October 2008 Archives

There is a great interview with Jim Whitehurst on ZDNet yesterday that starts on the topic of Cloud computing and virtualization and ends up speaking about the merits of open source.  Jim's ability to explain the value of these innovations is really clear and to the point. 

On the topic of Cloud, Jim explains that he believes that the economics of server farms will win out.  He then says "whether they are internal private grids or clouds, or whether those are public, or semi-private, that's still to be determined, because that's a lot around specific business models."  Therefore flexibility to use private grids or clouds or external clouds will be come very important for many companies.  This flexibility is one of the Objectives of MRG Grid.

Jim then does a great job of explaining how virtualization is becoming a commodity and should be moved to the operating system layer.  Then he explains the Red Hat business model for open source.  Again, he makes it very concise and clear.  Worth a read.

My blog difficulties have delayed this blog entry. I wanted to do a "Farewell IONA" blog (and I might do something later) and then an introduction to my new job at Red Hat.

After over 11 years at IONA (my couple of years at Aurora Technologies are officially included) I moved to Red Hat in May of this year.  Not long after my move I started hearing rumors of IONA's acquistion. And, of course, now IONA is part of Progress Software.

My move was prompted much less by IONA's fate than by what Red Hat is doing with MRG. It was time for change and MRG represents something very exciting going on in the industry. There is a lot I can and will be saying about MRG on this IPBabble and I'll only give a short introduction in this entry.

Red Hat's expansion into emerging technologies is an effort to provide more value to its customers. This work includes, among other things, virtualization, management and Messaging, Realtime and Grid (MRG).  I'll be explaining more about details in later posts but briefly:

• Messaging - an open source (Qpid), open standard (AMQP) based, platform independent, messaging infrastructure.
• Realtime - a predictable, low-latency linux kernel.
• Grid - an open source (Condor) HPC, HTC platform that provides the flexibility of local grids, remotes grids and cloud computing.

Of course there are lots more details but that is the very high level view. I'll be diving in a lot more on ipbabble.com.

I have a hybrid role: I work for Brian Stevens, the CTO, in the Office of CTO focused on MRG. In that way I'm very much an evangelist and customer focused solution architect. But in the same organization I'm an engineer working on MRG. So I have to contribute to the engineering effort too. It is both a very rewarding and very challenging role.  Getting up to speed on all the various aspects of MRG has been a steep learning curve despite my background in distributed computing and messaging. Thankfully I work with a really smart and dedicated team that has been generous with sharing their knowledge.  I'm sure I'll be introducing some of them on this blog in the future.


UPDATE: Thank you to Lana for spotting the "bog" typo.

Well I have this new blog set up but I can't figure out how to move all my old blog entries into this blog.  I guess I didn't export them correctly and just zipped up the files. If anyone knows how to get old Movable Type based blog entries into a new version of MT then let me know.

Update:
I'm just loading these manually and setting the date to the original published date.  I doubt I'll get around to entering the comments and trackbacks for the old entries. I'll have to see.