrial Sphere (VNIINS), the leading Russian institute in the field of information security, have created a contract for technological cooperation and also established a technological center to create solutions for Russian market.

LiMo Foundation Expands Line-up With Handsets From ELSE, NEC, Panasonic

2010-02-17T16:10:00.001-08:00

As rival Linux-based operating system (OS) Android gains further traction this week, the LiMo Foundation – the consortium behind mobile OS LiMO – has announced the imminent availability of its new R3 platform, new LiMo handsets (from ELSE, NEC and Panasonic Mobile Communications) and new members including ELSE and Adobe.

Arguably the biggest news for the Foundation this week though is the formation of the Wholesale Applications Community. There had been question marks about the relevance of the LiMo Foundation dedicated to creating an open, hardware-independent, Linux-based operating system for mobile devices given Android’s arrival on the scene.

Morgan Gillis, executive director of the Foundation, said yesterday: “We can see the outline of the mobile digital economy. The operators, especially the large operators, are assuming roles as outlets for media and have been joined in very strong competition by visionary entrants in the form of Google, Apple and Nokia in its new guise as a service company.”He added: “The entrants are competing as outlets and competing through their own device platforms, obviously seeking to create valuable linkages between the outlets and the platforms to drive efficiency and commercial return on investment. The mobile industry hasn’t followed the PC industry and fallen into anti-trust traps. Nevertheless, there is a clear linkage between the outlet and device platforms.

“This week the Wholesale Applications Community has emerged. It is virtually the entire industry collaborating on the wholesale infrastructure which sits behind the networks that are the distribution channels. We see a deep, powerful, long term affinity between LiMo and the Community. There is substantial overlap in terms of the main companies that are driving the initiatives. Both are truly open. LiMo intends to work very closely and practically with the new group to provide a much better way of working inside the mobile industry for applications developers, service providers and media providers of all kinds.”The LiMo web site offers complete details

Kitware Announces New Availability to its MIDAS Server

2010-01-29T12:57:00.000-08:00

Kitware announced it is opening up the main infrastructure of MIDAS under a nonrestrictive license allowing freedom to install the MIDAS server on location and build on top of the platform for free. MIDAS is a multi-media server optimized for storing massive collections of large, scientific data and related metadata reports. MIDAS integrates multimedia server technology with Kitware’s open-source data analysis and visualization clients. The server follows open standards for data storage, access and harvesting.

MIDAS is Kitware's premier data publication system created to support the emergence of data-centric computing. The effectiveness of a scientific research or engineering design organization depends on its ability to collect, store, process, mine, and visualize data. Whether performing statistical analysis, driving design through numerical optimization, or just exploring data, accurate and efficient access to data servers is imperative for sharing and managing a data repository for research. Visit the MIDAS product portal for complete SDK and feature details

With Perst, Silverlight Gains Embedded Database and Secure Local Storage

2010-01-28T16:00:00.000-08:00

McObject® announced it has successfully ported Perst™, its open source, object-oriented embedded database system, to Microsoft’s Silverlight technology for building rich Web applications. With Perst for .NET, developers using Silverlight can now include true database management system (DBMS) features in their rich Web client applications, including adding persistence to this data by storing it on local file systems. Visit the Perst product portal for complete feature and specification details

Data stored in Perst can exceed the storage size limit initially imposed on Silverlight applications, although for security reasons, permission from the Web application user is required for this. Permitting substantial amounts of locally stored data makes Perst a logical choice for Silverlight-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) and other hosted applications that need a database to support users’ work on ongoing projects.

Microsoft has also positioned Silverlight as a platform for rich Internet applications on smartphones and other mobile devices. “Perst’s strengths – including its small footprint, rich data management features, successful track record in a variety of mobile applications, and freely available source code – give it an edge to become the de facto embedded database system for Silverlight client software targeting mobile devices,” McObject CEO Steve Graves said.

McObject also released a new demo, available atwww.mcobject.com/silverlight-demo, showcasing Perst in a Silverlight-based customer relationship management (CRM) system. The demo runs in the user’s browser, stores records locally, and takes full advantage of Perst features such as indexes and native full text search to sort, retrieve and write records to the database. Users can launch the application from McObject’s site and also download complete, commented source code and documentation.

