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The Enterprise Volume Management System (EVMS) version 1.0.0 is a
state-of-the-art, easy to use volume manager of unparalleled flexibility
and expandability. EVMS integrates all aspects of disk, partition, and
volume management into a single, enterprise level design and
implementation, bringing industrial strength features found in proprietary
volume managers to Linux. As a result of the highly modular, plug-in
nature of EVMS, customers will be able to use this technology as their
companies’ needs grow and change and as new technologies become available.
EVMS is 100% open source, available for all community members to use, and
is licensed under the GPL.
EVMS technology significantly expands the Volume Management capabilities
found in Linux today by allowing users to access data and manage volumes
from virtually any operating system. In addition, when used to emulate
Volume Managers found in other non-Linux operating systems, EVMS can help
significantly reduce the expense and technical barriers associated with
migrating to a Linux platform.
“EVMS technology is a quantum leap forward in readying Linux for the
enterprise,” said Daniel Frye, Director, Linux Technology Center, IBM.
“When adopted in the base, EVMS will make Linux volume management
world-class.”
The EVMS project has its home on SourceForge (http://www.sf.net/projects/evms) and has hundreds of downloads with every
release, totaling tens of thousands of downloads received in less than one
year. The community is very active and has been involved with EVMS since
its inception in January of 2001. Several Linux distributors are currently
evaluating EVMS for inclusion in upcoming releases.
“EVMS technology is an impressive technological step in Linux storage
management, and SuSE welcomes the additional availability and migration
features,” said Boris Nalbach, CTO of SuSE Linux AG. “Such technology will
enable all enterprises to take even more advantage of using Linux for
mission critical applications.”
“The key to flexible processing power is making it easy to run Linux in any
enterprise environment. And that means making it easier for enterprises to
run their data centers,” said Ly-Huong Pham, CEO of Turbolinux. “Like
IBM, Turbolinux has a commitment to accelerate the penetration of Linux in
the enterprise by implementing features like EVMS in upcoming releases of
our Linux operating environments for enterprise servers and developers.
EVMS shows the industry that Linux provides unprecedented degrees of
interoperability and power at a very low cost.”
This inclusive, extensible volume manager utilizes a plug-in system that
supports all volume management capabilities found in Linux today and is
flexible enough to allow for the emulation of volume managers found in
other operating systems and other proprietary technologies. EVMS version
1.0.0 provides support for multiple disk partitioning schemes, mirroring
(RAID 1), striping with and without parity (RAID 0, 4, 5), drive linking,
bad block relocation, and volume groups.
A Volume Manager provides a virtual view of local and remote storage. This
virtual view can be used to combine or divide physical storage in a variety
of ways such as combining several physical disks to appear as one large
disk. Additionally, Volume Managers can support various capabilities such
as RAID support, Volume groups, encryption, compression and much more.
IBM Open Source Projects
EVMS is the latest of among over 70 projects that the LTC is currently
engaged in with the Open Source community. A full listing, with links to
project pages, can be found at http://www.ibm.com/linux/ltc. The LTC is
committed to working with the Open Source development community to add
Enterprise and Carrier Grade capabilities to Linux. This includes work to
advance: scalability, serviceability, serviceability tooling, performance,
directory services, Samba, printer support, security, networking, network
security, Linux Standards Base and LI18NUX standards initiatives, test
harnesses and test cases, storage/IO, file systems, volume managment,
device drivers, reliability, documentation, embedded Linux, availability,
and many other areas. The LTC also works with and supports a range of
communities including the Open Source Development Laboratory, Open Source
Initiative, KDE League, GNOME Foundation, Free Software Foundation, Free
Standards Group, and USENIX. The LTC mission is simply to “Help make
Linux better”.
About IBM
IBM is the world’s number one server company and information technology
provider, with 80 years of leadership in helping businesses innovate. IBM
helps customers, business partners and developers in a wide range of
industries that leverage the power of the Internet for e-business. For more
information, visit http://www.ibm.com.
IBM is a registered trademark of International Business Machines
Corporation. Linux is a registered trademark of Linux Torvalds.
