Open source

Preventive medicine for software change management

Most businesses seek competitive advantage through some kind of change. Whether they want to beat the competition to market with a new service or introduce new product categories, disruption is the norm.

The challenge in today's IT-centric world is that every one of those disruptions requires a software change, introducing the potential for downtime and lost revenue.

Change control and the associated risk mitigation is a big problem that every large organization faces. Last year, the London Stock Exchange crashed during a software change and was down for more than seven hours, costing traders millions, if not billions of … Read more

Open-source Hadoop powers Tennessee smart grid

The Tennessee Valley Authority is the nation's largest public power provider serving approximately 9 million consumers in seven southeastern states. The organization also happens to be a big supporter of open-source projects, including Hadoop, a tool designed for deep analysis and transformation of very large data sets.

Earlier this year, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) announced that it open sourced its data system used to collect data from smart grid devices called Phasor measurement units (PMUs). The data collection system is known in the industry as a Super Phasor Data Concentrator (SuperPDC), which can be used to determine the health of a power grid.

The open-source version of the SuperPDC is now called the "OpenPDC." I spoke to both Ritchie Carroll (RC), the project's creator, and Josh Patterson (JP), the person responsible for introducing Hadoop to the project, to discuss what the OpenPDC is and why TVA turned to Hadoop in building the system.

What sort of data volumes are you working with? RC: Currently there is around 20 TB of archived data, we expect this to grow quickly as a result of the SmartGrid stimulus funding which includes the addition of 850 phasor measurement devices. This may well grow the archive to half a Petabyte within the next few years.

How is this data currently captured and managed? Is any data discarded? JP: Data is collected directly from field devices at 30 times per second. This data is then time-aligned and processed in real-time--all data gets captured into a binary data file as time-series data for mass processing by Hadoop.

RC: No data is currently discarded, if we get to the point of needing to discard data because of cost--this will be a decision based on weighed importance of collected data. It is likely the data around major events will never be deleted because it will always be valuable for future student researchers. There is also value in being able to go back in time and look for newly discovered event signatures to see how long they might have been occurring. … Read more

Red Hat debuts virtualization management

Correction at 7:15 a.m. PST November 4: At one time, Red Hat had planned to ship an embedded KVM hypervisor based on Fedora. But the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor uses the RHEL 5.4 kernel and thereby picks up the same hardware verification portfolio.

With Tuesday's release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager (RHEV-M) for servers, the company has completed the first phase of a server virtualization rollout that effectively now puts KVM front and center. Red Hat released KVM commercially for the first time in September as part of … Read more

Turning Twitter into an application server

As much as Twitter is a powerful communication and social application, it's a relatively simple Web app. As part of a new contest sponsored by Engine Yard, Ruby on Rails developers are going to turn Twitter into their own application server.

The contest asks developers to program the "Worst App Server Technology Ever" (Waste) using Twitter as the message bus. While much of the contest is being done tongue-in-cheek, it's actually an interesting use case to see if a service like Twitter can take the place of a more traditional message bus like IBM MQ series … Read more

Most influential open-source gurus? Votes are in

Influence in open-source development communities is earned through years of writing and sharing great code. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, influence in the business side of open source is also gained through sharing expertise, and not necessarily from making mountains of cash.

At least, that's the lesson I take away from MindTouch's inaugural survey of 50 open-source business executives. MindTouch, an open-source collaboration company, has spent the last few months surveying executives within the commercial open-source community, asking them to name the most influential people within the commercial open-source ecosystem.

The result is effectively an all-star list of open-source … Read more

Jruby powers Gilt.com luxury shopping

JRuby is a relatively new high-performance Java implementation of the Ruby language that is showing increasing popularity among Java developers looking for additional productive frameworks.

JRuby allows for the incremental adoption of the Ruby language by allowing easy integration with existing Java libraries. It also lets Ruby and Rails applications to run easily on existing Java application servers that have been selected as standards within an organization.

I've been somewhat dismissive of Ruby as a language but there are more and more examples of large websites running extremely well. In fact RubyConf (already sold out) and JRubyConf are both seeing significant interest from developers for the upcoming events in San Francisco.

In the Q&A below I discuss how Jruby powers shopping site Gilt.com with CTO and co-founder Michael Bryzek.

If you are not familiar, Gilt Groupe has an interesting business model, somewhere between eBay and Woot, offering invitation-only sales of high-end fashion and luxury brands for men, women, and children. The site deals with unique spikes in traffic when new items are released as well as when an item becomes extremely popular. Accordingly, the IT infrastructure needs to be able to scale and burst in order to meet customer demands. … Read more

IBM and Canonical team up against Windows 7

IBM and Canonical, the commercial entity behind Ubuntu Linux, on Tuesday are launching a combined cloud and Linux desktop package designed for Netbooks and low-end PCs.

For those of us still waiting for Linux to hit the desktop, this type of packaging may be exactly how the move from Windows starts to pick up steam.

The IBM Client for Smart Work was first launched in South Africa in September and was initially geared toward emerging markets. IBM found that there was strong interest in the U.S. and other markets that had aging PC infrastructure and little desire for continued … Read more

Red Hat: An analyst day in improving times

NEW YORK--It was a larger and cheerier crowd that attended this year's Red Hat's analyst day at the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday.

That shouldn't be surprising. At last year's meeting on October 7, Red Hat management had the dubious honor of ringing the closing bell on a day that saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average drop over 500 points.

This meeting took place in a time of what's probably best described as cautious optimism about the state of the economy. And in the context of Red Hat financial results that have continued to … Read more

British Telecom picks Jaspersoft for analytics

If you need further proof that open-source applications are ready for prime time, take today's news from open-source business intelligence company Jaspersoft, which announced that British Telecom is using its business intelligence suite to support more than 8 million voice mail subscribers.

BT and Unisys, a longtime Jaspersoft partner, say they chose Jaspersoft for its modular design, which reduces maintenance and cost and gives them customization abilities that improve capacity planning.

The deal with BT also represents how important a solid channel strategy is for open-source software companies.

Jaspersoft CEO Brian Gentile has in the past mentioned that the … Read more