Distro Recipes 2013: Nice first !

As indicated, I had the opportunity to talk during the first Distro Recipes event organized in Paris last week, at the invitation of Hupstream. As Yoann Sculo posted, this was a very interesting day for me, and I really regret I was busy to also attend the first day and the opening.

After a nice welcome breakfast, Aurélien Bompard started by presenting the Fedora distribution.

He did a great job especially expalining how easy it was to become a Fedora maintainer, even if a comparison to Debian revealed that it’s much less different that what people may think (it also takes time to become a packager able to modify most distro packages) and I know by experience that the Fedora packagers are really picky (sometimes for not so good reasons) with new contributions.

After that I talked about HP and Linux distributions. I used in fact the standard HP marketing presentation of the company as a starter (modified of course to suit my needs and include more penguins !) in order to explain the span of our activities, our relationship with communities including distributions, announced that HP will even soon provide firmware for ProLiant servers under a package format (rpm and deb), the fact that HP doesn’t see Linux demand for desktop/laptop on the consumer market (no, it’s not just a price issue that would make Linux more appealing in that case as I justified) but that we do support Linux on some enterprise desktops/laptops. Hopefully this was useful and/or new to some of the audience.

Then Dodji Seketeli made the type of talk making you believe that you could contribute to gcc ! Of course, when he details how much time it took him to add some of the features of the next stable version, you know you can’t ! Well I at least Anyway lots of good news and features that make that future version 4.8 expected soon.

That conclude our morning sessions, and it was then time to eat !! Especially as we had a great buffet waiting for us as you can see:

In order to avoid a sleepy afternoon, we started right after by a round table with 7 people (!), that I had the pleasure to chair. With a representative of each distribution (Mageia, openSUSE, Fedora, Debian, Arch, Embedded) and a Microsoft representative, you could expect blood and swords fight ! Not at all, I was surprisingly happy that the elements were clearly exposed, each representative defending their own work rather than criticizing, and finding ways to propose more future joint work. Of course, some subjects such as LSB/FHS lead to more debate, but very constructive and I really enjoyed this time slot as a way to show that differences are an added value ! It was also the opportunity for me to meet with Colin Guthrie and Frédérc Crozat, which I had never met before. These distros should be happy to have such representatives defending them (and the others too of course ) Finally if you have ideas to share to improve cross-distribution work , consider joining the mailing listdedicated to his topic and start sharing your ideas.

Then it was time again for the remaining presentations. The first was Lucas Nussbaum. Long time Debian Developer, (he is even running for the Debian Project Leader now, vote for him !) he made a convincing picture of the Debian ecosystem, the numerous Web sites that contributors can create to enhance the distribution with stats, infos, Ubuntu correlations, … As usual, Debian appears as a very mature distribution, with a strong Governance, being perl friendly… If I had to change I may well become a debianers. But isn’t it because of the pres, as the morning I was a fedorian

The next speaker was a long time Linux enthousiast Pierre Ficheux. In fact back when it was Minitel time (not 2.0) I used his xtel program !! Pierre made a presentation (in english but with the accent ) around embedded Linux distributions, presenting various way to tailor one for your device (he was using a Raspberry Pi) depending whether you use an Ubuntu, a Yocto generated one or a pure OpenEmbedded linux one. Definitely a good idea to explore for my Pi !

And then we had the lightnings talks. Aurélien Bompard was there again for HyperKitty. Too bad it’s devoted to mailan, as I think Sympa would also benefit from such a work, as their archive management (at least on the latest versions I used) could be improved.

I came then again on stage for a project-builder.org presentation (building cross-distro packages for upstream projects) and made a short demo which I think is explaining much more than my slides, so I plan on using it more in the future !

After me, Eric Leblond explained how his upstream project (ulogd2) wasn’t picked up correclty by most distributions and asked for help to improce that.

And final speaker was Nicolas Vérité who made a panel on all mobile Linux distributions, recommending to follow closely Tizen for the future as the main force in this area.

Too bad it was already over. Anne closed the session and I’d like to thank her for the invitation and the perfect organization of this first cross-distributions vent as a real success. Well done and see you next year hopefully !

Meet at HP Discover next week

Hello,

I’ll be at the major HP event (HP Discover) next week in Frankfurt, Germany from the 4th to the 6th of December, delivering 2 sessions, and attenting some others which look very promising.

You may find me on the Red Hat booth or the Intel booth, if you want to talk about code and projects (MondoRescue, Project-Builder.org, UUWL), Architecture, FLOSS Governance, FLOSS @ HP or in general. Will be happy to exchange with you around these topics.