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“OpenOffice.org 1.0 may be the single best hope for consumers fed-up
with Microsoft’s desktop monopoly,” said Eric Raymond, co-founder of the
Open Source Initiative (OSI). “With Sun moving to a full service and
support business model for StarOffice software, users around the globe
will continue to have a free office productivity software tool through
the OpenOffice.org open source community.”
The OpenOffice.org 1.0 office suite features key desktop applications –
including word processor, spreadsheet, presentation and drawing
programs – in more than 25 languages. In addition, OpenOffice.org 1.0
works transparently with a variety of file formats, enabling users
familiar with other office suites, such as Microsoft Office and
StarOffice software, to work seamlessly in the application. The
OpenOffice.org 1.0 software runs stably and natively on multiple
platforms, including Linux, PPC Linux, Solaris [tm], Windows and many
other flavors of Unix.
OpenOffice.org is the largest open source project with more than 7.5
million lines of code. To date, more than 4.5 million downloads of
earlier versions of OpenOffice.org 1.0 have taken place. With the
release of the 1.0 version, the OpenOffice.org community expects that
number to grow significantly as businesses and individuals around the
world explore the free alternative to proprietary office suites.
The OpenOffice.org Community
In less than two years, the OpenOffice.org community has grown to more
than 10,000 volunteers, working together to build the leading
international office suite that will run on all major platforms and
provide access to all functionality and data through open-component
based APIs and an XML-based file format. Sun initiated this effort by
donating the StarOffice software source code and engineering to the
OpenOffice.org community. One of the major benefits of community-based
development is peer review, which has resulted in a stable, secure and
flexible software package.
Participants in the Community work on projects ranging from code
development to porting and localization, to bug reporting,
documentation, product marketing, local language sites and mirror
sites for software download.
“There are many important roles that volunteer developers can play to
shape the future functionality of OpenOffice.org (OOo) so if you are
looking for someplace to contribute, OOo can use you,” said Kevin
Hendricks, a key contributor to the OpenOffice.org community since its
inception nearly two years ago. Hendricks has lead volunteer development
teams for both the OpenOffice.org 1.0 spellchecker and PPC Linux port
projects.
“When OpenOffice.org was released, it was a tremendous amount of code
with a very deep history, and thus we knew it would take a lot of time
and effort to reach a critical mass of community participation,” said
Brian Behlendorf, CTO and co-founder, CollabNet. “The project has now
attracted a significant amount of outside involvement, some of it in
pretty interesting areas like marketing and quality assurance. With the
release of 1.0, it’s clear those efforts are bearing real fruit.
Congratulations to the community — and to Sun — for making this
happen.”
CollabNet’s SourceCast application enables both centralized and
geographically distributed software development teams to collaborate on
OpenOffice.org projects and to track them accurately. SourceCast is the
premier Web-based collaboration environment, which includes an
integrated set of software development applications. CollabNet also
provides strategic advice on open source issues and the growth of
OpenOffice.org, and offers analysis on current trends within the
community.
“OpenOffice.org may be the most important open source project right
now,” said Miguel de Icaza, founder of the GNOME project. “Because
people will try it and see they can get everyday work done without
giving more money to Microsoft, they’ll see — in a low-risk way — that
open source software can work for them and be an even better solution.”
About OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice.org is the home of the open source project and its community
of developers, users and marketers responsible for the on-going
development of the OpenOffice.org 1.0 product. The mission of
OpenOffice.org is to create, as a community, the leading international
office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to
all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an
XML-based file format. Additional ports, such as FreeBSD, IRIX and Mac
OS X are in various stages of completion by developers and end-users in
the OpenOffice.org community. OpenOffice.org 1.0 is written in C++ and
has documented API’s licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public
License (LGPL) and Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL) open
source licenses.
