Red Hat’s $136m acquisition of open source storage vendor Gluster marks Red Hat’s biggest buy since JBoss and starts the fourth quarter with a very intersting deal. The acquisition is definitely good for Red Hat since it bolsters its Cloud Forms IaaS and OpenShift PaaS technology and strategy with storage, which is often the starting point for enterprise and service provider cloud computing deployments. The acquisition also gives Red Hat another weapon in its fight against VMware, Microsoft and others, including OpenStack, of which Gluster is a member (more on that further down). The deal is also good for Gluster given the sizeable price Red Hat is paying for the provider of open source, software-based, scale-out storage for unstructured data and also as validation of both open source and software in today’s IT and cloud computing storage.
This is exactly the kind of disruption we’ve been seeing and expecting as Linux vendors compete with new rivals in virtualization, cloud computing and different layers of the stack, including storage (VMware, Microsoft, OpenStack, Oracle, Amazon and others), as covered in our recent special report, The Changing Linux Landscape.
While the deal makes perfect sense for both Red Hat and for Gluster, it also has implications for the white hot open source cloud computing project OpenStack. There was no mention of OpenStack in Red Hat’s FAQ on the deal, but there was a reference to ongoing support for Gluster partners, of which there are many fellow OpenStack members. OpenStack was also highlighted among Gluster’s key open standards participation along with the Linux Foundation and Red Hat-led Open Virtualization Alliance oriented around KVM. Sources at both Gluster and Red Hat, which point to OpenStack support being bundled into Red Hat’s coming Fedora 16, also reiterated to me Red Hat is indeed planning to continue involvement with OpenStack around the Gluster technologies. I suspect Red Hat is looking to leverage Gluster more for its own purposes than for OpenStack’s, but I must also acknowledge Red Hat’s understanding of the value of openness, community and compatibility. Taking that idea a step further, Gluster may represent a way that Red Hat can integrate with and tap into the OpenStack community by blending it with its own community around Fedora, RHEL, JBoss, RHEV and Cloud Forms and OpenShift.
The deal also leads many to wonder whether or what may be next for Red Hat in terms of acquisition. We’ve long thought database and data management technologies were areas where we might see Red Hat building out. This was also the subject of renewed rumors recently, and we believe it might still be an attractive piece for Red Hat given the open source opportunities and targets around NoSQL technologies such as Apache Hadoop distributed data management framework and Cassandra distributed database management software. We’ve also believed systems management to be a potential place for Red Hat to further expand. Given its need to largely stay within open source, we would expect targets in this area to include GroundWork Open Source, which joins Linux and Windows systmes in its monitorig and management, and Zenoss, which works with Cisco and Red Hat rival VMware in monitoring and managing systems with its open source software. Another potential target that would increase Red Hat’s depth in open source virtualization and cloud computing is Convirture, which might also be an avenue for Red Hat to reach out to midmarket and SMB customers and channel players. Red Hat was among the non-OpenStack members we listed as potential acquirers when considering the M&A possibilities (451 subscribers) out of OpenStack.
Given its recent quarterly earnings report and topping the $1 billion annual revenue mark, Red Hat seems again to be bucking the bad economy. We’ve written before in 2008 and more recently how bad economic conditions can be good for open source software. Red Hat is atop the list of open source vendors that suffer as traditional, enterprise IT customers such as banks freeze spending or worse, fail. However, the company’s deal for Gluster is yet another sign it is thriving and expanding despite economic difficulty and uncertainty.
You don’t have to just look at Red Hat’s earnings or take our word for it. On Jim Cramer’s ‘Mad Money’ this week, we heard Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst praised for Red Hat performance and traction where most companies and many economists are throwing the blame: financial services, government and Europe. Cramer credited Red Hat for a ’spectacular quarter’ and allowed Whitehurst to tout the benefits of the Gluster technology and acquisition, particularly Gluster’s software-based storage technology that matches cloud computing. It was quite a contrast to the news out of Oracle Open World, where hardware was a focal point.
 |
Installing Nginx With PHP5 (And PHP-FPM) And MySQL Support On Fedora 15
Nginx (pronounced "engine x") is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server. Nginx is known for its stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption. This tutorial shows how you can install Nginx on a Fedora 15 server with PHP5 support (through PHP-FPM) and MySQL support.
 |
Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Fedora 15
Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on a Fedora 15 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.