GWOS Releases GroundWork Monitor Enterprise 6.1

2010-01-21T14:52:00.000-08:00

GroundWork Open Source, Inc. announced the general availability of GroundWork Monitor Enterprise 6.1. “The release of 6.0 in September had a huge impact on our customer-base. Because of its popularity among new and current customers, the feedback we received drove all of the functionality improvements for 6.1,” said Simon Bennett, Sr. Director of Product Management for GWOS. “In this version, you will find both improvements in usability and performance, as well as, continued integration and support of leading open source operating systems like Ubuntu Server.”“GroundWork is the most economical solution for enterprise-class external monitoring that we've found,” said Philip Martin, Director of Client Services at SymbioSystems. “It provides us with an as-our-customers-see-it view of our services along with historical data and customizable reports, all at a fraction of the price of specialized external monitoring vendors and a fraction of the deployment time of any other solution we tested. Even better, since GroundWork is built on an open platform, it can grow with us, without additional license fees or other hassles you would normally expect from vendors.”

“As Ubuntu Server Edition sees more and more adoption at the core of the enterprise and business datacenter, the tools to monitor and manage these systems become critical,” says Steve George, VP Sales and Product Management, Corporate Services at Canonical. “GWOS’ support for our current release and our Long Term Support release gives Ubuntu users a great choice of technically-leading tools at low cost to make their deployment even easier to monitor and manage.”

The new GroundWork Monitor Enterprise 6.1 includes improvements to the GWOS platform for customers with heterogeneous, complex IT environments. Pricing is not affected by the new release, Enterprise QuickStart remains available for $49 USD per year. The GWOS product portal provides a complete description of feature updates

CriticalBlue and MontaVista Partner to Expand Multicore Software Development Solutions for Embedded Linux

2009-12-21T15:38:00.000-08:00

MontaVista® Software and CriticalBlue announced today CriticalBlue has joined the MontaVista partner program and will make their Prism product available on MontaVista Linux 6 and Montavista Linux Carrier Grade Edition products.

This announcement continues the broadening of Prism integrations with key players in the multicore software development eco-system by adding support for an industrial strength, commercial quality Linux. Prism is an award-winning embedded multicore programming system which allows software engineers to easily asses and realize the full potential of multicore processors without significant change to their development flow. Prism analyzes the behavior of code running on either hardware development boards or simulators. It allows engineers to take their existing sequential code, and without making any changes, explore and analyze opportunities for concurrency. Having identified the optimal parallelization strategy in this way, the developer will implement parallel structures, and use Prism again to verify efficient and thread-safe operations.

MontaVista Linux is the first commercial Linux provider to be supported by Prism. The Prism Eclipse plug-in will be integrated into the MontaVista DevRocket integrated development environment (IDE), providing the most advanced embedded Linux development environment for multicore software on the market. MontaVista customers will now be able to quickly analyze the potential benefit of new, high-performance, multicore software platforms for their existing application code and develop new code and quickly tune it for operation on multicore processors, all within a single MontaVista DevRocket environment, and all in the familiar Eclipse framework. Visit the MontaVista press room for complete partnership details

Google launches the Chronium Open Source Project

2009-11-20T12:07:00.000-08:00

"Today we are open-sourcing the project as Chromium OS. We are doing this early, a year before Google Chrome OS will be ready for users, because we are eager to engage with partners, the open source community and developers. As with the Google Chrome browser, development will be done in the open from this point on. This means the code is free, accessible to anyone and open for contributions. The Chromium OS project includes our current code base, user interface experiments and some initial designs for ongoing development.
This is the initial sketch and we will color it in over the course of the next year.We want to take this opportunity to explain why we're excited about the project and how it is a fundamentally different model of computing. First, it's all about the web. All apps are web apps. The entire experience takes place within the browser and there are no conventional desktop applications. This means users do not have to deal with installing, managing and updating programs.Second, because all apps live within the browser, there are significant benefits to security. Unlike traditional operating systems, Chrome OS doesn't trust the applications you run. Each app is contained within a security sandbox making it harder for malware and viruses to infect your computer. Furthermore, Chrome OS barely trusts itself. Every time you restart your computer the operating system verifies the integrity of its code.

