Cloud computing is disrupting many aspects of computing. One need only witness the manner in which online applications like Google Docs and Salesforce.com are disrupting entrenched competitors. Soon, cloud computing will significantly disrupt the database market, for the reasons explained below.

One of the most powerful arguments in technology is the price/performance ratio. Significant declines in price or significant increases in performance can result in disruption. When you get both price declines and performance increases, you get significant disruption. This is exactly what is coming to the database market.

The Past
Moore’s Law enabled the CPU to process data faster than the hard disk drive could get the data to the CPU. Because getting data to the CPU was the bottleneck, the database that solved that bottleneck would have a performance advantage.

The shared-disk database had two glaring …

We reported recently on Red Hat’s revenue growth and deferred revenue. One of the things I have been looking at recently is the slowdown in Red Hat’s growth in recent years, and the opportunities that the company has to improve that growth.

For some perspective it is worth noting that while Red Hat’s revenue has been growing steadily:

The rate of growth has been in decline for some time:

We have also noted (451 Group clients only) that the company will in …

LINBIT will be a proud sponsor at this year’s LinuxCon in Portland, OR, held on September 21-23. We will also participate in the Linux Plumbers Conference, co-located with LinuxCon.

Phil is to speak at LinuxCon about DRBD 8.3 and beyond. At LPC, we will primarily focus on building highly available storage systems with DRBD, Pacemaker, and the STGT and LIO …

Microsoft has announced that it is to contribute code to the Linux kernel development effort under the GNU General Public License (GPL) v2. What on earth does it all mean? Here’s our take on the situation. With thanks to Jay Lyman for his contribution to the following:

Q. This is a joke, right?

A. Not at all, although if any announcement is better suited to the image above, we can’t think of one. Microsoft has announced that it is going to contribute code to Linux under the GPLv2.

Q. What code is Microsoft contributing?

A. Microsoft is offering 20,000 lines of its own device drivers to the Linux kernel that will enable Linux to run as a guest …

Red Hat betas Enterprise Virtualization, partners with HP for SOA. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Red Hat announced that its Enterprise Virtualization portfolio of products is now available for beta testing.

# Red Hat collaborated with HP on SOA.

# David Megginson published mixing GPL and non-GPL: a different perspective. A new take on the MySQL/MariaDB storage engine debate.

# UK Government CIO shed some light on “G-Cloud” plans and how the new open source policy provides an opportunity.

# WAZI: …

By popular demand, we are now offering an on-line incarnation of our DRBD Total training sessions, normally taught in a 4-day on-site course. The next such training commences on May 18 (next Monday), and we still have a few seats left — so if you’re interested, grab one while you still can!

What’s covered in this course?

Here is an overview of the course highlights:

• Introduction to High Availability Clustering & DRBD
• Setting up a DRBD resource and common failure scenarios
• Configuring and running the Heartbeat/Pacemaker cluster stack
• Highly available NFS, MySQL, and virtualization
• DRBD performance tuning and optimization
• DRBD integration with Red Hat Cluster Suite
• Recent and future DRBD development

Every course attendee gets a virtual cluster to play with and practice on. It doesn’t get much more hands-on than this. …

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post titled Dear IBM , I was too late .. I was on holliday last week when people started sending me text messages , such as .. "Game Over MySQL , Long live Ingress" or "No Eclipse for IBM", etc ...

I had ideas regarding the future of certain Sun products at IBM, now the game has changed .. it'ss how they will live on at Oracle :)

Similar Questions arise .. like indeed the future of MySQL, the future of Solaris etc ...

So regarding the future of MySQL , I don't worry at all, on the contrary ..
Oracle tried buying mysql before they already have Innodb .. they didn't kill it .. the MySQL offering is complementary to the Oracle offering, now they can tackle both markets.
And as already mentionned when writing my IBM letter ..

As for MySQL, Jeremey has some good insights.. the fact that …

Like most people, and with just over a week to go before the conference, I’m putting the finishing touchs on my various presentations.

First up for me, on Monday afternoon, is my tutorial: Scale Up, Scale Out, and High Availability: Solutions and Combinations.

What will be doing?

Very simply: Looking at every potential solution for maximum scalability and availability for your database environment.

If you are attending, be prepared to:

• Expand your mind as we think about scaling up.
• Expand your horizons as we think about scaling out.
• Divide and conquer, as we think about high-availability.

We’re not not hands on in this session – but I will expect you to be brains on!