Bryan's Blog

Welcome Makara!

2010-11-30T21:19:00.000-05:00

Today, we announced that Red Hat has acquired Makara. This acquisition is going to accelerate significantly Red Hat's offerings around Platform as a Service. Makara includes many capabilities like auto-scaling, fantastic monitoring, and self-service portals for Java and LAMP applications in the cloud.

Combined with Red Hat's Cloud Foundations offerings as well as JBoss and Red Hat middleware platforms, we will be able to deliver the leading PaaS offering with:

Support for your choice of programming model and language, from full JEE to Spring to Ruby to LAMP and not just a proprietary or restricted API. This means you can run the broadest set of applications with the benefits of PaaS--including existing applications
Support for your choice of cloud--whether private or hybrid or public

Red Hat PaaS With Your Choice of Programming Model and Your Choice of Cloud

If you'd like to learn more about Makara's capabilities, you can try them out for free online.

Welcome aboard, Makara, and I look forward to working together!

MRG 1.3 is Released

2010-10-14T17:49:00.000-04:00

I'm pleased to announce the release of Red Hat Enterprise MRG 1.3. MRG 1.3 is a significant update that features many new enhancements, including:

Messaging

MRG 1.3 offers updated clients with improved performance, new protocol version independent C++ and Python clients, Windows C++ client and additional QMF APIs. Clustering enhancements include durable stores to provide optimized performance in clustered environments and stability improvements.

The update also enables MRG Messaging to be recognized as a supported messaging transport for JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform, and offers security improvements such as SASL support for Python, including Kerberos support.

Realtime
With MRG 1.3, Realtime will move to a 2.6.33-based kernel, and will include the new Performance Counter subsystem in the kernel and the new associated perf performance tool to enable greater performance capabilities for customers. The update also features new hardware enablement and certifications, which will incorporate a MRG Realtime hardware certification program that is expected to be introduced shortly for 1.3.

Grid
MRG Grid is a key component of Red Hat's Cloud Foundations and also for HPC markets. The release includes new user tools, Windows Execute Node support, enhanced workflow management, resource restriction capabilities, update configuration management and new admin tools. With these updates, customers will gain the ability to scale to tens of thousands of devices, be able to provision virtual machines, centralize configuration and management and utilize cloud spill-over capabilities.

For additional information on MRG 1.3, see the official release announcement.

Red Hat Cloud Updates

2010-08-25T13:32:00.000-04:00

Red Hat made a number of cloud announcements today:

Additionally, I participated in a webcast where we outlined details around these announcements and our strategy. You can view a replay of the webcast if you missed it live.

Finally, if you'd like additional information on Red Hat's cloud solutions, check out Cloud Foundations and information on the Portable Cloud.

Red Hat Enterprise MRG and Mellanox ConnectX-2 10GigE NICs Achieve New Performance Levels for Messaging, Realtime and Grid Applications

2010-06-22T11:48:00.001-04:00

Red Hat and Mellanox announced today results from work that we've been doing together to enable RDMA over Ethernet with Red Hat Enterprise MRG Messaging on top of Mellanox's ConnectX-2 cards:

Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, and Mellanox® Technologies, Ltd. (NASDAQ: MLNX; TASE: MLNX), a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end connectivity solutions for data center servers and storage systems, today announced that Red Hat Enterprise MRG with the open Advanced Messaging Queuing Protocol (AMQP) standard and Red Hat Enterprise Linux achieved Ethernet-based data center fabric performance, delivering a 42 percent reduction in latency using Mellanox ConnectX-2 with RDMA over Ethernet (RoE), with throughputs up to 1.2 million acknowledged messages per second, with latencies in the 10 microseconds range in tests conducted by Red Hat.

We'll also be presenting details of these results at the Red Hat Summit this week in the sessions:

Additionally, Mellanox will be highlighting these results this week at their booth at SIFMA.

Red Hat Summit 2010 This Week

2010-06-21T10:54:00.001-04:00

The Red Hat Summit is taking place this week in my hometown of Boston. The conference kicks off tomorrow, and I'll be presenting three sessions there:

I'll also be meeting customers and partners at our Systems Management VIP lounge and other events. I'm looking forward to seeing some of you at the Summit this week!

Condor Week 2010 Presentations

2010-04-15T13:18:00.000-04:00

This week is Condor Week, and this is always a big event for the Condor project, from which we build MRG Grid. Red Hat has a strong partnership with the University of Wisconsin, and we are happy to participate in this year's event with two presentations today.

In case you're not able to attend the sessions in person, here are links to them:

Red Hat MRG by Matthew Farrellee
Improving Condor Configuration Management with Wallaby by Will Benton and Rob Rati

New IBM Cloud Built on Red Hat

2010-03-16T08:40:00.000-04:00

Today, IBM is introducing their new enterprise cloud, and they are building that cloud on top of Red Hat offerings, including Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. This is yet another example of the growing number of public clouds built on and certified with Red Hat (Amazon EC2 was the pioneer in our Certified Cloud provider program).

Here's a quote from the press release:

Our decade-long partnership with Red Hat has always been focused on customer value and innovation. Today, we are extending this partnership to include cloud computing – broadening our reach and answering the strong customer demand for cloud computing services," said Maria Azua, vice president of Cloud Computing Enablement at IBM. "Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is an optimal hypervisor technology for the infrastructure offerings on the IBM cloud."

Virtualization is one of the foundational technologies of cloud computing, so it's great to see that when it came to building its own cloud, IBM chose Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as the optimal solution amongst all the available possibilities in the market.

Deutsche Börse Customer Case Study for MRG

2010-03-03T12:31:00.001-05:00

Today, Red Hat published an announcement and a case study on how Deutsche Börse, the German Stock Exchange, is using Red Hat Enterprise MRG for their new risk management system as well as their upcoming trading platform:

"We decided to implement Red Hat Enterprise MRG Messaging with AMQP because we wanted to make it as easy as possible for our client banks to access the relevant risk data. Using the open standard AMQP helps us to avoid complex and time-consuming development of customized adaptors," said Gerhard Lessmann, member of the executive board at Deutsche Börse Systems.

Furthermore,

“In addition to the risk management system, we are in the process of building an entirely new trading platform for Deutsche Börse Group, based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise MRG,” said Gerhard Lessmann, DBS. “In this context it was a logical decision to work with Red Hat also for our risk management project. We always work to keep our IT operations focused on their core tasks and to minimise support workload on the team. Having Red Hat support readily available as a single point of contact is an excellent way to achieve just that.”

As a leading exchange, Deutsche Börse, has extremely high requirements for their software infrastructure. So, we're glad to have such a positive endorsement from them. We're also happy to be working with Deutsche Börse on the AMQP specification itself as part of the AMQP working group.

You can read the full case study here.

Open Source Energy Savings with Condor

2010-03-02T10:06:00.000-05:00

Forbes has an article today on Open Source Energy Savings using Condor. In addition to highlighting how Condor can help with saving energy in a data center, the article features Red Hat and our work around Condor with Red Hat Enterprise MRG a couple times:

Two years ago Red Hat worked out a partnership deal with the university to make Condor open source using the Apache Foundation license.

and

Paul Cormier, president of products and technologies at Red Hat, is working on combining a large collection of open source projects into a cloud provisioning and management suite. "The move to cloud computing as the next generation architecture has only been possible by integrating many of these open source projects, such as Condor," says Cormier. "It is only natural that the software for creating and managing these virtual environments come from the world of open source as well."

The energy savings policies you can implement with Condor are nice, but we see these features as truly beneficial for most enterprises as part of a cloud solution. For example, we have added virtualization support to Condor, which can further improve power management in a cloud deployment. Let's say you had two servers each running at 50% capacity with one virtual machine job on each of them. You could have a Condor job which moved one of the virtual machine jobs to the other server, consolidating all work on one machine. Then, you could have a Condor job turn off the other machine.

Red Hat Virtual Experience 2009

2009-12-07T10:00:00.004-05:00

This Wednesday December 9, 2009, Red Hat will be hosting its Red Hat Virtual Experience event focused on cloud computing. I have a session there in the afternoon regarding MRG:

Building and Leveraging Compute Clouds with Red Hat Enterprise MRG

This presentation will cover the current state of Red Hat's cloud efforts and provide technical information that details how to build a cloud infrastructure based on Red Hat's technologies and blueprints. The presentation will also provide an overview of the capabilities and features Red Hat Enterprise MRG and Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization jointly provide and how workload scheduling and virtualization can be used as an enterprise management platform.

There's also many other great sessions. You can see the agenda here.

The Red Hat Virtual Experience 2009 is free to attend, and you can register here.

MRG 1.2 is Available

2009-12-07T08:22:00.000-05:00

I'm pleased to announce that Red Hat Enterprise MRG 1.2 is now available. MRG 1.2 provides many improvements, including:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 support
Significant messaging performance updates and benchmark data. For example, results include over 1.5 million reliable messages/second throughput per system and under 40 microsecond latency for reliable messaging on infiniband with our RDMA drivers. Perhaps even more impressively, we have achieved over 1 million messages per second virtualized on KVM with 10GB networks--this is within 5% of bare metal
New and updated Realtime tools. RTEval is a new tool that detects hardware latencies in systems and complements our realtime hardware certification program in helping customers get the best performance from their entire application platform--both hardware and operating system
Grid enhancements like support for hierarchical fair share, KVM virtual machines (the new standard in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4) and Condor 7.4
Many more optimizations and updates

You can read more about the MRG 1.2 release at press.redhat.com. You can also read MRG 1.2's release notes.

Existing MRG customers can yum update their systems to get the new release. Prospects can contact Red Hat for more information.

