Tom Coull, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Products and Engineering, of Penguin Computing and I had a chance to catch up a few days ago. I've spoken with the "super computing simplified" people on several occasions in the past.
I've been watching, and involved with, LinuxWorld Expo since the very early days. As with other operating system focused conferences in the past, the conference has had its glory days and then faced a declining interest from sponsors and attendees.
After a number of delays, I finally was able to speak with Mike Ferris, Red Hat's Director of Product Strategy for Red Hat's cloud computing initiatives. Red Hat has done its best to address the issues I mentioned in my post Virtualization and Cloud Computing Challenge Licensing Models.
In my post Saying good bye - Microsoft is dropping Itanium I layed out Microsoft's history of supporting and then dropping processors based upon their high volume/low value go-to-market strategy. As several readers pointed out to me, Red Hat has also announced that future versions of Redhat Enteprise Linux will not support Intel's Itanium (see Itanium Support in Enterprise Linux for more information).
While I was at IDC, I managed the team that watched system software and virtualization software. That team was one of the very first in the industry to include Linux in its operating system research.
After I published Novell offers virtual machine driver pack my friends at Novell responded quickly to clear up my confusion about their announcement. Wow, guys, that was fast!
Open source storage virtualization from Red Hat is taking on the big players in the market. Can it win? Red Hat's Gluster Community Manager thinks it has what it takes to win.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, a graduation ceremony
I just read my colleague Mary Jo Foley's post Want a peek at a non-Windows operating system from Microsoft? and thought I'd add a few additional thoughts on Microsoft's research project called "Singularity.
When we take a look at each of the technologies, what becomes clear is that many people are grappling with how to make the most use of powerful industry standard microprocessors from Intel, AMD and others.