On The Margins

Monday June 01, 2009

[ Technology ] SunRay @ CommunityOne

This year, at CommunityOne and JavaOne, every user has access (through their registration smart cards) to arrays of SunRay  clients and a choice of Windows, OpenSolaris and Ubuntu desktops accessed through the SunRay clients. The system is powered by SunRay servers and VirtualBox virtualization environment. I'm using one of the SunRay 270's to write and post this blog. (I selected the Ubuntu desktop.)

2009-06-01 14:39:28.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
opensolaris operating-systems software sunray technology ubuntu windows

Friday March 27, 2009

[ Business ] Microsoft Takes Note of MySQL

In a Financial Times report today about RedHat's quarterly earnings, Sam Ramji of Microsoft takes note of MySQL and its influence as a key component in the general move towards open-source software:

Larger deployments of open-source to firms that already run the technology in a small way might be the most that happens, due to the fact that recessions make IT managers worry about risk. For the same reasons, a recession is not the time to switch a workforce to a new technology.

Microsoft is counting on that, while accepting that every leading company will soon be running at least some open-source software.

“It’s a heterogeneous world,” said Microsoft’s Sam Ramji. While Microsoft continues to warn about the legal and economic perils of relying on Linux and similar systems, Mr Ramji’s role is to make sure that open-source programs already in use can work in conjunction with Microsoft software.

That way, just because a company is using the MySQL open-source database, it will not feel compelled to put it on top of the Linux operating system. By some measures, that defence is working well – Mr Ramji said 56 per cent of MySQL instances were running on Windows.

Then again, the easier Mr Ramji makes it for IT buyers to economise by putting open-source in more places, the more they will do just that and undermine his business in the longer-term.

2009-03-27 11:04:15.0 -- Comments [4] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
databases linux mysql operating-systems software windows

Thursday January 29, 2009

[ Technology ] Wikipedia on Sun | MySQL Servers

Wikimedia Foundation is expanding Wikipedia to multimedia with Sun Open Storage Solution and MySQL Database:

Wikipedia receives between 25,000 and 60,000 page requests per second, depending on the time of day. Wikimedia needed to update its infrastructure to handle this huge volume of traffic and ensure that its systems were reliable, highly available, and easily scalable. It also wanted to expand its upload file limit from 20 MB to 100 MB to accommodate rich media (audio and video) content, but before it could do that it needed to expand its storage capacity.

It is great to see that how the most important non-profit content provider on the web grows and it is great to be part of that growth.

Wikipedia should be the subject of extensive studies in various fields of sociology, economics and information systems: social knowledge, open-source, open-content, markets, information economics and open-scoeity.

2009-01-29 13:43:41.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
clusters content databases mysql networking open-source operating-systems social software solaris technology

Tuesday August 05, 2008

[ Technology ] LinuxWorld Expo?

I dropped by "LinuxWorld Expo" in San Francisco on Tuesday, and I think the only thing worth noting is the PgDay.

Five years ago, when I attended the same Expo, it had a completely different spirit, with a lot more participation by the main Linux vendors and a large variety of software companies.

(Other references: PostgreSQL on Solaris and on OpenSolaris.) 

2008-08-05 23:14:32.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
databases hardware open-source opensolaris operating-systems postgresql software solaris sun technology