About CollabNet
CollabNet provides companies with solutions for collaborative software
development by combining a Web-based software application with a suite
of consulting services. Using these solutions, customers can collaborate
on development projects within an enterprise, with customers, business
partners, or with third party developer organizations, such as industry
specific or open source communities. CollabNet enables corporations to
reduce costs and increase revenues by bringing different project team
members together, regardless of their location. CollabNet is currently
working with customers ranging from hardware and software providers to
companies from industries such as financial services, wireless, and
pharmaceuticals. Brian Behlendorf, co-founder of the Apache Software
Foundation, established CollabNet in July 1999. For more information,
see http://www.collab.net
About Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision — “The Network Is The
Computer[tm]” — has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq: SUNW) to
its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware,
software and services that make the Net work. Sun can be found in more
than 170 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://sun.com.
OpenOffice.org 1.0, which shares the same code base as Sun’s StarOffice 6.0 is — like StarOffice 6.0 — a full-featured office suite that provides a near drop-in replacement for Microsoft Office. OpenOffice.org 1.0 offers consumers and businesses software freedom, enabling a free market for service and support, while the Sun-branded product, StarOffice 6.0, offers 24×7 fee-based support and training for consumers and businesses, along with deployment and migration services. StarOffice also offers additional features, such as a database, special fonts and Sun quality and assurance testing.The two office suites complement each other, meeting the varying needs of consumers, open source advocates and enterprise customers.
“OpenOffice.org 1.0 may be the single best hope for consumers fed-up with Microsoft’s desktop monopoly,” said Eric Raymond, co-founder of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). “With Sun moving to a full service and support business model for StarOffice, users around the globe will continue to have a free office productivity software tool through the OpenOffice.org open source community.”
The OpenOffice.org 1.0 office suite features key desktop applications — including word processor, spreadsheet, presentation and drawing programs — in more than 25 languages. In addition, OpenOffice.org 1.0 works transparently with a variety of file formats, enabling users familiar with other office suites, such as Microsoft Office and StarOffice, to work seamlessly in the application. The OpenOffice.org 1.0 software runs stably and natively on multiple platforms, including Linux, PPC Linux, Solaris, Windows and many other flavours of Unix.
OpenOffice.org is the largest open source project with more than 7.5 million lines of code. To date, more than 4.5 million downloads of earlier versions of OpenOffice.org 1.0 have taken place. With the release of the 1.0 version, the OpenOffice.org community expects that number to grow significantly as businesses and individuals around the world explore the free alternative to proprietary office suites.
The OpenOffice.org Community
In less than two years, the OpenOffice.org community has grown to more than 10,000 volunteers, working together to build the leading international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format. Sun initiated this effort by donating the StarOffice source code and engineering to the OpenOffice.org community. One of the major benefits of community-based development is peer review, which has resulted in a stable, secure and flexible software package.
Participants in the Community work on projects ranging from code development to porting and localisation, to bug reporting, documentation, product marketing, local language sites and mirror sites for software download.
“There are many important roles that volunteer developers can play to shape the future functionality of OpenOffice.org (OOo) so if you are looking for someplace to contribute, OOo can use you,” said Kevin Hendricks, a key contributor to the OpenOffice.org community since its inception nearly two years ago. Hendricks has lead volunteer development teams for both the OpenOffice.org 1.0 spellchecker and PPC Linux port projects.
“When OpenOffice.org was released, it was a tremendous amount of code with a very deep history, and thus we knew it would take a lot of time and effort to reach a critical mass of community participation,” said Brian Behlendorf, CTO and co-founder, CollabNet. “The project has now attracted a significant amount of outside involvement, some of it in pretty interesting areas like marketing and quality assurance. With the release of 1.0, it’s clear those efforts are bearing real fruit. Congratulations to the community — and to Sun — for making this happen.”
CollabNet’s SourceCast application enables both centralised and geographically distributed software development teams to collaborate on OpenOffice.org projects and to track them accurately. SourceCast is the premier Web-based collaboration environment, which includes an integrated set of software development applications. CollabNet also provides strategic advice on open source issues and the growth of OpenOffice.org, and offers analysis on current trends within the community.
