Linux

Earlier this week I blogged about my data center colleagues over at Dell's Enterprise Technology Center (aka Dell TechCenter). They are a community of system-admins, data center managers and other technical people that are on the hunt for new ways to get more out of their data center servers, storage and networking equipment.

This week, Dell TechCenter launched the Dell Masters Program, a network of technical superstars within Dell TechCenter who create and contribute community content (scripts, whitepapers, videos etc.) based on their own experiences, ideas and innovations.

Take a look at a post written by Dell-Scott H (aka @dellservergeek or Scott Hanson by his wife, colleagues and friends) on the Dell TechCenter blog announcing the new program. He walks you through how to get registered and why stinkin' badges are not part of this program.

Editor-in-Chief Tom Kolnowski sums it up nicely, "The Dell Masters Program is all about using deep peer-to-peer networking."

The Red Hat Summit is taking place September 1-4 in Chicago, and Dell will be an active participant in the activities. We're an "Enterprise Sponsor" of the event, and we'll have a both in the partner pavilion, showing off our latest and greatest servers as well as giving away flashlights and USB keys for those that come by.

We also have two Dell engineers leading technical sessions during the summit. The first session is on Wednesday at 1 PM, titled "Simplifying Linux iSCSI Management with iSNS", and is lead jointly by Dell's Shyam Iyer along with Mike Christie from Red Hat. They'll be discussing simpler, faster ways to achieve storage LUN/volume provisioning through a single management console. The second session is lead by one of Dell's Linux Technology Strategist in the Office of the CTO, Matt Domsch. His session takes place on Friday at 11 AM, and is titled "Simplifying New Server Deployment." Matt will be discussing how Dell and Red Hat are simplifying new server deployment using Red Hat Enterprise Linux's device driver update model and Dell's built-in systems management features.

Click here to find more details on the Dell sessions and a complete list of all the other sessions going on during the Red Hat Summit.

If you're attending the Red Hat Summit, please stop by the both and/or the technical sessions to meet us. We'd love to hear any feedback you have around running Linux on Dell systems.

There's been a lot of buzz in the blogosphere since Google announced the Chrome OS last week. For those of you who didn't follow the discussions, the Chrome OS is an experience-targeted cloud OS that has the potential to push the boundaries and definition of the alternative operating environment. According to Google's blog post, the Chrome OS is specifically targeted towards the netbook class device. While there's still lots of questions about the OS, the idea has potential. I think it will be interesting to see what the interaction between Chrome OS and Android will ultimately be within the cloud. Given that Google has made it clear that the Chrome OS will be available in the second half of 2010, there's still a lot of time to see how this will develop. As with most new technology, Dell plans to evaluate the Chrome OS and other alternative operating environments, like we've done in the past. Luckily (for me!), Dell enjoys a great relationship with Google. As we have more details to share on the topic, we'll do it here.

Alternative operating systems, continue to evolve, flourish and prosper. Over the last 18 months, we have seen Linux and its derivatives make their way into the hands of consumers (hooray!!). We have also seen smartphone and MID operating systems such as Android and the Palm Pre's WebOS showing signs of enthusiasm and prosperity.  It's a wonderful time to witness and participate in such a renaissance within the PC and small device industry.  These alternative operating environments are truly "different" from the traditional Windows platform - they don't attempt to simply "mimic" Windows.

Alternative operating system provide users with an focused experience: highlighting a particular feature - such as web browsing, email, or media consumption. Within Dell, we call this an "experience-targeted" platform as it represents the primal focus of the alternative environment:  direct and focus the user towards a specific set of features (or "experiences" in marketing terms). Most alternative operating environments also come with this "focused" feature.  As is typically the case, these alternative operating environments are not Windows compatible - they do not run the standard Windows/Win32 applications that are so common. This can be seen as a disadvantage. However, these alternative operating environments attempt to address this shortcoming by focusing their feature set with a self-directed experience: entice and direct the user to its strengths.

Moblin is the next evolutionary step of the traditional Linux environment where focus on smaller devices and small screens is a requirement. It takes a different approach to its user experience from either Dell's current offering or Ubuntu Netbook Remix by further simplifying the self-directedness of the desktop - no user guide should be needed to learn how to use Moblin. Additionally, Moblin replaces some of the traditional Linux applications, such as media players, browsers, etc..., with equivalent versions that have been specifically optimized to align with this new design behavior/look and feel of Moblin. Applications take up the entire desktop in Moblin (because screen real estate is a premium in these kinds of devices).  Hence, applications that are optimized around that behavior provide a greater user experience over the traditional Linux version of the same application.  Moblin continues this theme by providing a new simplified network connectivity manager - one that again, looks and behaves like a more integrated application within the Moblin desktop. Like our Linux offering on Mini netbooks and UNR, simplicity is a key design element in Moblin. Users of Moblin see a targeted feature set (browsing, social networking/email, media) and the entire Moblin desktop directs and focuses the user on those features.  Dell is very interested in Moblin at present and is working very closely with its key Moblin partners (Intel and Canonical) investigating potential offerings.

Add this all up, and down the road this means that customers will have all kinds of choices on the OS side. If you're into open source options, I predict lots of exciting times ahead for us all!

Take that chart we've been looking at for years: on one axis you have cost; on the other you have topic X.  X is usually restore time, or redundancy, or reliability, and so on.  The idea is If you want more of X, you've have to be willing to spend more. Let's make X reliability. What happens when the reliability side of that chart flattens? Where cost doesn't necessarily equate to significantly more reliability? Then you pick the solution that costs less with the same results.

Recently, AIX/Power systems achieved top spot in the ITIC survey referenced in this article for reliability. It highlights that participants reported only 15 minutes of unplanned downtime per year for those systems. HOWEVER, check out this quote:  “The second most reliable servers in terms of downtime were customized versions of Novell SuSE Linux running on standard x86 hardware, clocking in at 17.4 minutes of downtime per year.”

Granted, it states 'customized' version of SLES, which I'd like to understand more, but really - 2.4 minutes of downtime difference over an entire year for second place? Another way to put it: 99.99715% vs 99.99669% reliability. (15 / minutes per year and 17.4 / minutes per year)

It would be interesting to understand the cost comparison of the top two systems in the survey. I think it's safe to say that it is more expensive to implement the POWER architecture solutions over the Linux x86 solutions from a hardware perspective (yeah, I know, I just threw out some serious flamebait for you RISC fans). It is what it is: typically RISC is more expensive than x86 hardware. The question is how much more expensive is it for those two minutes of difference in reliability over an entire year?

There are, of course, other factors for an understanding of true 'total cost of ownership' (TCO) including software, staffing, and more. In years past TCO, especially as it relates to software licensing, was a valid argument for the POWER systems line. Fewer processors to get the same job done = less software core licensing costs. However, taking into account performance of recent Intel/AMD cores and adjusted software licensing value units for specific core architecture, that argument is a thing of the past.

Of course, if you went with the AIX solution, you'd have 2.4 more minutes of time to do things like read my blog post; yet your budget for something else might suffer --i.e. travel to VMworld to meet with all of us on the DellTechCenter team at our booth.

Welcome the newest member to the Dell TechCenter team, Jeff Sullivan !

Jeff will be leading the charge on Dell PowerVault, Dell EqualLogic, and Dell/EMC storage solutions.  Jeff comes with a long history in IT, all the way from changing tapes (fun, fun) to selling enterprise UNIX solutions from IBM.  With his backgroup in UNIX, he will also be leading our Dell Linux solutions topic on the TechCenter.

The best way to reach Jeff is through the TechCenter, or hit him up on twitter @SANPenguin, how cool of a name is that ?!