How to Forward Your Mobile Phone's Voicemail to Google Voice with a Full Google Voice Account (and Still Use Your Mobile Phone with Your Google Number)

2009-10-29T17:54:00.000-04:00

Google recently announced the option to use Google Voice with your existing number. By selecting this option when you sign up for Google Voice, Google Voice effectively becomes an enhanced voicemail service with capabilities like SMS alerting, archiving, and transcripts, but you lose out on many other great features like ringing multiple phones or ListenIn. Given this, I'm not sure why anyone would want to sign up for this limited service.

Instead, you can sign up for a full Google Voice account and get Google Voice voicemail for your existing number--plus preserve the option to use all of Google Voice's other features with a new number if you like. With this option, whether someone calls your mobile phone number or your Google number, Google Voice will handle your voicemail.

Here's how to setup your mobile phone to use Google Voice's voicemail with a full Google Voice account:

Sign up for a Google Voice account. Note that you'll need an invite to join, currently
Select the option to create an account with a Google Number rather than a non-Google number
Add your mobile phone to your Google Voice account
Go to Settings in Google Voice and click on the "Activate Google voicemail on this phone" link
Follow Google Voice's popup instructions to forward your phone's voicemail to Google Voice
Go back to Settings in Google Voice and click the "Edit" link on the settings for your mobile phone
Click "Show advanced settings"
Under the "Forwarding Options" section, set "Go straight to voicemail." This will ensure that Google Voice won't try to ring your other phones once your mobile phone has forwarded to voicemail

That's it! Now, when someone calls your mobile phone number and you don't answer, it will go to Google Voice's voicemail--just like with Google's Google Voice With Your Own Number service. But, you still have the option to switch to your Google number in the future and take advantage of all of Google Voice's other features. So, for example, if someone calls your Google number, it will also ring your mobile phone.

Cloud Storage Hubbub

2009-10-16T10:51:00.000-04:00

Why is it that the media is still writing articles about whether Microsoft and T-Mobile's Sidekick data loss issue is going to put a damper on cloud storage, but nobody is asking whether Apple's bug in Snow Leopard that deletes all personal data is going to stop people from storing data locally? Articles reporting initially on each incident came out within a few days of each other.

Part of the reason that the Sidekick failure--and it is a catastrophic failure--is causing people to question cloud storage is because everyone is writing articles asking this question. But, nobody is writing articles asking anything similar about Apple.

The Sidekick incident doesn't illustrate a fault of cloud storage versus local storage--it just shows that you still need to care about protecting your data, no matter where you store it. Maybe the fact that everyone is writing about Sidekick rather than Snow Leopard illustrates that Cloud Computing is even sexier and more buzz-worthy than Apple!

MRG Presentations and Videos from the Summit

2009-09-08T18:57:00.000-04:00

I'm back from Chicago from another great Red Hat Summit. I have uploaded my two presentations from the 2009 Red Hat Summit online:

As an additional treat, you can also view videos of one of my sessions, as well as our CTO Brian Stevens' keynote, which highlighted cloud computing with MRG and other technologies. I can't link to the videos directly, but you can find them at

http://www.redhat.com/promo/summit/2009/highlights/

Brian Stevens' keynote is on the first tab. My MRG presentation is on the Summit Sessions tab.

Finally, you can watch a demo video of cloud computing with Red Hat Enterprise MRG. In this video, I bridge and aggregate three different clouds together (a local render cloud, an internal cloud provisioned by Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, and Amazon EC2) into one seamless render cloud for film rendering. This video created quite a buzz at the Summit, so enjoy!

Red Hat Enterprise MRG at the Red Hat Summit

2009-08-28T16:10:00.001-04:00

Next week is the Red Hat Summit in Chicago. We'll be featuring Red Hat Enterprise MRG there prominently:

Building and Leveraging Compute Clouds with Red Hat Enterprise MRG
MRG Messaging: A Programmer's Overview
Red Hat Enterprise MRG (Messaging, Realtime, Grid) Update and Roadmap
A booth demonstrating cloud computing with MRG
A special demo during our CTO Brian Stevens' keynote on cloud computing

I'll be at the Summit presenting the cloud computing and MRG update sessions. I hope to see you there!

(The direct links to the sessions at the summit web site don't load that well due to the fancy javascript on that site. You can go to http://www.redhat.com/promo/summit/2009/agenda/tracks/ and find the tracks manually to get a much better view of the info)

The Easy Way to Install TweetDeck on Linux and Work Around Error #5100

2009-08-26T21:31:00.001-04:00

I tried installing TweetDeck on my Fedora Linux laptop and ran into an Error #5100. I did a Google search, and it turns out that many other people have run into this error and solved it by doing things like downloading Adobe AIR and TweetDeck, and installing these files manually as root.

~~I found a much easier way: run FireFox (or whatever browser you use) as root, go to http://tweetdeck.com/, and click the "Download Now" link. Everything works!~~

Update: according to smmehadi at Adobe, installing xterm first is the truly easy and recommended way to solve this issue. http://www.adobe.com/products/air/systemreqs/

MRG In The Open Source Cloud Computing Forum

2009-07-13T18:23:00.000-04:00

Red Hat is hosting an online event, the Open Source Cloud Computing Forum, on July 22, 2009. Matt Farrellee from the MRG team will be presenting on how Condor, the Grid component in MRG, helps with building and adopting clouds during the 5th session at 11:30am.

The event is free also features lots of other great sessions. Read more about it here and then register to attend!

Introducing QpidComponents.org

2009-07-13T18:13:00.000-04:00

We've launched a new Web site, http://qpidcomponents.org. This site features additional components and tools for enterprise AMQP messaging that we have developed for Apache Qpid. We also ship productized and supported versions of these components and tools in Red Hat Enterprise MRG.

Notably, QPidComponents.org includes a high-speed persistence library and management tools. Why don't we just include these components in the QPid project? One major reason is that they're licensed under open source licenses other than the Apache license. For example, because the persistence library tightly ties to Linux, which is licensed under the GPL, we can't license that code under the Apache license.

Check out http://qpidcomponents.org if you use QPid!

Carl Trieloff Keynote about AMQP/MRG at SIFMA 2009

2009-06-24T07:37:00.001-04:00

SIFMA's Technology Management Conference & Exhibit is perhaps Wall St's biggest such annual event. Carl Trieloff will deliver this morning's opening keynote, followed by Stanley Young, the CEO of NYSE Technologies.

Carl's talk is on Building Financial Use Cases Directly into Messaging Software for Better Performance and Productivity and will cover work we've done in AMQP and Red Hat Enterprise MRG to provide a leading messaging platform and ecosystem.

MRG Realtime Slides From HP Tech Forum 2009

2009-06-18T21:15:00.000-04:00

I've posted online my slides from my presentation today at the HP Technology Forum and Expo about Realtime Performance with Red Hat Enterprise MRG and HP Systems.

You can download them here.

Cloud, Utility, Grid and Other Mixed Metaphors

2009-06-18T12:52:00.000-04:00

I've written a new blog post for press.redhat.com: Cloud, Utility, Grid and Other Mixed Metaphors. It discusses three terms that people typically use together but are often unclear about how they fit: cloud computing, utility computing, and grid computing. The post illustrates the differences between the concepts and also describes how they fit together by using Red Hat Enterprise MRG as an example of how to achieve all three.

Check out the post at http://press.redhat.com/2009/06/18/cloud-utility-grid-and-other-mixed-metaphors/.

MRG at the HP Technology Forum 2009

2009-06-16T02:36:00.000-04:00

I'm at the HP Technology Forum and Expo 2009 in Las Vegas right now. On Thursday morning, I'll be speaking on Realtime Performance with Red Hat Enterprise MRG and HP Systems. The session is first thing after breakfast, so it's early--but it will be worth it! Also, we are demonstrating MRG Messaging and Realtime at the Red Hat Booth in the Expo center. So, stop by to see MRG in action (and also to pick up a free red hat).

Simultaneously Charging the Novatel MiFi 2200 via USB and using Wifi, and Other MiFi Thoughts

2009-06-08T14:14:00.015-04:00

Updated 7/27/2009

I recently upgraded my wireless USB modem from a Sprint Novatel Ovation U727 to a Sprint Novatel MiFi 2200. The MiFi 2200 is a great, tiny device that integrates a 3G modem with a wireless router so that you can connect multiple wifi-enabled devices to your 3G modem. There are all sorts of reviews of the MiFi 2200 on the Web already, so I won't add an in-depth review. I will say, though, that:

The Sprint version of the MiFi 2200 doesn't come with an included USB Micro data cable, so you'll need to get one if you want to tether or charge from your computer. On the other hand, unlike the Verizon version which does come with a cable, the Sprint version doesn't require being connected to a Windows PC for activation, so it's easy to setup
The Sprint version of the MiFi 2200 includes GPS, but it's pretty useless. You have to go to a Web page on the router and go to linked searches from that specific interface for local resources

If you connect the MiFi 2200 to your computer via a USB Micro cable, it acts as a tethered modem. The instructions I wrote for using a Novatel Ovation U727 modem on Fedora work for the MiFi 2200 as a tethered modem as well.