You may find more details (in french) on the sessions I’ll be delivering on the event blog site.

See you there !

HP Discover Las Vegas 2011

Even if it’s already passed, as announced, I want to share what I saw during this event.

I arrived in Las Vegas on the 8th of June, just in time for registration, and then had to sleep to recover from the jet lag.

On the 9th of June, before starting the day, I had a strong thought for my daughter who was celebrating without me her 17th anniversary today. Happy birthday Ségolène !!

The event is just enormous this year. 10000 customers are around ! The exhibition hall is twice or three times the size of the already large HP Tech Forum one I visited the last 2 previous years. There are partners all over the place exhibiting + huge HP booths on all what we can deliver, and believe me, we can do a lot !! I now understand why they changed the location for this year, as they were probably in need for a larger convention center than the Mandalay Bay one (which was the largest I knew before ) All of that is just impressive.

I was in the first set of sessions today at 8:00AM to speak about RISC/Unix to ProLiant/Xeon/RHEL migration. Hope the about 35 people in the room got the message correctly, even if the jet-lag was not completely absorbed.

Then I joined a session on HP Vertica Analytics system, solution for big data. (Colin Mahony, VP Product Management, Business Dev & Marketing). The product was just announced on Monday. Colin explained the following:

• 40% of growth in data per year (0.8 ZB in 2009, 35 in 2020). Exponential data growth with regards to budget growth.
• Goal is to create a disruptive techno to support analytics of these large data set.
• Disconnect between customers asking for Industry Standard Technologies, cost effective, real time, distributed, … and buying Oracle Teradata.
• Area of intrest in Web 2.0 gaming, Telco, Oil and Gaz, FSI, … 350+ customers.
• Vertica is ACID compliant, SQL compliant. Not recommended on continental sites. No BLOB support (put them in Hadoop).
• Vertica provides 4C == Columnar storage (reduce # of queries and I/Os), Compression (ratio from 5 to 60 wrt raw), Continuous performance (wrt competition: 50x to 1000x query perf, 2x load, 0.5x density), Clustering (shared nothing P2P system + Internal Raid)
• They also propose a Deatabase Designer + Workload Analyser
• Customer example: Zynga 2PB graphical representations of social connections.
• Compared to Haddop/Mapreduce Vertica is real time vs batch oriented

They have a UDx C++ framework in 5.0, going beyond SQL and an Hadoop connector.
The software is 37 MB. It supports RHEL, SELS, Fedora (ext3). And it works with BO, SAP.
They don’t have their own analytics apps. They rather partner with SAS, ETL.
Oracle migration is straight forward at schema level.
No support for stored procedures.
Vertica provides tools to help for migration.

The technology looks impressive and I’ll have to see how we can cooperate with them to host a demo in our Solution Center.

The rest of the day was dedicated to a Red Hat meeting, in particular with Karthik Prabahkar who took time to explain to me the whole Cloud approach at Red Hat, being their Technologist on the subject. I have now a much better view on Cloud Forms, DeltaCloud API and OpenShift, how they articutate, what is coming and how all that can fit with the HP portfolio A lot of fun coming !

The night was the opportunity to see Paul Mc Cartney himself in concert. It’s really impressive to hear Beatles songs sung by one of them, on stage, with always a great energy and excellent musicians around. Even if that’s not my prefered type of music, I enjoyed it a lot, much more than I had expected. He is a great musician and worth hearing in concert.

The 10th of June was a short day, as session were only delivered in the morning. After a short private meeting with Kristin Lampka of Intel to sync up on our activities, I covered our HP|Intel|Red Hat Open Source Solutions Initiative first, which gathered some 20 people (not too bad for an early session when everybody is leaving it seems). Had 2 contacts afterwards that may lead to some activities later on. I then followed-up immediately with a session on MondoRescue to which about 12 people attended, including a satisfied user It’s so nice from time to time to get good feedback as a change to all the problems reported on the mailing-list !!

It was then time to lunch and I had the great pleasure to pass this moment with Marc Nozell, working in the US in our Partners group (PTAC) and who has always interesting views on the IT industry and Open Source in particular. We had a very good discussion in particular on the future of IT usage, especially by tennagers, private data manipulation, Facebook and all what you can imagine around such as combining that with face recognition and all the trouble it could generate. Was generating good thoughts as well as being entertaining.