I`m not the biggest fan of openSUSE but this weeks post by Colin Charles makes me happy ..
openSUSE users can now do a mariadb install from their default repositories.
With all the fuzz about Snoracle and MySQL's future last year to me it became clear that we would end up having different MySQL based distributions, probably with different names, and that it would be up to the Linux distributions to provide the users with what they preferred, working with those Linux distributions
therefore would be very important for the MySQL distributions.
Sadly my Fedora box doesn't allow me to do a yum install mariadb yet ... but I`m sure that's only a matter of time ..
Andrew just published an update to his Clusters from Scratch documentation that contains a step-by-step guide for initially setting up DRBD based cluster resources on Fedora 13.
Yes, that’s the Fedora release with Linux 2.6.33, so no more installing DRBD kernel modules.
 |
Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Fedora 12
Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on a Fedora 12 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.
In a time when many tradeshows are experiencing lower then normal attendance the 8th Annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE 8x) had record attendance this past weekend in Los Angeles. I was there exhibiting and conducting a community training day for Zenoss and was very impressed by not only the quality of the program but the enthusiasm of the attendees.
Here are some of the highlights:
On the Friday before the main SCaLE expo and speaking program starts many people hold mini-conferences and the SCaLE staff has been excellent at helping to organize and promote the events. I conducted a Zenoss Community Day that Friday with phenomenal attendance and enjoyed meeting a great group of open source management users. I also peeked in on Ubucon which had a standing room only crowd of Ubuntu users. There were also quite a few other special events that seemed to be well attended.
I got to watch both keynotes this year and they were both excellent. Here’s a little recap.
Karsten’s a bona fide community builder helping drive the growth of the Fedora project, an open source distribution sponsored by Red Hat. His talk was a great overview of how to drive community participation and better yet, what results not to discount. He also announced the newly published free book, The Open Source Way – Creating and nurturing communities of contributors. A blue print of how to apply open source principles to communities and facilitate participation. In his presentation he made reference to an initiative sponsored by Red Hat, Professors Open Source Summer Experience (POSSE), to help professors understand how to get their students involved in open source which was very cool.
He also made some interesting references to research done by Etienne Wenger on Communities of Practice, which are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. Which is part of the science indicated in the time of the talk.
Tarus is the lead of the OpenNMS project which he maintains in conjunction with a services business, The OpenNMS Group. He offers a very candid tale of his starting the OpenNMS group using the board game, Life, as a metaphor. It was very clever. Tarus and I share a common interest in open source IT management given the companies and projects with but we have some different philosophical views on how to develop those companies and communities. Despite that I really respect his passion for his project and his company. I thought his presentation was very well done and really enjoyed his talk.
Both keynotes are available here on UStream.
I got to sit in on Stephen Spector’s presentation on Xen and had a lot of time to talk to him through out the show. Xen fascinates me as a open source virtualization technology it’s used everywhere and even serves as the infrastructure for Amazon EC2.
I was there to man the Zenoss booth so I missed out on a couple of scaling and cloud presentations but the word was they were all great:
If you are an open source fan or vendor and can make the trip, I highly recommend attending to SCale 9x next February.
Technorati Tags: Fedora, LInuxfest, Los Angeles, Open Source, OpenNMS, SCALE8x, Xen
 |
Installing Nginx With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Fedora 12
Nginx (pronounced "engine x") is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server. Nginx is known for its stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption. This tutorial shows how you can install Nginx on a Fedora 12 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.
Technorati Tags: 