One of the limitations of the MiFi 2200 is that if you connect it to your computer with a USB Micro, it won't work as a wifi router. This creates problems if you want to charge your MiFi 2200 via USB while also sharing your connection or using an operating system/laptop without adequate drivers for using the MiFi 2200 as a tethered modem. I've worked around this limitation in two ways:

Purchase a Belkin Mini Surge 3OUT. This is a fanstastic, travel-sized power strip with 3 outlets and 2 USB jacks. You can use this to power your MiFi 2200 via USB and also share a power outlet with other devices, like your laptop. The Belkin Mini Surge is great if you want to use a power outlet in public, but it's already full. By plugging in the Mini Surge, you can share that power outlet with other people
Purchase an iPhone USB Charging Adapter.
Even though this adapter says its for iPhones, what it really does is take a USB cable and strip out the data across it, leaving only power. By plugging this adapter to a USB Micro cable, you can then attach your MiFi 2200 to your laptop's USB port to charge it but still have the MiFi 2200 function as a wireless router

Update 7/27/2009
One important thing to note is that the MiFi 2200 requires a lot of power to charge, and many off-the-shelf USB micro cables won't be able to send enough power to the MiFi 2200 to charge it from a USB port. In fact, I've tried several different USB micro cables with my MiFi with varying degrees of successful charging. So, if you buy an iPhone USB Charging Adapter or try using the Belkin Mini Surge but aren't able to charge your MiFi, the chances are that it's your USB Micro cable which is the problem.

I've recently purchased a Tekkeon TekCharge MP1800, which is a portable battery back that can power and charge the MiFi 2200 as well as other power-hugry devices (like my iPhone).

The TekCharge comes with a retractable cable that is able to charge the MiFi from a computer's USB port, and it also provides a compact battery for giving your other electronic gadgets additional runtime and charge. Since purchasing the TekCharge, I just use the cable that came with it and no longer need the iPhone USB charger.

MRG/AMQP Keynote at STAC Performance Summit in NYC on June 4, 2009

2009-06-01T10:07:00.000-04:00

I'll be at the STAC Performance Summit this Thursday, June 4, in New York City. Carl Trieloff from my team will be delivering a keynote there and discussing new developments around AMQP and MRG as well as industry changes that we see coming as a result. He'll also be highlighting some interesting performance data and work that we're doing with STAC.

The STAC Performance Summit is free to attend for end-user firms--you can find more information and register at http://www.stacresearch.com/node/4904.

How to Upgrade a Thinkpad T60 with a Full Disk Encryption (FDE) Hard Drive and Fedora

2009-05-04T13:02:00.006-04:00

I recently upgraded my Lenovo Thinkpad T60 with a Full Disk Encryption (FDE) hard drive, a Seagate Momentus 7200 FDE. The Momentus 7200 FDE provides encryption directly built into the hard drive: all data written to the hard drive is automatically encrypted with a key that is generated by and stored directly in the hard drive itself and cannot be retrieved. FDE is probably the easiest and most transparent way to protect your data in case you happen to lose or have your laptop stolen.

I boot multiple operating systems on my laptop, and I wanted a form of encryption that was secure but would also allow me to create symbolic links between different partitions and operating systems. So, for example, both Fedora 10 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 support encrypted disks via software. But, using a FDE hard drive allows me to ensure that the entire hard drive is encrypted, while still enabling me to access transparently the different operating system partitions from each other.

I also was running out of space on my existing hard drive and wanted a solution which would allow me to migrate all of my data from my old hard drive to my new hard drive easily. Using FDE enables that without requiring re-installation of any software in the process.

For more information on FDE with Thinkpads, see Lenovo's FAQ.

Here's how I upgraded to FDE:

Preparation Steps

Backup your data in case anything goes wrong!
Purchase a Seagate Momentus 7200 FDE hard drive. Make sure its capacity is at least as large as your existing hard drive
Purchase a 2.5" SATA hard disk enclosure with a USB 2.0 interface. This should cost around $15-30 and will enable you to transfer information from your old hard drive to your new hard drive. Amazon or your local compute store should sell a lot of these
Download Fedora and create a Fedora Live CD/USB. You will boot into this to copy data from your old hard drive to your new hard drive

Installation and Migration Steps

Remove your old hard drive from your laptop. If you have a Lenovo Thinkpad T60, you can follow Lenovo's instructions for how to do this
Install your new Seagate Momentus 7200 FDE hard drive into your computer
Install your old hard drive into the hard disk enclosure. Don't plug your USB hard drive enclosure into your laptop yet
Insert your Fedora Live CD/USB into your laptop and boot into Fedora.
Login into Fedora and open a terminal window. In the terminal, type "su -" to become the root user
Type "fdisk -l" and note how your new hard drive is mapped as a device. For example, on my system, this is /dev/sda
Plug your the USB hard drive enclosure into your laptop. Fedora should automatically recognize and mount your old hard drive
Type "fdisk -l." Both hard drives should now appear. Note how your old hard drive is mapped as a device. For example, on my system, it is /dev/sdb
Directly copy all the contents of your old hard drive to your new hard drive by executing: dd if=[your old hard drive device] of=[your new hard drive device]. For example, on my system, I did dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda. This process will likely take several hours
Once your copying is done, reboot your laptop. Make sure to remove your Fedora LiveCD/USB. You can also unplug your USB hard drive enclosure
Verify that you can boot into your laptop and that your operating system(s) and data are intact on your new FDE hard drive

Final Security Steps
Now that your laptop has a FDE hard drive installed, you need to finish securing it by configuring your BIOS to require a password for accessing your hard drive:

Reboot your laptop and enter your BIOS settings menu. On a T60, you can do this by hitting the Blue ThinkVantage button immediately and then entering your BIOS settings
Go to the security settings section and enable requiring a user password for accessing your hard drive. Type in a new user password and make sure to remember it. From now on, when you turn on your computer, you'll have to enter this password before you can boot into your hard drive or access data on it
Save your settings and reboot your laptop
Attach your USB hard drive enclosure and delete all your old, unsecure information from your old hard drive

Congratulations! You now have a fully secure, encrypted hard drive with all your data and operating system(s) on it!

Optional: Using Your Extra Space
If your FDE hard drive is bigger than your old hard drive, you will have empty space that you can use. You have a variety of options available to you, from creating a new partition to extending existing partitions with this space. If you use Fedora or Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you can use the graphical tool, GParted, to help with this.

If you happen to use LVM, GParted doesn't work with LVM yet. In that case, you can read the Red Hat Magazine article, Tips and tricks: What is the procedure to resize an LVM2 logical volume and the ext2 or ext3 filesystem?, for how to increase the size of an LVM partition. Note that the end of the article discusses using the command, ext2online. That command has since been replaced by resize2fs.

Corporate, Customer, and Academic Open Source Communities for Next Generation Software

2009-03-25T18:36:00.000-04:00

I submitted a paper for the NSF's Cyberinfrastructure Software Sustainability & Reusability Workshop. I discuss some of the innovative open source models we've used to develop Red Hat Enterprise MRG:

The NSF is looking both at models of how to build sustainable cyberinfrastructure software as well as specific software that will benefit its goals like providing communities with access to a “world class high performance computing (HPC) environment.” Red Hat Enterprise MRG, a high performance distributed computing platform which integrates Messaging, Realtime, and Grid capabilities, provides both an open source model of how academic researchers, customers, and corporations can collaborate as well as powerful software infrastructure which can help the NSF meet its next-generation cyberinfrastructure goals.

For example, I discuss the partnership we have with the University of Wisconsin around Condor for Grid scheduling:

This partnership between UW and Red Hat is adding many innovative capabilities to Condor and also expanding significantly Condor's reach from research environments to enterprises. For example, Red Hat has focused on adding many capabilities which enterprises require for deployment but which are not paramount for academia. These enhancements range from new graphical management tools to enterprise maintainability to concurrency limits on scarce resources like software licenses. Furthermore, Red Hat has also focused on advancing Condor towards utility and cloud models of computing by adding capabilities like libvirt virtualization support and Amazon EC2 integration. Many enterprises are now looking at MRG and Condor for building private clouds and moving to cloud computing.

The paper also discusses how we're feeding back developments from the enterprise into academia, how we've collaborated with customers and users around AMQP and messaging, how the technologies in MRG can help the NSF meet its software goals around sustainable HPC, and so on.

You can see the submission at the NSF's site for papers.

You can also directly download a pdf of the paper from the NSF's site: Corporate, Customer, and Academic Open Source Communities for Next Generation Software.

Software is Low Latency's Weakest Link...Unless You're Running Red Hat Enterprise MRG

2009-03-19T17:12:00.000-04:00

There's an article in today's Wall St and Technology, Software is Low Latency's Weakest Link. The article states:

The weakest link in the low-latency value chain is older software or poorly written code, not market data feeds, lack of ultra-fast processors or older networks, according to experts at Wall Street & Technology's Accelerating Wall Street 2009 conference.

Furthermore,

"Within the applications, we see the greatest opportunity to improve latency," said Rob Wallos, global head of market data architecture at Citi during the session The Complete Low Latency Value Chain. "Hardware can give you a generic 20 percent improvement in performance, but there is only so far you can go with hardware. "

This is certainly true in general. We have found that even moving up to exotic hardware like infiniband only provides incremental gains in performance unless you optimize your application to take advantage of that hardware. That's why we've been working with hardware manufacturers and optimizing Red Hat Enterprise MRG for the latest hardware as well as for Linux.

For example, MRG includes RDMA drivers to achieve extremely low latency on infiniband. Compare the results of MRG Messaging running on infiniband with standard TCP versus with our RDMA drivers:

This chart illustrates latency using 1K messages at a sustained throughput of 50,000 messages/second using MRG Messaging. This is for fully reliable application-level latency between three peers: a producer is sending a message through a broker to a client, and that message is acknowledged back. So, there are four network hops in this case. As you can see with standard TCP (the red line), the latency is nothing ground-breaking at around 1 millsecond, even though we're using infiniband. In other words, moving the application to infiniband doesn't automatically improve latency significantly.

