This site is about to go down in near future. However, we continue about mobile development in our new blog called DelayToleraNt.com.
Marc Fleury Speaks about Business of OSS at CERN
April 26th, 2007The series of open source talks continued at CERN. Last week we were privileged to hear Marc Fleury, the founder and ex-President of JBoss speaking about the “Business of OSS”. In the beginning Marc, who is now being retired, wanted to make clear that he is not presenting any company, but only his personal view. Major motivation for him to visit the CERN was to see the preparations of the world’s largest particle accelerator LHC which is due to start later this year.
In his speak Fleury discussed the various open source business models. The five presented models were visited and the ways to generate money from there were discussed as well as related pitfalls of the models. The enthusiastic speaker seemed to have experience from all the five models, each of them being visited at the different phases of the project life-cycle. The ideas that were emphasized probably the most were the possibility to make revenue from offering training in the early phase of the business. Secondly, the double-licensing (GPL-LGPL) seemed to be his favorite model for the more mature projects within professional open source. The pitfalls of using BSD license for professional projects were warned about.
One of the concluding remarks was that the open source is nowadays one of the best models for a small company to become global. It is extremely hard to be funded as proprietary closed source project to the extend that company would have enough resources to go global and establish customer base which generates revenue. Marc also discussed how many businesses tend to go too early to venture capitalist funding, and told that they did never have to touch the money they acquired from the VC. The money was there to make shareholders more secure but it was not needed to cover the operational costs of the company at any time.
And of course, the talk was not all about going through the slides. As Marc pointed out himself, he is an evangelist and will be an evangelist. One rarely sees such an energetic speaker who really likes to speak about his subject of interest. Especially, the free discussion in the end gave us interesting views on the dynamics of the operating system space.
Shuttleworth from Ubuntu Gives Talk at CERN
March 3rd, 2007
The council chamber of CERN in Geneva was full of exited engineers and scientists this week when the head of Ubuntu project was giving a talk. Mark Shuttleworth was talking about the future of the open source and the way the free software changes the world.
Shuttleworth started the talk by telling how he was exited to come and talk at CERN where science is made to change the world in a way that will affect our future. He continued by explaining how he sees that free software will also change in a profound and permanent manner the way we use computers as part of our everyday activities. It is not only that the free software has been catching up with the proprietary applications but the potential which has been built up during this process. Having different characteristics free software and open source development enables things that will achieve far greater goals than the current proprietary solutions whose development has been limited by a set of financial rules.
Then Mark discussed the current free software landscape going through his 13 theses:
#13 Pretty is a feature
#12 Consistent Packaging
#11 Simplified, rationalised licensing
#10 Presence
#9 Pervasive support
#8 Govoritye po Russki?
#007 Great gadgets
#6 Sensory Immersion
#5 Real real-time collaboration
#4 Plan, execute, DELIVER
#3 The Extra dimension
#2 Granny’s new camera
#1 Keeping it FREE
After the presentation the excitement of the audience was well seen from good questions and discussion. For us one of the interesting things was to see how a talented person with a clear coal in his mind really has potential to change how things are done in global scale. Let us remind that the project was founded only in 2004 and already in few years it has grown to be a globally known concept.
SMART to Predict Disk Failures
February 20th, 2007Here we briefly introduce an efficient open source tool, which can help you to get hints whether your disk is about to break soon or not. A project called S.M.A.R.T monitoring tools is hosted in sourceforge, the software runs on multiple platforms and might be worth a look.
Anil Gupta discusses in his blog about Google’s findings on using SMART data to predict hard drive failures. The main observation is that the available monitoring data is not precise enough to predict failures of a single disk. However, in larger configurations the increasing number of reported errors can be used to estimate when to start replacing the hardware. Especially, scan errors were seen to estimate failure better than some of the other metrics provided by the tool.
We also read a good introductory article on how to use the monitoring tools on Linux platform and followed the instructions. It was fairly easy to get started with SMART and see that our disk was doing fine. Of course, what really matters with using this kind of tools is to use them continuously and observing the changes in the metrics when the disks become aged.
Erasure Coding for Reliable Storage
February 9th, 2007In this article we give a brief introduction to erasure coding, give few relevant pointers to tutorials and current solutions both on commercial and in free open source technologies.
Erasure codes can be used to construct very reliable storage. The coding can be used to provide redundancy to protect from loosing data when storage components become broken or unconnected. Some coding methods require the least possible amount of storage to provide for high redundancy. A well known example of erasure coding storage is RAID-5, which uses XOR coding. An alternative technique is to create multiple identical copies data, this is often called replication or mirroring. When targeting similar security levels the mirroring uses significantly more storage space and is thus more expensive than erasure coding. As an example typical RAID-5, where a parity data unit is created for each 4 disks consumes 125% of disk space over the amount of stored data. Similar goal to survive from one lost disk can be achieved with creating a single replica, which uses 200% disk space over the amount of stored data.
Large Storage at CERN
January 20th, 2007
CERN is the world’s largest particle physics laboratory situated in Geneva Switzerland.
Beginnig this year 2007 CERN will start running a new generation particle accelerator. The new accelerator is named LHC, which stands for Large Hadron Collider. One of the main objectives of the experiment is to prove the existence of Higg’s boson.
To find such a small particle amazing amounts of data needs to be recorded and analyzed. To manage the data analysis several data Grid projects have been initiated. The amount of data produced by the new accelerator is foreseen to be in the scale of tens of PetaBytes.
CASTOR infrastructure developed at CERN is currently used to manage more than 6 PetaBytes (6 Million GigaBytes) of information. The architecture comprises fuctionalities from databases to massive tape storages.
If you wish to see a groovy ad video how this creates challenges for the IT infrastrucutre check the video by HP.
JBossWorld Berlin 2006: Day Three
November 29th, 2006
The JBossWorld Party yesterday didn’t affect the program on Wednesday, even people looked tired at the morning. The day was relatively short, the program ended just before the lunch. A couple of storage related presentations were also given. The first speak was given by a RedHat which revealed impressive portfolio of open-source storage products available from RedHat.
JBossWorld Berlin 2006: Day Two
November 21st, 2006
The Second day started with an early breakfast. Despite the early time and people still being jetlagged, the conference hall was packed full of people eager to see the top executives. After all, this was the first time the JBoss and RedHat were organizing a major event after the corporate fusion. The opening music and video-installation welcomed Mark Fleury, now having title Senor Vice President of RedHat and General Manager of the JBoss Division, to the stage and as an energetic performer he had no problem of keeping the people awake.
JBossWorld Berlin 2006: Day One
November 20th, 2006
JBossWorld conference has started at Berlin. Rooms were already full of people with good energy when first sessions started at 12:00. Laptop workshop sessions provided introduction to new JBoss components through practical hands-on examples. CDs with pre written code examples were given to the audience and the participants made needed changes to the code to make their first applications using e.g. JBoss SEAM. The exercise consisted of adding the necessary annotations and class inclusions to make the applications to include advanced properties such as object persistence. The session was held by Mark Spritzler.
Continue reading ‘JBossWorld Berlin 2006: Day One’
JBossWorld Berlin 2006
November 16th, 2006
JStorage will provide daily coverage on JBoss World Berlin 2006 organized November 20-22. The conference will bring together the professional open source community around Europe and over seas. In this news forum we will be bringing you the daily coverage about the topical presentations on professional open source topics. You may have a look on the agenda and post here a comment on what You would like to see here just a few hours after the presentations have seen the light.
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