“OpenOffice.org may be the most important open source project right now, said Miguel de Icaza, founder of the GNOME project. Because people will try it and see they can get everyday work done without giving more money to Microsoft, they’ll see — in a low-risk way — that open source software can work for them and be an even better solution.
About OpenOffice.org
OpenOffice.org is the home of the open source project and its community of developers, users and marketers responsible for the on-going development of the OpenOffice.org 1.0 product. The mission of OpenOffice.org is to create, as a community, the leading international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format. Additional ports, such as FreeBSD, IRIX and Mac OS X are in various stages of completion by developers and end-users in the OpenOffice.org community. OpenOffice.org 1.0 is written in C++ and has documented API’s licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL) open source licenses.
About CollabNet
CollabNet provides companies with solutions for collaborative software development by combining a Web-based software application with a suite of consulting services. Using these solutions, customers can collaborate on development projects within an enterprise, with customers, business partners, or with third party developer organisations, such as industry specific or open source communities. CollabNet enables corporations to reduce costs and increase revenues by bringing different project team members together, regardless of their location. CollabNet is currently working with customers ranging from hardware and software providers to companies from industries such as financial services, wireless, and pharmaceuticals. Brian Behlendorf, co-founder of the Apache Software Foundation, established CollabNet in July 1999. For more information, see http://www.collab.net/.
About Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Since its inception in 1982, a singular vision — “The Network Is The ComputerTM” — has propelled Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Nasdaq:SUNW) to its position as a leading provider of industrial-strength hardware, software and services that power the Internet and allow companies worldwide to take their businesses to the nth. Sun can be found in more than 170 countries and on the World Wide Web at http://www.sun.com/.
MEDIA RELEASE CONTACT:
Jacqueline McNally
Communiy Contact, Australia/New Zealand
OpenOffice.org Marketing Project
Jacqueline McNally
+61 8 9474 3021 (GMT +0800)
tsukusenai@openoffice.org
Author: JT Smith
One of the latest to jump on the back-end bandwagon has been
SuSE. Lately, this German Linux developer has focused increasingly
on corporate back-end applications, especially its SuSE Enterprise
Server package. That package has been characterized as the most commercial Unix-like of SuSE’s offerings to date, and it comes with a service package that places
restrictions on the number of tweaks downstream users can make to the platform. Such
restrictions are heresy in the Open Source community, but company
spokespeople suggest that only by restricting changes to the code base can SuSE or
its competitors effectively service corporate accounts.
Some potential prospects agree. An IT executive at a major energy company told me that while his firm has been tempted by Linux, “large companies live and die on
the consistency and scalability of their systems. People can’t be
making undocumented tweaks to core software without our knowing about it, and
our technical partners can’t be caught by surprise if portions of the
code base are changed without their being aware of it.”
Meanwhile, SuSE has taken a number of steps to de-emphasize its
focus on the desktop. Although SuSE’s new release 8.0 includes the GNOME
1.4.1 graphical interface, it also comes without what has become the most
important user application, Sun’s StarOffice. Although the distribution includes
OpenOffice, a stripped-down version of the software, the reduced
functionality of OpenOffice almost certainly makes the package less attractive to
casual users. France’s MandrakeSoft is also restricting the distribution of
StarOffice, limiting it to its premier customers.
Meanwhile, Sun is backing away from its earlier assertions that Linux
was best suited to low-end systems and applications. Analysts at a
recent conference with Sun Microsystems president Ed Zander report that the
company is hearing from its systems integrators that Sun needs to dissolve the
barriers between its proprietary Solaris platform and Linux. One
analyst from Merrill Lynch went so far as to predict that, “We think … Linux
at the low end and Solaris above may meld into ‘Solinux.'” The company
has begun to promote Linux in back-end applications. Sun and SuSE have
cooperated in adopting Sun’s Grid Engine 5.3 to a Linux platform. Grid
software makes use of extra cycles on unused machines within a
workgroup, effectively creating virtual mainframes throughout the enterprise for
roughly the $80 cost of the software.
