Linux’s adoption in the enterprise has been accelerating for more than a decade, and the role of the OS in this environment is more strategic than ever. Linux is accelerating innovation for delivering IT services internally with virtualization technologies and is enabling new models for customers to build businesses based on Linux using cloud computing.
In an effort to capture notable enterprise Linux news and trends, The Linux Foundation will be surfacing some of the important milestones and announcements for enterprise Linux each week. We hope this is useful to our members and to the Linux.com community and we welcome your feedback and additions to these highlights in the comments section.
This week was studded with major enterprise Linux news. The story that probably got the most attention was Oracle’s Enterprise Linux Kernel. The company describes it as a “fast, reliable, modern Linux kernel that is optimized for Oracle’s software and hardware.” It is based on its previous “Unbreakable Linux” offering, which is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). This ongoing evolution of Oracle’s Linux strategy has drawn both applause and critisism, but there is no denying its contributions to the Linux kernel community and its competitive vigor. We’ll watch to see how customers receive this latest move.
Speaking of Red Hat, the company this week announced its earnings for its fiscal year 2011 second quarter and continued to demonstrate how an open source software company can dominate in any economy. Red Hat reported total revenue for the quarter was up 20% from the year ago quarter. Subscription revenue was up 19% year over year. CEO Jim Whitehurst pointed to a variety of reasons for this success, including Red Hat’s Cloud Foundation portfolio.
Network monitoring and systems management vendor Zenoss this week released its own report on virtualization and cloud computing. It surveyed about 200 organizations and found that flexibility was the leading driver for adopting these technologies, while securitiy remains the biggest concern. VMware and Amazon EC2 lead the pack for applications deployments, but the report concludes that Xen, KVM, Rackspace Cloud and Google App Engine are experiencing increasing action.
It’s also worth noting the product and technology announcements from Cisco and Amazon this week. Sean Michael Kerner of InternetNews reports on Cisco’s new Linux switches for small business. Kerner’s report includes that Cisco uses Linux for its 300 Series because it helps reduce the time needed to train partners and customers. The TechTarget crew has you covered on the new Amazon Machine Image (AMI) focused on Linux.
Lastly, this weekly report would not be complete with out mentioning the ongoing rumors about VMware and Novell. The Wall Street Journal has been tracking the story and when something has been confirmed, we’ll share it here.