With our RDMA drivers , however, MRG can achieve latencies an order of magnitude better--about 70 microseconds on this same particular hardware. And, remember, this is for 1K message sizes and 4 network hops! So, yes, it is true that in general, low latency bottlenecks are in software. However, we have been developing MRG to take full advantage of modern hardware and also Linux, so we've pushed the bottlenecks back to the hardware domain in many cases.

I should also note that our next release of MRG will include a cross-memory driver for co-locating our messaging broker with an application client. This would remove one of the network links for latency and should allow us to halve our latency performance.

QCon Presentation Slides For Download

2009-03-18T22:17:00.000-04:00

I presented Next-Generation AMQP Messaging Performance, Architectures, and Ecosystems with Red Hat Enterprise MRG last week at QCon London, along with Carl Trieloff. The talk included a detailed use case of work we've been doing with customers to build financial trading systems and stock exchanges with MRG. Messaging deployments don't get any higher end than this, so it's an interesting study.

In particular, we've added capabilities in MRG like LVQ, Ring Queue, and TTL so that companies can build market caches or provide updated streaming quotes directly from the messaging broker rather than build these capabilities themselves. We've also done a lot of work to get some pretty impressive performance (e.g. fully reliable latency across three peers in around 60 microseconds). And, of course, we support capabilities like active/active clustering for high availability and federation for disaster recovery.

Beyond the case study, we also talked about the new ecosystems that are forming around AMQP and MRG as well as new types of messaging-oriented applications people are building now.

You can download our slides from the talk here.

QCon London

2009-03-04T10:48:00.000-05:00

I'll be at QCon London next week. Red Hat is sponsoring a booth, and we'll be giving two talks:

We've got a good customer case study and some pretty interesting features, use cases, and performance data that we'll be presenting around messaging. Come to our talks and stop by our booth if you're attending the show.

QPid is a Top-Level Apache Project

2009-03-04T09:37:00.000-05:00

The Apache Software Foundation announced today that it has elevated QPid to a top-level project, based on the accomplishments it has made in developing a community and software. We did the initial submission of QPid to Apache, so it's gratifying to see that it has come such a long way now and has developed such a large community and following--including some surprising members.

"On the heels of its recent graduation, Qpid has also reached the completion of the major Qpid M4 release. We're thrilled to have our project's growth and maturity recognized by the Apache Software Foundation," said Carl Trieloff, Chair of the Apache Qpid Project Management Committee (PMC) and Senior Consulting Software Engineer at Red Hat. "With the promotion to an Apache Top-Level Project, Qpid is recognized for outstanding development based on our vibrant, rapidly expanding community, infrastructure, and for collaborative development."

John O'Hara, Chairman of the AMQP Working Group and Executive Director at JPMorgan said, "I am delighted that the Apache Software Foundation has graduated the Qpid project. AMQP is an open infrastructure for business messaging over the Internet. Apache Qpid developers have been active participants in the AMQP Working Group working in partnership with other AMQP solution developers and end-users. The ASF's provision of Qpid as its AMQP implementation adds to the range of AMQP solutions businesses can choose from to improve their efficiency."

Read more in the full press release from Apache.

Check out QPid's new home: http://qpid.apache.org

Introduction to Realtime Linux Slides From SCALE 7x

2009-02-23T13:27:00.002-05:00

I presented Introduction to Realtime Linux at SCALE 7x this past weekend. The event was great, and our Red Hat and Fedora booths both received a lot of traffic--we ran out of almost all of our give-aways the first morning!

You can download the slides I presented here.

Upcoming Events: JBoss Virtual Experience and SCALE 2009

2009-02-09T11:07:00.031-05:00

I'll be at a pair of events in the next couple weeks: the JBoss Virtual Experience and the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) 2009.

At the JBoss Virtual Experience, I'll be manning a virtual booth to talk about Red Hat Enterprise MRG and Cloud Computing. MRG Grid's support for virtualization and also integration with Amazon EC2 makes it a powerful tool for companies that either want to leverage the cloud or build their own cloud. If you're attending the JBoss Virtual Experience, stop by the booth!

At SCALE, I'll be giving a talk, Introduction to Realtime Linux. If you've wondered about Realtime Linux's benefits, performance characetristics, state, or just what it is, this will be a useful session to attend. You can read about the rest of Red Hat and Fedora's presence at SCALE as well.

Red Hat Enterprise MRG 1.1 is Released

2009-02-03T19:21:00.039-05:00

I'm pleased to announce that we released Red Hat Enterprise MRG 1.1 today. This is a significant release that adds many new capabilities and performance enhancements. It also introduces formal support around
the Grid component and entire MRG platform for the first time (Grid was Technology Preview in v1.0). Some of the highlights of MRG 1.1 include:

Messaging

Native infiniband and RDMA driver for dramatically better
latency
Active/Active Clustering
Enhanced security
Queue semantics like Last Value Queue and Ring Queue
Native .NET client
Improved management tools
Increased performance

Realtime

Improved performance, especially on boxes with higher CPU-counts
Improved performance tools. For example, Tuna now has the ability to write tunings to an init script once you've found an optimal tuning for your system

Grid

New GUI management tools
Low latency scheduling via MRG's messaging bus
Amazon EC2 support for adding capacity on-the-fly in the cloud
Concurrency limits on any scarce resource like software licenses or database handles
Dynamic provisioning, which enables you to mark slots as partitionable and sub-divide them dynamically so that more than one job can occupy a slot at once

You can find out more about MRG at http://redhat.com/mrg. Also, you can read the press announcement for MRG 1.1 at http://www.press.redhat.com/2009/02/04/red-hat-debuts-enterprise-mrg-11/.

STAC Benchmark Results for Red Hat Enterprise MRG Realtime

2008-11-07T14:20:00.004-05:00

STAC Research performs a number of third-party benchmarks for the financial community. Recently, they performed a benchmark of RMDS on top of a system running Red Hat Enterprise MRG Realtime. Our realtime offering enhances Red Hat Enterprise Linux with deterministic latency and performance for critical applications like RMDS.

The results of this test included:

- Lowest mean latency reported to date with RMDS
Less than 1ms mean latency at up to 700,000 updates per second

- Standard deviation of latency remained below 0.5 ms through 600,000 updates per second
- In the "Producer 50/50" fanout test of a multiplexed P2PS, total output was:
7.07M updates per second with jumbo frames (MTU = 9000 bytes)
5.56M updates per second with standard frames (MTU = 1500 bytes)

You can see the entire summary and report here.

QPid Welcomes a New Member

2008-11-07T14:00:00.008-05:00

QPid is the upstream open source project led by Apache that Red Hat participates heavily in to help develop Red Hat Enterprise MRG and to provide AMQP in Fedora. The initial QPid proposal was submitted by a Red Hat engineer to Apache, and the QPid community has grown significantly since then to include a large set of diverse participants.

Building on the recent announcement that it has joined the AMQP working group, Microsoft has now announced that it will be joining and contributing to the open source QPid project at Apache to build its AMQP implementation. This is also great news for the open source world and a bold new step for Microsoft.

As we previously highlighted, Microsoft adopting the open AMQP standard will enable a new wave of innovation and interoperability—especially between Linux and Windows. Now that Microsoft will be working on development of AMQP software in open source, we expect this to further enhance the interoperability between Linux and Windows—they will not only speak the same protocol but share the same open source code base for that communication, offering an opportunity for Microsoft to build its relationship with the open source community.

The Advantages of Open Source
With Qpid’s new addition, there are several highlights to point out:

Open source provides a way for active contributors and community members to accelerate significantly the timeline in which vendors like Microsoft can provide an AMQP implementation. By joining an established open source project, these such vendors are able to reap the benefits of all the engineering work that many of the leading messaging developers in the world have already done. Now, these developers in the QPid project will also benefit from Microsoft's contributions.
There are strategic benefits in joining an open source community. QPid is distributed under an Apache license. So, a vendor could easily just take the QPid code base, fork it for internal use, and then proceed to build its own, proprietary AMQP implementation. By joining the QPid project, Microsoft will not have total control over the direction of the code base beneath its products, and its engineers will have to earn their commit rights and status the same way that other QPid committers have. Still, as companies like Red Hat have shown, building products collaboratively in the open source community leads to more rapid innovation and the opportunity to create better software.
There is value in the QPid community and implementation. There are multiple open source projects that are implementing AMQP (this is great for making AMQP pervasive). However, that Microsoft is joining QPid indicates that it sees significant value and leadership in QPid. Indeed, QPid is the first open source project to achieve compliance with the latest version of AMQP (0-10). QPid also has support for a wide variety of platforms, including .NET. Indeed, Red Hat engineers have developed a native WCF-compliant .NET client for QPid. Others in the community have contributed an Excel plugin for QPid and are driving the advancement of the QPid broker on Windows.

Red Hat welcomes new members to the QPid open source community to help
expand its technology and continue to create long-term benefits for the project, community and its members. For more information, see here.

* Note: I have also published this blog at http://press.redhat.com. You can see other MRG blog entries there at http://www.press.redhat.com/category/red-hat-enterprise-mrg/

AMQP and Fedora 10

2008-10-24T15:46:00.008-04:00

I love AMQP, I love Fedora, and I love blog entries that list AMQP support as the number 1 feature of Fedora 10!

Welcome to AMQP, Microsoft

2008-10-24T09:00:00.003-04:00

Today, Microsoft announced that it has joined the AMQP working group. As a founding member of the AMQP working group, we at Red Hat are excited about this development.

Just as Red Hat has been adding native AMQP support into the Linux platform and ecosystem at Fedora and through Red Hat Enterprise MRG, Microsoft is bringing AMQP support to Windows and its ecosystem. Between Linux and Windows, AMQP will become a standard messaging facility on the vast majority of operating systems and server platforms. It will offer a new level of interoperability between Linux and Windows using open standards and open source software. And, it is designed to lead to breakthroughs in everything from core infrastructure software to management tools to next-generation applications and architectures. At Red Hat, we are already building upon our AMQP messaging implementation for everything from virtualization management to security management to monitoring.

