The Portable Consultant has always been a supporter of open source philosophy, and not only in matters of code. As a technical architect on some large-scale portal projects in the past, I’m always intrigued by the infrastructure behind massive services such as Facebook and Google.
Facebook has “opened” their server technology and announced the creation of the Open Compute Project to distribute this intellectual capital.
Cheers,
-pmh
Oracle’s announcement of a new free virtual server solution is, at the very least, an extension of those magazine ads that offered greater uptime by running Oracle on top of Linux (the Oracle Unbreakable Linux campaign).
It has been said that Oracle’s main interest in Linux, and Linux support, is to facilitate the hosting of Oracle’s proprietary products. (Oh, and if that cuts Microsoft out of the picture so that customers can spend more with Oracle so much the better!)
The Portable Consultant, whose present work happens to involve infrastructure design including database hosting options, agrees.
Oracle’s VM announcement seems to align with this approach: when hosting Oracle products, consider using Oracle-supported Linux and (New!) Oracle VM.
Whether Oracle’s free VM will challenge VMware in all its roles remains to be seen. My guess it that it is aimed primarily at hosting Oracle products and that is where Oracle development and support will focus.
Cheers,
-pmh
How about this? The Portable Consultant actually addressing an interesting development or two in the world of Infrastructure Architecture ~ Design & Deployment!
virtual competitors
Item One is the IPO of VMware which, The Economist assures us, is not a repeat of the Internet Bubble years despite the fact that the stock rose 76% on the first day.
Item Two is the acquisition of privately held XenSource by Citrix which is seen by The Motley Fool as a reasonable response to the changing technology that threatens their main product line.
virtual uses in the data centre and at home
As a technical architect I had been waiting for some time for VMware and similar virtualization options to catch on for server virtualization. Amongst my customers this has been happening during the past couple of years. As a parent I have been using VMware Workstation for several years now as a way to isolate my child from upsetting my fragile Windows configuration on the family PC.
the future of XenSource
It is interesting that a company based on proprietary software, Citrix, has looked to a company based on open source, XenSource, to save its bacon. This further validates the open source business model. It will be interesting to see how Citrix now deals with its new open source property and the open source based businesses and communities that have been instrumental in the success of XenSource including Novell and Red Hat.
Cheers,
-pmh