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.

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.

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 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.

The techniques for erasure coding are many, and they are based on different mathematics. Usually the ones that are based on the use of simple XOR coding are very fast to compute. These codes, however, often lack either in flexibility or they consume more space, or require more complex management of data units. Other type of codes, e.g. Reed-Solomon, that are based on matrix calculations are ideal regarding their space requirement, and enable using any combination of data units to recover the original data. An excellent introduction by Jim Planck to the theory behind the erasure codes can be found here.

A good illustration about the feasibility of using the erasure codes for storage is the late emergence of company called CleverSafe. They use coding technologies to provide a very reliable storage for the customers with reasonable amount of used resources. The company also hosts an open source project about their technology. Another coding storage project that is finally starting to mature and to be stable in operation is GridBlocks DISK. The GridBlocks is entirely written on Java, by the authors of JStorage.com, and licensed under liberal BSD open source license. The DISK has been successfully run both in LAN and WAN environments.

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.

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.

The last speak in the Core Technology track was given by two researchers working with Grid computing. Mikko Pitkänen and Juho Karppinen ( also JStorage authors) told how they have successfully used JBoss clustering products for implementing distributed storage and computing architectures. The work has been done within GridBlocks project, which is a project to provide essential building blocks for Grid applications in Java.

If you are really interested what happened in Berlin, the official conference news link to many intresting writings. The recap with slide shows will propably be available soon.

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.

One of the things Mr Fleury discussed was the recent evolvement in the industry that has been taking place after the RH and JBoss fusion. After a long static situation in the application server market, which he described similar to “Nash equilibrium”, the industry is moving. As he said currently “Larry is moving, Microsoft is moving and everybody is moving” and the time will show, which of the players have the strongest ecosystem to survive.

To mention about interesting speaks from the sponsors, Mr. Steve Rawsthorn from Unisys had a good discussion with Mr. Fleury. The discussion point out for example how all airports in US are running Unisys and how a fairly large share of credit card transactions are globally processed by the company’s servers even they may quite invisible on the streets. The presentation deserves a mention, as it was a talk that did the marketing very well yet managed to avoid being boring at all. For example, no slides at all.

Then an announcement was made, where Bull company announced its status as a partner of JBoss. The opening session lasted nice hour and quarter and included a good amount of nice stage humor as well as a good overview on the whereabouts of major open source vendors close to JBoss.

And of course something that should not be forgotten, someone promised to the crowd, as often seen in JBoss forums that “we love you”, what a warm feeling that gives! How could we blog anything bad about so nice people:)

The sessions continued with more advanced subjects than yesterday. Burr Sutter gave two presentations targeted for developers about SOA. On afternoon the SOA track continued by Thomas Diesler who talked about JBoss web services stack present at JBoss AS 5.0. The new application server version is turning beta very soon, and many presentations were giving insight of the new features. For example, Anil Saldhana presented J2EE security and new JBoss Security components on forthcoming beta AS. Anil also presented JBoss Federated SSO framework with Sonil Shah. Overall, too many sessions at the same time and unfortunately you cannot attend them all.

We are off to cocktail reception which starts right now. And the evening continues at e-Werk where JBoss World Party is held.

Service Oriented Architecture is the current way of doing things. The JBossWorld conference has a special SOA track lasting the whole three-day event. Today started with introductions to the SOA concept and relevant building blocks: web services and JBoss Enteprise Service Bus (ESB). The next days are going to give much more intense look into SOA.

The use of annotations seemed to be characteristics for many new Java components that were introduced. Usually using the annotations remove the need to do configurations through hand editing the XML-files. Complex functionality can then be included to the applications with introducing only small changes to the application code.

JBoss Messaging library was presented by Tim Fox and the new architecture comprises performance-improving design as well as removes many limitations that were present in the preceding MQ component. The messaging incorporates state of the art design including the use of NIO and SEDA for performance and architecture which leverages functionality of other JBoss libraries, such as transactions and group communication.

More information here tomorrow…

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.