Enabling Next-Generation Architectures
AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) is the industry's first standard for messaging that spans from the wire-level to the semantics of messaging; it provides a full specification of an Internet Protocol for business messaging. This is significant because before the arrival of AMQP, no two messaging implementations could natively interoperate with each other—even though messaging software's core mission is to distribute data across disparate systems. Furthermore, with the rise of messaging-based architectures like SOA or EDA and the critical nature of messaging to many of today's networked applications, the lack of a standard in messaging is a major obstacle for integration and developing next-generation applications.

People used to have to purchase TCP/IP stacks until they became a standard facility in operating systems. Once that happened, there was a tremendous leap forward in networking and networked applications, even though the technology was previously available. The fact that everyone could now count on this same network protocol to be ubiquitous and interoperable meant that applications and architectures started depending and building upon this capability in ways that previously no one had envisioned. The same thing happened with other standards, like http. The same thing is happening with technologies like virtualization. And, the same thing will happen in the messaging space via AMQP—in today's networked world, when developers can count on the prevalence of a common messaging protocol with authentication, security, reliability, and all the desired patterns like point-to-point, publish/subscribe, or eventing, they will unleash a new generation of applications and architectures that we have only begun to imagine.

Microsoft's joining AMQP and decision to integrate AMQP into its platforms, combined with the work that we have already been doing with AMQP at Red Hat and elsewhere, has made the fulfillment of AMQP's promise inevitable and quite exciting. But, this does not diminish the contribution of others. The AMQP working group already has a well-esteemed set of members, ranging from software vendors like Red Hat to hardware vendors like Cisco to end-users like JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, and Deutsche Börse (see the full list of participants at http://amqp.org). Indeed, one of the unique hallmarks of the AMQP working group is that it started as an initiative at an end-user (JPMC) and has many other end-users contributing to the specification. This ensures that AMQP is developing into a standard that solves and addresses significant real-world issues rather than just being a lowest-common denominator amongst various competing vendors.

Legal Note
Because this will be of concern to many people—particularly in the open source community—it is worth pointing out one of the legal ramifications of Microsoft joining AMQP. There is a strong IP provision in the contract for joining the AMQP working group. Anyone joining the AMQP working group must freely license IP that is used by AMQP—AMQP is and will always be an open standard that is free to implement. By joining the AMQP working group, Microsoft has signed this contract. So, there is no threat of Microsoft holding the AMQP standard hostage via patent threats.

* Note: I have also published this blog at http://press.redhat.com. You can see other MRG blog entries there at http://www.press.redhat.com/category/red-hat-enterprise-mrg/

High Performance on Wall St

2008-09-21T21:42:00.001-04:00

I'll be at the High Performance on Wall St show tomorrow in NYC at the Roosevelt Hotel. This should be an interesting show, despite (in part, because of?) the recent turmoil on Wall St--all the recent financial calamity isn't going to reduce financial service's need for computational power.

I'm going to be speaking on a panel at 4pm on "Building The Perfect Financial Services Data Center." Red Hat has a booth (#102), where we'll be debuting publicly the new GUI Tools we've developed around Condor for Red Hat Enterprise MRG as well as showing off our integration between MRG and Amazon's EC2 Cloud. Come check us out if you're at the show!

Can AMQP break IBM's MOM monopoly?

2008-08-01T09:10:00.001-04:00

Jeff Gould at InteropSystems has written a great series of articles about the value and promise of AMQP. Part 1 of the article is here: Can AMQP break IBM's MOM monopoly? In part 2 of the series, Gould interviews Red Hat's Carl Trieloff, who talks about what we're doing with AMQP, JBoss and MRG.

Red Hat Enterprise MRG Presentations From the 2008 Red Hat Summit

2008-06-23T07:09:00.008-04:00

I've posted online the presentations that we just did at the 2008 Red Hat Summit about Red Hat Enterprise MRG. You can download them at:

Realtime Linux: Who, What, When, Where and Why by Clark Williams
Red Hat Enterprise MRG Overview by Carl Trieloff
Dynamic Grid Computing With Red Hat Enterprise MRG & Amazon EC2 and accompanying demo video by Bryan Che

Red Hat Enterprise MRG v1 is Released

2008-06-19T12:10:00.013-04:00

Today marks the release of version 1 of Red Hat Enterprise MRG, our high performance distributed computing platform that integrates Messaging, Realtime, and Grid technologies. Red Hat has been working across each of these technologies for years, so we're excited to be launching the initial release at the Red Hat Summit.

We've got some pretty impressive performance results, customers, partners, and use cases for MRG. For details, see:

The official press release for MRG's release
Official blog entries about MRG
The Red Hat Enterprise MRG web site

Additionally, if you happen to be at the Red Hat Summit, we're featuring MRG pretty prominently:

Our CEO, Jim Whitehurst, highlighted MRG Messaging and AMQP yesterday in his keynote as an example of a customer (JPMC) contributing to open source
Our CTO, Brian Stevens, featured MRG in this morning's keynote
We have several sessions on MRG
We are doing MRG demos at the Red Hat booth in the Expo Hall
Cisco is a sponsor at the Summit and is demonstrating their AON Message Bus Interconnect (MBI) solution. Cisco is debuting support for Red Hat Enterprise MRG Messaging in their AON MBI product at the Summit and demonstrating this in the Expo Hall.
IBM is a sponsor at the Summit and is demonstrating their WebSphere Real Time, which is an RTSJ-compliant realtime JVM. IBM supports WebSphere Real Time exclusively on Red Hat Enterprise MRG. They have also been a strong development partner with Red Hat around realtime, and they are a winner in this year's Red Hat Innovation Awards for this work. IBM is demonstrating WebSphere Real Time in the Expo Hall.

Congratulations to the entire MRG team for this fantastic release!

Red Hat Summit 2008 (and FUDCon!)

2008-06-16T15:46:00.010-04:00

Tomorrow is the start of the 2008 Red Hat Summit in Boston. There are going to be several sessions related to Red Hat Enterprise MRG there:

Thursday 1:30pm: Realtime Linux: Who, What, When, Where and Why by Clark Williams. Clark is the tech lead for realtime at Red Hat, so he'll have a lot of good stuff to say about performance results, how we've developed realtime, what's happening in the open source community, what's planned for the future, and so on.
Thursday 4:00pm: Red Hat Enterprise MRG Overview by Carl Trieloff. Carl is the technical director and visionary behind MRG, so this will be a great opportunity to hear first-hand about the origins, successes, and benefits of MRG. Way back, I spent over a year working to get Carl into Red Hat to launch and drive our MRG initiatives. Now, after creating AMQP, starting new open source projects, bringing realtime to maturity, and signing our partnership with the University of Wisconsin around Condor, we are starting to see significant traction around MRG.
Friday 9:00am: Dynamic Grid Computing With Red Hat Enterprise MRG & Amazon EC2 by Bryan Che. That's me! I hope you can get up early enough to attend my session. I'll be presenting on the work we've been doing to enable dynamically provisioning grid capacity at Amazon EC2's cloud infrastructure right from your MRG Grid's Condor scheduler. This will enable enterprises to add capacity dynamically to existing data centers or even to provision entire grids on-demand in the cloud. Cloud computing is hot these days, and we are seeing a lot of customer interest in MRG's integration with EC2.

This week also marks the start of FUDCon 2008 in Boston. Matt Farrellee, who is our tech lead for Condor and MRG Grid, will be coming to town to help lead discussions on implementing Fedora Nightlife. Of course, I'll be there too.

Fedora Nightlife Article on lwn.net

2008-06-05T18:55:00.002-04:00

There's a nice, detailed article about Fedora Nightlife on lwn.net: http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/284887/b05744ca15f41a52/.

Fedora Nightlife and Energy Usage

2008-06-01T16:48:00.016-04:00

Wow, lots of response to my blog post about Nightlife! It's great to see so much interest right at the start. There are a lot of questions, but many of the conversations around these should happen on the Fedora Nightlife mailing lists as they're not just for me to answer. Also, I've now created an initial Wiki page for Nightlife (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Nightlife), so a lot of information will ultimately go over there. I will, however, blog about some of the topics that have stirred more discussion.

I'll start with one of the questions that always seems to arise when people talk about harvesting idle computing capacity: energy usage. Specifically, isn't it a waste of energy to leave your computer running when you're not using it so that others can leverage it for distributed computation? This is a complex issue with a complicated answer: it sometimes is a waste of energy, but it doesn't have to be a waste and can even save energy in the long run.

Cycle harvesting is sometimes a waste of energy
Let's start with the obvious: harvesting idle computer capacity across many--perhaps millions--of computers can definitely waste energy. Computers that might otherwise have been turned off are now running at full power crunching data for projects that may not be useful. Furthermore, these computers won't all be fully utilized 100% of the time, so there will be many instances of computers running with nothing to do but waste energy. Yes, unfortunately, cycle harvesting can and often does waste energy.

Cycle harvesting doesn't have to be a waste of energy
Cycle harvesting can waste energy, but it doesn't have to do so. I hope that as we work on Nightlife, this will prove to be the case.