While all this activity generates a revenue stream for companies
that badly need it, it may be a strategic mistake in the long term. This is
because outside of Europe and North America, Linux is beginning to
emerge as a serious desktop alternative. As I’ve noted in a number of previous
columns, countries in Africa and Asia are adopting Open Source
with a speed that could eventually have important consequences for domestic
software and systems vendors.
Countries such as Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan are important
hardware equipment makers, but with a few exceptions they have not had much of a
foothold in the software business. That could change, and desktop Linux
could be the vehicle that allows these countries to emerge as Linux
powerhouses in a few years.
In Malaysia, a number of universities are trying to
lead a major initiative toward nationwide adoption of Linux and away from
a dependence on bootlegged proprietary software. Malaysia’s National
Computer Confederation has developed a plan led by its Open Source Special
Interest Group that includes programs for the country’s end users, systems
administrators, developers and company managers. Planners recently concluded a forum
that attracted local representatives of high tech companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, as well as local technology developers and
the Malaysian Academy of Science.
In China, Taiwan and Singapore, the widespread use of
computers has lagged well behind a number of western countries, in part because
of the complexities of typing thousands of Chinese language characters.
Chinese keyboards are far more complex than their western equivalents and
developers have struggled with a variety of alternatives including pen-based
systems, speech-to-text, or requiring typists to key in transliterations of
Chinese words using the roman alphabet. It has been an area where
Microsoft and other proprietary systems developers could have taken an important
lead, but haven’t.
One of the best input systems is called ChangJie, a Chinese
character input system created by Chu Bong-foo, a prominent figure in the East
Asian IT community. Recently Chu demonstrated that he had adapted ChangJie
for China’s Red Flag Linux distribution. The resulting platform, nicknamed Chinese 2000, is being promoted in both mainland China and Taiwan as the first really viable
alternative to Microsoft on Asian desktops.
In much of Asia, the only real competition to Linux-on-the-desktop
comes from bootlegged Microsoft products. According to the Business
Software Association, over 50% of the software used in Taiwan is
pirated. Estimates in Hong Kong and mainland China run as high as 80%. In
Malaysia, a prominent government department involved with enforcement of
copyrights recently revealed that many of its desktops were running on bootlegged
software.
This is starting to change. Local governments are struggling
to rein-in illegal versions of Windows products. And as easier-to-use
desktop applications-based programs like ChangJie start to come on stream, the
price of these localized applications may prove to be irresistible.
Sources claim that Chinese 2000 with Kai Office 6.0 applications will sell for
around $50. A legal package of equivalent software from Microsoft will
sell for about $725.
Widespread adoption is still some years away. According to a
spokesman for Malaysia’s Open Source Special Interest Group, Linux faces a number
of perceptual barriers. Microsoft’s disinformation campaign about Open
Source’s reliability and consistency has been particularly effective in
discouraging early adoption by many local companies and government
agencies. In addition, many companies in the region have yet to wake up to
Microsoft’s vulnerability to hacking and viruses. A recent poll by NISER, Malaysia’s Information and Communications Technology Security and Emergency Response Center found that over 70% of the companies surveyed had not conducted any formal evaluation of the security
of their IT systems, and according to NISER spokesperson Raja Azrina Raja
Othman, the few who have conducted security audits conducted them as a
result of government mandates.
Observers have warned that the lack of security awareness is at odds
with the country’s announced ambitions to become a global Internet banking center and service bureau for the financial services
industry. As security awareness grows, however, this sector is expected to become
a critical adopter of Open Source. Linux has already gained a prominent
toehold in Asian academic circles. Important parts of the Malaysian and
Chinese economy, notably the healthcare sector, have become prominent
early adopters of Linux. The region has begun to develop an vibrant, if
embryonic software development and service infrastructure based on Open Source
technology.
And, if it succeeds in Asia, both Linux-on-the-desktop, and the
companies that have developed it, could show up in the West in a few years.
Will European and American Linux vendors be ready to compete for the
desktop? Or will they continue to be focused elsewhere?
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This hybrid of proprietary and open source code will blow your socks off. It’s more than just a pretty face for SNORT.”
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