Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.3 became globally available today, with the new enterprise OS featuring virtualisation improvements, support for Intel's Core i7 architecture, and inclusion of the Open Java Development Kit from Sun Microsystems.
Microsoft announced the second release of its Windows Server 2008 operating system at its Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles this week.
Red Hat has released new beta versions of its enterprise and desktop Linux products, with improvements including better virtualisation and clustering features, to make the operating system a more stable platform for server farms.
Novell says its Linux business has grown by 243 percent over the last three quarters, and it largely credits its deal with Microsoft.
On Thursday, Canonical plans to release "Gutsy Gibbon," the Ubuntu Linux version 7.10 that the company hopes will lay the foundation for a serious push into the server and other markets in six months.
You've only got to hang around a datacentre for about 30 seconds before someone starts raving on about virtualisation. While the cost benefits of virtualisation are obvious, the management challenges often get swept under the carpet.
Some future trends in storage are obvious: we'll need more of it, it'll be cheaper per megabyte, and a lot of it will be virtualised.
Managers in charge of storage have a lot to worry about, but there seems no particular reason why people in this corner of the world should be more concerned about security than anything else. Why is it that securing our data matters more to us than accessing it?
In the Australian market, banks are the archetypal large IT customer: they've got lots of technology of differing vintages, have to spend a fortune on services to stitch it all together, and are also obliged to meet a super-strict regulatory regime which would make most lesser enterprises quake in their virtualised boots.
There were some interesting responses to my analysis piece last week about Apple's new Boot Camp Windows-on-Mac software, but all the evidence still points in one direction...
In this candid interview with ZDNet.com.au, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst discusses why he thinks rival VMWare will fail, how the financial crisis will be good for open source, and why cloud computing will be the future.
Managing data can be difficult, especially if you have almost 500 terabytes of storage and spend $10,000 a month on backup tapes. This case study looks at how Melbourne IT, one of Australia's biggest web hosting companies, handles storage
We show you how you can use virtualisation technology to research operating systems, examine network bottlenecks, or uncover the implications of new application deployments.
There appears to be no doubt that Windows 7 will be significantly more popular in Australia than Vista was, a reality that will help Microsoft entrench its wider software portfolio even further into the enterprise.
A lot of the fuss behind virtualisation is focused around the datacentre. That's all well and good, but there is a whole world of virtualisation for workstations where competition for the best suite is red-hot and constantly improving.
Production-quality XenSource virtualisation is the main selling point here, with optional clustering and storage virtualisation to go with it. But there's a lot more besides, making the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux a compelling solution for businesses of all sizes.
SCVMM 2008 R2 is a very competent product, neatly bringing Microsoft's virtualisation management offering in line with the competition at the same time as offering management of disparate platforms in the one product. The integration with the rest of the Systems Center suite makes the overall management and monitoring experience better than its rivals.
Despite taking a completely different approach to virtualisation, Virtuozzo Containers can match the best hypervisors on performance while at the same time making virtual workloads quick and easy to deploy and manage.
Early releases of the Xen hypervisor showed promise but had lots of rough edges. Citrix's XenServer 5, however, is very much a production-class virtualisation solution with features that match, and in some cases exceed, what's available on rival platforms.
Microsoft's Hyper-V is a solid virtualisation platform that's compatible with a wide range of modern server hardware.
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