If your system has been compromised, it is designed to fix itself with a reboot. While no computer can be made completely secure, we're going to make life much harder (and less profitable) for the bad guys. If you dig security, read the Chrome OS Security Overview or watch the video. Most of all, we are obsessed with speed. We are taking out every unnecessary process, optimizing many operations and running everything possible in parallel. This means you can go from turning on the computer to surfing the web in a few seconds. Our obsession with speed goes all the way down to the metal. We are specifying reference hardware components to create the fastest experience for Google Chrome OS." (excerpt form the Google press release)

Terracotta Acquires Quartz, Open Source Scheduling Vendor

2009-11-19T12:24:00.000-08:00

Terracotta today announced the acquisition of privately-held open source job scheduling software Quartz. Quartz is the most widely used Java scheduler in the world, with tens of thousands of enterprise production deployments at companies such as Vodafone, Level 3, Cisco and Adobe. In addition, Quartz is built into many products made by companies such as Atlassian, SpringSource, a division of VMware, and Red Hat.

A number of Terracotta customers and users already cluster Quartz to enable high-availability job scheduling and execution and to more easily scale their applications to multiple nodes. Quartz is ideal for creating simple or complex schedules for triggering application tasks such as driving process workflow and generating application data reports and recurring system maintenance checkups. Terracotta makes clustering Quartz a simpler, faster and far less expensive alternative to using a central database for coordination. Now, with the acquisition, Terracotta will quickly integrate Quartz within the Terracotta platform to enable users to easily scale applications in large virtualized environments and private clouds and to distribute the massive workloads characteristic of these environments.

“As the trend toward scaleout in virtualized environments continues to gain speed, coordination across application instances becomes a critical capability,” said Amit Pandey, CEO, Terracotta. “Our acquisition of Quartz perfectly positions us to solve this problem for our users. Terracotta will be extending the products’ APIs to include node-aware scheduling features that will make scaling out considerably simpler in virtualized environments.”

Int3s Partners with Red Hat to Power Toronto Hydro's Innovative Smart Meter Program

2009-11-12T14:23:00.001-08:00

Red Hat and Red Hat Advanced Business Partner, Int3s, today announced that Toronto Hydro Corporation has deployed JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the platform for its innovative Smart Meter program and has successfully completed the initial phases of its program to create a customer-focused cost and energy-saving initiative.

Toronto Hydro is the largest municipal electric distribution utility in Canada and operates two wholly owned affiliates with a combined workforce of over 1,400 people. It serves 697,000 residential and commercial customers across the greater Toronto Area, representing 18.5% of electricity consumers in the province of Ontario.

"We've succeeded because of the combination of the leadership of Toronto Hydro, the innovation of Red Hat products, and the expertise of Int3s in integrating systems. Together they allowed us to leverage the power of JBoss and really make the technology work for us," said Eduardo Bresani, Vice President of IT and Chief Information Officer, Toronto Hydro.

Toronto Hydro identified the need for a five-year strategic technology initiative, with the goal to implement a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to replace the organization’s traditional IT infrastructure. A key business driver for the change was the firm's stretched IT resources. Specifically, building and maintaining point-to-point interfaces between all the various systems Toronto Hydro had put into place over the years – legacy as well as client-server and Web-based systems - was proving too complex and costly. Visit Red Hat's press room for full details

MIPS Technologies Submits Code for Tamarin Open Source Project

2009-10-29T15:54:00.000-07:00

MIPS Technologies released a MIPS(R)-optimized version of the ActionScript(TM) virtual machine (VM) that is used in compelling Web-connected technologies such as Adobe(R) Flash(R) Player. The ActionScript VM is accessible via the Tamarin open source project, and is a key component in optimizing Adobe Flash Player for running on the MIPS architecture. MIPS' optimizations accelerate ActionScript 3 performance on a validation suite of benchmarks by nearly 2.5x relative to the non-optimized VM. In real terms, MIPS' optimized VM executes twice as fast on a MIPS32(R) 74K(R) CPU core relative to the optimized VM for ARM running on an ARM Cortex A8 CPU(1).

