Dell – Page 7

Computer maker brings virtualisation to the desktop

Tom Sanders from vnunet.com at Linuxworld in Boston on 06 Apr 2006.

Virtualisation technology will enable the creation of dedicated environments for desktops that can be tailored to optimise characteristics such as security or gaming, Dell chief technology officer Kevin Kettler said in a keynote presentation at LinuxWorld in Boston.

Virtual systems on a desktop system could allow a browser to run in a dedicated environment that can be killed entirely if it became infected by a virus.

The user experience would be the same as if they had only closed the browser, but under the hood the underlying operating system would be terminated as well.

“If you have virus problems or spam problems, it would be great to just step back and say: ‘I’m having trouble with my machine. Let me just kill this secure browser,'” Kettler told delegates.

Virtualisation can also be used to run media servers, offer support for legacy applications when switching operating systems, and make for easier system maintenance, Kettler argued.

The technology lets users run several operating systems on a single physical server with each operating system acting as though it is running on dedicated hardware.

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According to Dell, the trend is driven by the rise of multi-core processors, the integration of virtualisation technology into processors from AMD and Intel, and moves towards storage virtualisation.

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This could allow developers to tailor Linux towards special applications, for instance creating a Linux version that is designed to deliver good gaming performance.

“Think about these encapsulated environments and the opportunity to develop around these things. The opportunity is pretty powerful,” he said.

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The synergy between Grid computing and virtualization is becoming more and more apparent and is starting to find common ground in Linux.

At Novell’s Brainshare conference, virtualization is taking the spot light. In fact, Dell made an announcement that it will offer Novell ZENworks for Linux servers.

Adam Fineberg’s (Levanta) view was reported by InfoWorld

Adam Fineberg (Vice President of Engineering at Levanta) sees specific technical reasons why Linux has become the most widely used OS for Grid environments:”Some of the key aspects of an operating system that you really need take advantage of in a Grid computing environment are the networking and file systems. The networking side is very important because of the large number of nodes, the need to quickly / easily add more nodes, exchange information between the nodes with low latency, as well as access shared storage systems and devices. Linux does very good ‘zero copy’ networking, meaning that once the data reaches the network stack, it doesn’t have to be copied again all the way through the rest of the operating system. That really keeps the networking efficient in Linux systems. With respect to file systems — because of the very strong interface that’s defined within Linux, there are a great number of file systems that are available for you. And that’s something that’s fairly unique to the Linux OS. Most of the operating systems don’t actually have a large number of file systems available for them, other than some standard ones like NFS. That makes it relatively easy to pick a file system that’s well-suited for your particular application. So having access to, for instance, XFS or JFS — which are two very high performance file systems that have good characteristics, but by the same token have very different implementations and therefore very different operating characteristics — you can optimize by choosing the file system that’s best suited for your application.”

The embracing of Linux by the Grid / Virtualization community boils down to being able to understand the boundary values of this set of complex use-case equations. Linux, being open source, lets you get at the raw OS kernel code. This gives you access to the “boundaries” of the OS, the way it interfaces to applications and the hardware. An intimate understanding of these boundary conditions are critical to Grid and Virtualization…

Read this full article at source.

Dell touts ‘disposable desktop’

Computer maker brings virtualisation to the desktop

Are Grid Computing & Virtualization Blending?

The synergy between Grid computing and virtualization is becoming more and more apparent and is starting to find common ground in Linux.

Adam Fineberg’s (Levanta) view was reported by InfoWorld