There are many worthwhile tasks which can only be accomplished by heavy computation. A lot of fundamental research today in biology or healthcare, for example, requires access to large computer grids. If you believe that this type of research is a worthy use of energy, then the issue of wasting energy becomes an engineering problem of utilization and efficiency. That is, there are certain tasks for which it is worthwhile to let others use your available computing power. As long as these tasks fully utilize your computer when it is idle and they do so in the most efficient manner, then they aren't really wasting energy. More concretely, what if finding a cure to cancer required a lot of computational modeling? Would it be a waste of energy if there was a good project devoted to harvesting idle capacity to find such a cure, and it did so in a way that fully utilized all the computers which were donating capacity in an efficient manner?

If the keys to preventing energy waste in cycle harvesting are utilization and efficiency for worthwhile projects, then this is a problem we can address for Nightlife in a variety of ways. For example, the Condor scheduler is highly adept at maximizing resources efficiently. Given enough tasks or projects, we should be able to use all the resources available to Nightlife efficiently. The challenges will come from finding enough good projects and work for which people can donate their computing capacity. As long as we've got a good queue of work, we should be able to ensure that all the computers donating to Nightlife are doing something worthwhile and not just sitting around.

There are also many things that we can do at Fedora to increase further our ability to utilize resources efficiently. For example, we could explore waking computers to execute tasks that the owners of those computers deem worthwhile; otherwise, those computers will be in a suspended or low/no-power mode. At Fedora, we can drive the Linux operating system to be much more efficient in how it uses power while doing computations. And, Fedora's patron, Red Hat, has strong relationships with and influence over major hardware manufacturers and customers of grids. As commercial enterprises also look at how to save energy while doing their own grid computations, we have an opportunity to lead the way in developing and demonstrating the best techniques for doing this in an earth-friendly way.

Cycle Harvesting Can Save Energy
Much of the work that would run on Fedora Nightlife is going to be computed one way or another. A project like Nightlife, however, can not only help speed these computations by providing additional processing power, it can also help save total energy usage in the long run.

If you've ever visited a large data center, then you know that the energy usage of of the individual computers in that data center is only a fraction of the total energy the data center consumes. When you put tens of thousands of computers together in a single room, then many other energy hogs come into play. Foremost is cooling--large data centers require massive amounts of redundant air conditioning systems to prevent the computers from overheating as they process in close proximity to each other. There are also many other devices that draw power: the numerous network switches and routers connecting the computers, all the devices that monitor the data center's health and security, the redundant power supplies that keep the data center operating in the event of a power failure, and so on.

If a project were to distribute its computations over many individual, geographically dispersed computers and didn't need to build out a large data center for all its work, then it would no longer have to use as large a cooling center or provide as much backup power or do any of the other energy-consuming things that putting so many computers close together requires. Instead, by distributing its work over a number of individual machines through Nightlife, a project could cut down on its total energy required per computation.

Another way that Nightlife can provide energy benefits over a dedicated data center is by avoiding a concentrated usage of power in a single geographic location. I once visited a large Internet company in a power crisis because its host city's power grid could provide it with no additional electricity to grow--the company had totally maxed out the available electricity to it. Even if Nightlife didn't save total energy usage but increased the amount of energy required per calculation (which, as I've argued above, it doesn't have to do), this could still provide a better overall environmental impact. Rather than concentrating all its energy use in one place, a project could distribute and amortize its energy impact across a much larger area by leveraging Nightlife.

You don't have to participate, but you can contribute
Finally, maybe you fundamentally believe that there is nothing worthwhile for running on a large computer grid--no matter how noble the task--because of the energy required for running a grid. That's fine--you don't have to donate capacity to Nightlife. But, pragmatically, you have to agree that people are going to compute certain things one way or another. At Fedora, we have a tremendous opportunity to improve the power usage of grid computing in general. So, even if you don't donate idle capacity to Nightlife, please consider helping Fedora as a whole become the most energy-efficient platform for computation.

Introducing Fedora Nightlife

2008-05-28T22:47:00.004-04:00

I've recently started a new project at Fedora called Nightlife. Here's the text of the e-mail I sent to the newly-created Fedora Nightlife mailing list:

Fedora Nightlife is a new project for creating a Fedora community grid. People will be able to donate idle capacity from their own computers to an open, general-purpose Fedora-run grid for processing socially beneficial work and scientific research that requires access to large amounts of computing power. Given the large number of Fedora users, I hope that we will eventually be able to build a community grid of over a million nodes at Fedora. This will be a great example of the power of the Fedora community, give people new and meaningful ways to contribute to Fedora, advance the development of large-scale grid software, and lead to real benefits for the world.Fedora Nightlife will leverage the Condor project, which was (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/) created and hosted by the University of Wisconsin Madison, for scheduling and harnessing donated computing power. Last year, Red Hat and the University of Wisconsin signed a strategic partnership around Condor. Part of this partnership entailed releasing Condor's source code under an OSI-approved open source license. As a result, we now have Condor packaged at Fedora, and upstream development continues to happen at the University of Wisconsin repository in an open manner.
Some of the immediate next steps for Fedora Nightlife are:
-create a Wiki page for this project
-get a Condor scheduler hosted at Fedora up and running
-work out what are the requirements for a project to be able to run on Fedora Nightlife (e.g. its software must be open source, it must be safe, it should have some kind of open policy around its results, etc) We've already started working on getting a scheduler up and running. Ishould have a wiki setup relatively soon so that we can start mapping out more plans there. Then, we can focus on growing the Nightlife community of projects andsolicit Fedora users to donate capacity. Hopefully, enabling donation of compute power to Nightlife can eventually become a first-boot option for Fedora installs. I welcome everyone to contribute to and participate in the FedoraNightlife project!

If you'd like to subscribe to the Fedora Nightlife mailing list, you can do so at https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-nightlife-list

Fedora Nightlife is going to build on the work I do in my day job at Red Hat around Red Hat Enterprise MRG--it'll be based on the same technology we use for MRG's grid capabilities. This is great for me for a couple reasons: Fedora Nightlife will be a powerful and public example of the scale that's possible with Red Hat Enterprise MRG, and the work we do to drive Nightlife/Condor to the 1 million node count will directly benefit MRG. Also, it's great to be at a place like Red Hat where I can work on my product management job and do some good in the world at the same time.

Creating a Wireless 3G Network Connection on Fedora 9 With a Novatel Ovation U727

2008-05-17T15:33:00.024-04:00

One of my favourite features of Fedora 9 is NetworkManager's new support for wireless 3G modems. I just recently got a Novatel Ovation U727 EVDO Rev A USB Modem for Sprint's network because this modem explicitly supports Linux. Sprint provides instructions for using the U727 on Linux from its Web site. But, since Fedora 9 makes this process much easier, here is how to do it:

Have your laptop always load the proper drivers for the modem by adding the following lines to /etc/rc.local:

#load driver for Sprint Novatel u727 wireless modem
rmmod usbserial
modprobe -v usbserial vendor=0x1410 product=0x4100

Insert your U727 into your laptop.
The U727 has built-in flash storage for which Fedora will mount on your machine, launch a file browser, and show a link on your desktop. Close the file browser, and right-click the link to your flash storage and select to eject the device (note that unless you eject the flash storage, your modem won't work).
Right-click on NetworkManager and select Edit Connections.
Click on the Add button to create a new connection for your U727.
Fill in the new dialog box with the name of your modem's connection and the number to dial. In my case, I named the connection Sprint Novatel U727. Type in #777 for the number to dial.
Hit OK and then close the dialog box
Now, click on NetworkManager, and you should see your new USB modem connection show up as a connection option.
Select your new connection, and you'll be online!

Here are instructions for using your modem in the future now that it's setup:

Insert your U727 into your laptop
Eject the mounted flash storage device in your modem (unless you eject the flash storage, your modem won't work)
Go to NetworkManager to select your U727 connection

I'm currently writing this post while online with my Sprint U727 modem. As a side-note, I selected Sprint's 3G service for mobile broadband even though I don't use Sprint for my cell phone service because Sprint has truly unlimited data usage (Verizon and AT&T cap at 5GB/month) with good terms of service (Verizon restricts things like streaming media), and its EVDO rev A network is fairly fast. Here are the results of a speed test that I just ran:

Update 5/19/2008:

Sprint is updating its Terms of Service to cap data usage at 5GB/month too. Given that, I will likely switch from Sprint to Verizon, which I prefer for cell phone service. Verizon also sells a U727 modem, so these instructions will work for Verizon too

JBoss Developer Studio For Mac OS Now Available

2008-03-12T08:23:00.009-04:00

Hi, I'm happy to announce that JBoss Developer Studio for Mac OS is now available. So, now you can get all the benefits of fantastic certified tools and an integrated JBoss Enterprise Application Platform with native Mac support. Many JBoss developers use Macs, and we know that many in our community use Macs, so we're excited to make this available. And, of course, if you're a Windows or Linux user, JBoss Developer Studio has been available for those platforms as well.

You can get JBoss Developer Studio for Mac OS from http://www.jboss.com/products/devstudio.

Note that right now, due to an issue in Eclipse, we are only supporting JBoss Developer Studio on Mac OS Tiger 10.4.x and earlier right now. There is a workaround available for Leopard, but this isn't a supported configuration. We'll add formal Leopard support in our next update.

Enjoy!

We're not going to release Red Hat Developer Studio anymore. Introducing JBoss Developer Studio 1.0!

2007-12-10T08:00:00.000-05:00

I'm pleased to announce today the General Availability of JBoss Developer Studio 1.0 for Windows and Linux. JBoss Developer Studio provides a certified open source development environment that includes and integrates:

JBoss Developer Studio provides a host of powerful features, such as Seam tools, powerful Ajax capabilities, a Visual Page Editor with WYSIWYG editing of JSF pages and RichFaces Ajax components, robust Hibernate capabilities, and much more.