Adobe Flash technology for mobile phones, consumer electronics, and Internet-connected digital home devices already runs on a number of leading SoC platforms based on the MIPS architecture. Adobe Flash technology enables delivery of high-definition content and rich applications to Internet-connected TVs and TV-connected consumer electronic devices in the digital living room. The Adobe Flash Platform for the Digital Home will build on these capabilities with support for custom filters and effects, native 3D transformation and animation, advanced audio processing, and graphics hardware acceleration.

"Adobe Flash technology is key for the Internet-connected multimedia experience in the digital home," said Art Swift, vice president of marketing, MIPS Technologies. "MIPS is committed to optimizing key elements of Adobe Flash Player, starting with the Tamarin project, an open source version of the ActionScript virtual machine used in Flash Player." Visit MIPS press room for complete details

Zeugma Releases Zeugma Services Node Software Development Kit (SDK)

2009-10-28T15:45:00.000-07:00

Zeugma Systems has released a software development kit (SDK) for its flagship product, the Zeugma Services Node (ZSN). The SDK leverages the scalable and fully federated compute grid which is inherent to the ZSN, allowing service providers and third parties to quickly and easily develop custom applications capable of running directly within the ZSN. This capability provides visibility and control over network resources heretofore not possible in a carrier-grade broadband aggregation, subscriber management, and edge routing device.

The Zeugma SDK provides APIs that give applications direct access to the subscriber management, routing, traffic management, and compute capabilities within the ZSN. Using these APIs, applications can “push” rules down into the data plane, instructing deep session inspection (DSI) technology to copy or intercept certain traffic flows up to the application for analysis and processing. Applications are also able to dynamically modify traffic management aspects of the data plane with individual per-subscriber, per-session granularity. Zeugma’s SmartBoost application, developed using the SDK, exemplifies the ease with which new service-enabling applications can be deployed.

Michael Howard, principal analyst with Infonetics Research, views the ability to rapidly develop and implement new applications as “an essential feature for Telco 2.0 network operators. It has been proven many times over that closed development systems are inherently limiting-opening these systems to innovation from multiple sources is a prerequisite for operators to realize Telco 2.0 goals. Zeugma is ahead of the pack with the first SDK we’ve seen for carrier-class broadband edge equipment.”

MontaVista Announces Additional Platform Support with MontaVista Linux 6

2009-10-28T15:36:00.000-07:00

MontaVista® Software announced more new Market Specific Distributions (MSDs) for MontaVista Linux 6. The new MSDs continue to expand the market specific focus of MVL6, delivering support for industrial automation, automotive, Android, portable multimedia devices, and multicore networking applications. All the new MSDs will be available this quarter and support processors from Cavium, Freescale, Intel, and Texas Instruments.

Market Specific Distributions are built on a common framework, and optimized for the respective hardware platform and its target market. Each MSD is feature compatible with the semiconductor Linux technology for that processor, and is fully tested and supported by MontaVista. In addition, MontaVista adds additional features required to deliver a complete, commercial quality product to market. MontaVista becomes the first commercial embedded Linux vendor to announce support for Industrial Automation, bringing added features such as advanced power management, RT Preempt support, and Ethernet enablement for PROFINET.

For networking, the new MSDs support some of the newest multicore processors from Intel, Cavium, and Freescale, offering added features like semiconductor-optimized library support for multi core management, and advanced network features like SCTP, OpenSwan, libpcap, and IPsec tools.

The Android MSD offers advanced power management, advanced 2D/3D graphics, semiconductor advanced codec enablement, along with Bluetooth and WiFi connectivity. Similar to Android, the Portable Multimedia Device and Automotive MSDs offers advanced power management, advanced 2D/3D graphics, semiconductor advanced codec enablement, along with Bluetooth and WiFi connectivity, but also adds CAN (controller-area network) support. Visit MontaVista's product portal for complete feature details