One of the main benefits of using JBoss Developer Studio is that it pre-integrates and certifies tooling and runtime components together. When you use JBoss Developer Studio:

You don't have to worry about whether all the plugins you use will work together or require incompatible dependencies.
You'll have the assurance that all your runtime libraries like Hibernate or Seam are properly matched with each other and already installed into JBoss Application Server.
You'll know that the particular Eclipse plugins you have work precisely with the runtime libraries and containers in your development environment.
You can easily upgrade to new technologies because all the matching tooling, runtime components, and dependencies will be provided to you in an integrated installer.
You can deploy your development platform with confidence because Red Hat supports JBoss Enterprise Application Platform releases for 5 years.

In addition to Eclipse, Eclipse Tooling, and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Developer Studio also includes a copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Network access for development use. Even if you're a Windows-based developer (and we know that a lot of you are!), you may want to take advantage of Red Hat Enterprise Linux's built-in virtualization capabilities to run multiple Windows guests for different development and test environments.

Many of you know that we had released a couple betas under the name, Red Hat Developer Studio. During the beta process, we found that it would be advantageous to leverage the powerful JBoss brand more clearly. So, as we release this new offering, we are officially christening it JBoss Developer Studio.

JBoss Developer Studio 1.0 is available now as a subscription offering for $99. To summarize, JBoss Developer Studio includes:

Eclipse
Eclipse Tooling
JBoss Enterprise Application Platform
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
RHN Access
Support for Windows and Linux

To learn more about JBoss Developer Studio, visit: http://www.jboss.com/products/devstudio

Red Hat Enterprise MRG: Red Hat, Customer-Driven Innovation, and Open Source Leadership

2007-12-04T08:00:00.000-05:00

Red Hat has shown that open source is one of the best ways to bring customer-driven innovation and leadership to the market. Today’s announcement of Red Hat Enterprise MRG provides a perfect example of this in many respects.

Spreading the Message of Open Source and Open Standards

Red Hat Enterprise MRG includes Red Hat’s implementation of AMQP-based ( Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) enterprise messaging. Both the MRG Messaging implementation and AMQP itself highlight Red Hat’s leadership and customer-driven innovation.

Red Hat is developing its AMQP messaging implementation in various open source projects and communities. One of the most notable aspects of these communities is that there are many messaging users from financial services and other industries contributing major pieces of code. These users are working to make sure that this messaging implementation will meet their specific needs when they ultimately consume it as customers. The results of this collaboration are noteworthy: MRG Messaging provides breakthrough features and performance and can reach durable messaging throughputs two orders of magnitude higher than other solutions.

Open source developers are not alone in recognizing the value of collaborating with others. The AMQP working group, of which Red Hat is a founding member, is developing the AMQP specification to be an open, interoperable standard for messaging. This particular working group is especially effective because its membership contains not only technology companies but also many end-users of messaging technology—including several investment banking giants. Of course, all contributions in the AMQP working group are valuable, no matter who provides them. But, AMQP is developing into a broadly accepted standard in many ways because there are so many end-users working to ensure that AMQP meets their own needs. Truly, this is customer-driven innovation.

Deterministic Success

In 2005, Red Hat began working on its realtime kernel technology in response to a request by the US Navy for the DDG 1000 Zumwalt Class Destroyer project. Red Hat engineer, Ingo Molnar, developed a realtime patch set which brought highly deterministic response times to the Linux kernel. However, Red Hat did not just release a product around this work. Instead, Red Hat has been working and continues to work with the Linux community to bring this realtime technology into the upstream Linux kernel. To date, Red Hat has incorporated about two-thirds of its realtime code base upstream and is working to push the rest of this code upstream. One notable recent achievement was the acceptance of Ingo’s Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS) into the mainline kernel this summer.

Why is Red Hat working so hard to push its realtime work into the mainline kernel? By having features implemented upstream, these capabilities “carry forward” into future versions of the kernel, so MRG Realtime has the product longevity that proprietary realtime extensions do not.

Trying to support extensions to Linux that are not accepted upstream is a losing battle. Red Hat recognized this long ago and thus pursued the long task of writing realtime extensions and pushing them upstream. Sure, this is hard work. But, at the end of the day, Red Hat will be in an optimal position to support this technology for the long term, since Red Hat wrote and led the work upstream.

Broad-Scale Innovation

Red Hat Enterprise MRG’s High Throughput Computing and grid capabilities are based on the Condor project created by and hosted at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. First developed in the late 1980’s, Condor has been under continuous active research and use and possess features and capabilities that far exceed those of any commercial, proprietary grid product. However, Condor has not seen significant industry usage to date because it does not provide all the enterprise features, manageability and supportability that customers require. For example, one of the first pieces of work Red Hat performed on Condor was to break it up from one large, statically linked program into separate RPM packages that are robust, manageable, upgradeable and can be discreetly patched.

Red Hat and the University of Wisconsin have signed a unique partnership around Condor. Under this agreement, the University of Wisconsin will release Condor’s source code under an OSI-approved open source license so that Red Hat may include Condor in its open source distributions, and Red Hat will jointly fund and staff Condor development on-campus at the University of Wisconsin.

Condor has a large community of users and researchers in the academic space. Through its agreement with the University of Wisconsin, Red Hat will be able to bring this innovation from academia to the enterprise. Furthermore, Red Hat and the University of Wisconsin will work to strengthen Condor with additional features and enterprise strength and also enhance Linux for High Throughput Computing to the benefit of both scientists and enterprises. Red Hat believes that this will lead to great advances in infrastructure technology and a great partnership between industry and academia. This is the best kind of customer-driven, open source innovation of all: one that not only advances technology but improves the way we do things.

For more information on Red Hat Enterprise MRG, see here.

How to get smaller-looking fonts on Fedora 8

2007-12-03T18:49:00.000-05:00

When I installed Fedora 8, I thought it was quite slick and impressive visually in many ways. But, there was one thing that bugged me--my fonts now looked much bigger than they did in Fedora 7. It turns out that a default install of Fedora 8 sets a high dpi for fonts. To change this and get back to smaller-looking fonts:

Go to System->Preferences->Look and Feel->Appearance to open the Appearances dialog box
Click on the Fonts tab
Click on the Details... button
Change resolution to 96 dots per inch

That's it!

Red Hat Developer Studio 1.0 Release Candidate 1 Now Available

2007-11-13T13:52:00.000-05:00

I'm pleased to announce that Red Hat Developer Studio 1.0 Release Candidate 1 is now available for download for both Windows and Linux. This release fixes a number of bugs we found during the betas and also adds some polish and features, like Xul Runner and a new "mini"JMX console.

You can download Red Hat Developer Studio 1.0 Release Candidate 1 from http://www.redhat.com/developers/rhds/

Please try it out and provide feedback at http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewforum&f=258

We're in the home stretch now!

Red Hat Developer Studio 1.0 Beta 2 Now Available

2007-10-05T22:44:00.000-04:00

I'm pleased to announce the release of our second Beta for Red Hat Developer Studio. We've fixed a number of bugs and also added many new features, including:

Seam hot deploy for WARs
Integrated TestNG so that generated Seam projects are automatically setup to be tested
New Seam Generate Entities Wizard
New Seam wizards for all the Seam component generation options from seam-gen (Seam Action, Form, Entity, Conversation)
And more!

You can download Red Hat Developer Studio 1.0 Beta 2 from http://www.redhat.com/developers/rhds/

Please try it out and provide feedback at http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewforum&f=258

Getting Networking on Fedora 7 Working after Suspend/Resume

2007-09-22T01:10:00.000-04:00

After recently updating my Fedora 7 installation, I was pleasantly surprised to find that suspend/resume now works on my ThinkPad T60. However, there was one problem: after resuming out of suspend, NetworkManager wouldn't see any of my network devices and thus couldn't connect to any network.

To fix this, I hacked my system to stop NetworkManager upon suspend and then start NetworkManger on resume. You can do this by editing the file

/usr/lib/hal/scripts/linux/hal-system-power-suspend-linux
(/usr/lib64/... on x86_64 machines)

Edit the section that reads:


#RedHat/Fedora and SUSE support pm-utils
elif [ -f "/etc/redhat-release" ] || [ -f "/etc/fedora-release" ] \
|| [ -f "/etc/SuSE-release" ] ; then
# TODO: fix pm-suspend to take a --wakeup-alarm argument
if [ $seconds_to_sleep != "0" ] ; then
alarm_not_supported
fi
# TODO: fixup pm-suspend to define erroc code (see alarm above) and throw
#    the appropriate exception
if [ -x "/usr/sbin/pm-suspend" ] ; then
           #stop network manager
           service NetworkManager stop
/usr/sbin/pm-suspend $QUIRKS
RET=$?
else
# TODO: add support
unsupported
fi

by adding the red commands. This stops NetworkManager at suspend.

Then, at the bottom of the file, edit the text:


#Refresh devices as a resume can do funny things
for type in button battery ac_adapter
do
devices=`hal-find-by-capability --capability $type`
for device in $devices
do
dbus-send --system --print-reply --dest=org.freedesktop.Hal \
   $device org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Rescan
done
done

#start NetworkManager
service NetworkManager start

exit $RET

by adding the text in red.

Now, when you suspend and resume Fedora 7, networking should work!

Red Hat Developer Studio 1.0 Beta 1 Now Available

2007-08-13T08:00:00.000-04:00

I'm pleased to announce the availability of the first beta release of Red Hat Developer Studio. This beta release marks the first time that a 100% open source development solution is available that integrates Eclipse, Eclipse plugins, and an entire runtime platform (The JBoss Enterprise Application Platform). So, with Red Hat Developer Studio, you can, out of the box, do things like:

Generate a new Seam application using new Seam tools and deploy right into a pre-configured JBoss Application Server
Visually design and code JSF pages using the updated Visual Page Editor, which now supports WYSIWYG editing of rich, AJAX components
Generate entity beans for Seam applications from your database using Hibernate and visual seam-gen tools

You can download the Red Hat Developer Studio beta from http://www.redhat.com/developers/rhds/index.html.

Red Hat Messaging is now at jboss.org

2007-08-01T18:06:00.000-04:00

I'm pleased to announce that the open source project, Red Hat Messaging, has now moved to jboss.org: http://labs.jboss.com/rhmessaging/. Red Hat Messaging is an open source project that is building a high performance, reliable distribution of the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) standard. We're excited to work on this project as part of the JBoss middleware community. We hope that you'll check out the project, try out the builds, and perhaps get involved in development!

We're also happy to be collaborating with the JBoss Messaging project. You can find out more about how JBoss Messaging and Red Hat Messaging relate by viewing the JBoss Messaging and Red Hat Messaging FAQ.

Eclipse Europa is Available

2007-06-27T15:11:00.000-04:00

Today marks the release of Eclipse Europa, the next version of Eclipse's open source framework and components. This is a great achievement by Eclipse and a testament to the power of open source--the on-time, simultaneous, coordinated release of 21 distinct projects is a fantastic feat. Even the largest software companies have trouble releasing a couple products together.

This is why at Red Hat, we are doing all of our development for JBoss Tools in open source at jboss.org. In fact, we are already targeting Eclipse Europa with our plugins. So, if you want to try out all the latest tools for building powerful and rich applications, try downloading Eclipse Europa and then installing the latest JBoss Tools builds! And, of course, you can look forward to Red Hat Developer Studio later this summer, which will certify and integrate all this, along with the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

Exadel Plugins Now Available in Open Source at JBoss Tools!

2007-06-22T16:56:00.000-04:00

Today marks an important milestone for the upcoming Red Hat Developer Studio product from Red Hat: we have completed open sourcing the former Exadel Studio Pro plugins from the Red Hat/Exadel Partnership that we announced back at EclipseCon in March.

These plugins, along with the former JBoss IDE plugins, and some new ones (e.g. a Seam plugin) are all available at the JBoss Tools project at jboss.org. You can visit the JBoss Tools project to check out the source code and download the latest versions of the plugins. And, of course, we'd welcome your participation in the open source project too.

One of the most exciting aspects of our open sourcing Exadel's plugins at jboss.org is that this marks the first time that developer tools of this caliber have been available in open source. Previously, all the major Eclipse-based tools vendors built their offerings on top of an open source foundation (Eclipse). But, they kept their most desirable features proprietary and sold them to customers. At Red Hat, we believe the best way to help developers is to provide them with a powerful and completely open source set of development tools and platforms.

For developers that want the latest versions of our plugins and like to remain at the tip of our technology, they are welcome to go to JBoss Tools and tailor-assemble their own, ideal development environment. For developers that prefer an integrated, supportable, and stable development environment that offers great technology, Red Hat has a solution too. Later this summer, Red Hat will be introducing a new product around the JBoss Tools project: Red Hat Developer Studio.

Red Hat Developer Studio will provide a subscription that includes and integrates:

Eclipse 3.3 from the Eclipse Europa release
Production-ready versions of the plugins from JBoss Tools and elsewhere, all tested and integrated together along with their dependencies into Eclipse
The JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, which includes production-ready versions of JBoss Application Server, Hibernate, and Seam
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Red Hat Network access for updates

Red Hat Developer Studio will provide one installer that sets up your entire development environment: Eclipse, plugins, and JBoss runtime platforms all integrated together. Of course, like all of our products, Red Hat Developer Studio will be 100% open source. And, it will run on a variety of platforms like Linux and Windows.

So, Red Hat will be offering a variety of solutions for developers. The plugins we have just open sourced at JBoss Tools will provide rich capabilities around many of the other projects at jboss.org. And, Red Hat Developer Studio will build upon JBoss Tools to offer a completely integrated and certified open source development environment. Please check out JBoss Tools and let us know what you think!

Stable Fedora 7 Wireless Networking on a Thinkpad T60

2007-06-22T09:31:00.000-04:00

Fedora 7 includes new, free iwl3945 wireless drivers. This means that users with the Intel PRO/Wireless 3945 card in their laptops (like my T60 has) no longer have to install firmware and drivers manually to get wireless working like in FC6. This is great and makes Fedora much easier to install. Unfortunately, these new drivers don't seem to be quite stable yet. So, I've gone back to the old ipw3945 wireless drivers, which have been much more stable for me. Here's how I did it:

do a rpm install to get the freshrpms repo:


rpm -ivh http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/fedora/linux/7/freshrpms-release/freshrpms-release-1.1-1.fc.noarch.rpm

install the ipw3945 packages:


yum install -y ipw3945-kmdl-`uname -r` ipw3945

create /etc/modprobe.d/ipw3945 with the contents:


install ipw3945 /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install ipw3945 ; sleep 0.5 ; /sbin/ipw3945d --quiet
remove ipw3945 /sbin/ipw3945d --kill ; /sbin/modprobe -r --ignore-remove ipw3945

add to /etc/rc.local to start ipw3945:


# start wireless networking
modprobe -r ipw3945; sleep 0.5; modprobe ipw3945

That's it!

Note: If you ever update your kernel to a newer version, you will have to do a


yum install -y ipw3945-kmdl-`uname -r`

to get the corresponding wireless module for your new kernel. This is one of the disadvantages of going to the old ipw3945 drivers versus the ones included in Fedora 7.

Introduction to Red Hat Developer Studio Webinar

2007-05-30T23:25:00.000-04:00

Update:
The recording for this webinar is online at http://www.info.redhat.com/forms/RHDevStudioWebinarDownloadRequest

The upcoming Red Hat Developer Studio attracted quite a bit of attention and buzz recently at JavaOne and the Red Hat Summit. Red Hat Developer Studio will be the first completely open source, Eclipse-based development environment with robust capabilities for building rich, enterprise applications. Red Hat Developer Studio also will include the new JBoss Enterprise Application Platform so that developers will have one installer that integrates all their development tools, components, and platforms with no manual configuration necessary.

If you missed out on the live demos that we did for Red Hat Developer Studio, you can check out a webinar that we're hosting 5/31 at 2:00 PM EDT:

Introduction to Red Hat Developer Studio

This webinar will introduce Red Hat Developer Studio, a new, robust, and completely open source Eclipse-based IDE for building enterprise Rich Internet Applications. Come see how to use exciting features like new JBoss Seam wizards and tools, JBoss RichFaces editors with visual previews, and robust Hibernate tooling.
HOSTED BY: Bryan Che
SPEAKERS: James Williams: Solutions Architect, Red Hat
Max Katz: Senior Systems Engineer, Exadel
DATE: Thursday, May 31
TIME: 2 p.m. EDT
Register Here to attend the webinar

If you aren't able to attend the live webinar, we plan to record it and make it available for viewing on an on-demand basis. Hope to see you there!

Red Hat Summit Presentations

2007-05-14T16:24:00.000-04:00

Last week, I had a whirlwind California trip and attended both the Red Hat Summit in San Diego as well as JavaOne in San Francisco. I gave a presentation on Red Hat's new developer offerings on Wednesday morning at the Summit, flew to San Francisco early Wednesday afternoon for JavaOne, and then returned Thursday morning to San Diego in time to give my 11:30am presentation on Red Hat Messaging at the Summit.

Here are PDF's of the two presentations I gave at the Red Hat Summit:

Both the Red Hat Developer Program and Red Hat Messaging are exciting new offerings that Red Hat is introducing this year. The Red Hat Developer Program just launched last month and provides new developer offerings from tools and software to services and support. It will also include the upcoming Red Hat Developer Studio IDE.

Red Hat Messaging is a new open source project that implements AMQP and will provide revolutionary new levels of openness, performance, and reliability in the messaging space.

Are the Wii Shortages a Nintendo Ploy to Sell the DS?

2007-04-27T17:24:00.000-04:00

There have been many articles about Nintendo's Wii shortages since the Wii launched during the last Christmas season. Now, Nintendo is reporting huge sales and profits for the past few months. This reminds me of a case study I read in the book, Readings in Managerial Psychology, while taking 15.301 at MIT:

So the toy manufacturers are faced with a dilemma: how to keep sales high during the peak [Christmas] season and, at the same time, retain a healthy demand for toys in the immediately following months...The problem is in motivating postholiday spent-out parents to reach down for the price of yet another plaything for their already toy-glutted children. What could the toy companies possibly do to produce that unlikely behavior?

The author found out by interviewing someone from the toy business:

I just happen to know how several of the big toy companies jack up their January and February sales. They start prior to Christmas with attractive TV ads for certain special toys. The kids, naturally, want what they see and extract Christmas promises for these items from their parents. Now here's where the genius of the companies' plan comes in: They undersupply the stores with the toys they've gotten the parents to promise. Most parents find those things sold out and are forced to substitute toys of equal value. The toy manufacturers, of course, make a point of supplying the stores with plenty of these substitutes. Then, after Christmas, the companies start running the ads again for the other, special toys. That juices up the kids to want those toys more than ever. They go running to their parents whining, 'You promised, you promised,' and the adults go trudging off to the store to live up dutifully to their words.

Two interesting things to note in the recent Wii articles:

Most of Nintendo's stunning profits in the recent quarter came from sales of its DS handheld (16.02 million units worldwide in the latest fiscal quarter)--not the Wii (5.84 million Wii machines worldwide in the last five months). Indeed, the DS has been the best-selling of all game systems
Along with its large profits, Nintendo is announcing that it is now starting to increase production of its Wii console