I passed the rest of the day sorting the tons of mail accumulated through out the week and left the US on Saturday. Should be back in August for a longer period this time, but in Houston.

OSSI: Best Stronger Together EMEA Red Hat Partner 2011

	HP Intel and Red Hat OSSI Stronger Together Award
HP and Intel have been honored with the Stronger Together Award at the Red Hat EMEA Partner Summit which took place in Dublin 5-8 of June. During the event, HP has delivered keynote and breakout sessions and experts from the Solution Center managed the joint HP and Intel booth. Participants were able to see the HP ProLiant DL980 G7 and to witness demonstrations of advanced virtualization with RHEL 6.1 KVM and SRIOV on top of HP ProLiant Xeon systems as part of the joint HP Intel and Red Hat Open Source Solutions Initiative (OSSI).   “The 12 year partnership between HP and Red Hat is based on collaborative engineering and joint marketing activities that have led to a wide range of partner engagements and customer successes across all industries. HP and Intel were delighted to be joint gold sponsors at the Red Hat Partner Summit in Dublin week held in Dublin, and to win Red Hat’s  "Stronger Together" award. This was a great acknowledgement of our tireless work, particularly within the EMEA HP, Intel, and Red Hat Open Source Solutions Initiative based in Grenoble France, to ease our customer’s transition to open source and to equip them in their journey to the cloud…” – Rhys Austin, Senior Business Development Manager, HP Industry Standard Server EMEA   “From the outset of its partnership with Red Hat, HP has shown a strong commitment to Red Hat’s business.and were very keen to educate their staff on Red Hat offerings and expand their footprint within Red Hat’s partner ecosystem. In 2009 Red Hat became involved in the HP Intel Solution Center located in Grenoble, an innovative center offering a unique collaborative working environment where HP, Intel and partners can work together.  Our HP, Intel and Red Hat Open Source Solutions Initiative (OSSI) brings together an ecosystem of partners and customers from these companies and can leverage a strong vertical focus where necessary.  It is important to Red Hat that the technical expertise at the Solution Center in Grenoble includes open source, plus extended knowledge around HW, Storage, HA, solutions and consulting offerings. and we are looking forward to further developing our joint initiative with HP and Intel.” – Petra Heinrich, VP Partners & Alliances, Red Hat EMEA   To learn more about the OSSI and RISC to Linux on ProLiant migrations, you may contact Arnaud Meurant (arnaud.meurant_at_hp.com) or Bruno Cornec (bruno.cornec_at_hp.com) and visit our web site at http://www.hpintelco.net.   To learn more on the event, visit http://www.europe.redhat.com/mktg/partnersummit/2011.

 

Proposition of Cross-Distro Mini-Conf for Linux.conf.au 2012

Time has come again to think to our friends down under ! Since I was there in 2007 for a MondoRescue conference I think this is really a place to be in the FLOSS ecosystem when possible; Too bad it’s so far away from France Travel costs are not light either.

But I thought I should propose the follwoing mini-conf, as the one I attended in Fosdem 2010 on the same topic worked very interesting, and allowed to start some joint collaboration that I think is fruitful and avoid/reduce fragmentation.

I hope it will be accepted to give me an opportunity to fly there and meet with the great community which gathers there each year.

So here it is (Thanks to the great example provided by Martin Michlmayr last year)

The “Cross-Distribution” mini-conf at LCA 2012 (Ballarat, Australia; January 16-20 2012) is for people interested in cooperation between Open Source distributions. Topics include contributors agreements, licensing policies, packaging best practices and tools, sharing patches to upstream projects, communications, working with upstream Open Source developers, translations, governance, workflow in place, version control systems, bug reporting management and sharing, vcs-pkg.org, funding, marketing, lessons from your experience, and whatever related topics people would like to bring up. Whether you are a single contributor working on a single package, or leading a full distribution, managing a full distribution infrastructure, or representing it in the press, whether it’s famous as Debian or less as AbulEdu this mini-conf hopes to bring different people together to exchange thoughts and facilitate discussion about these topics.

Presentation submitters should feel free to suggest their own topics. Here is a list of potentially interesting subjects (in no particular order):

* Building software packages on a large scale
* Choosing valid licenses and copyright policies
* Patch management
* Working with upstream
* Forking a distribution
* Experiences in distributed development
* Managing bug report and enhancement request
* Tools to support making a distribution
* Translation of a distribution
* Reuse between distributions
* Collaborationbetween distributions
* Distribution structures
* FHS
* Distribution Development Management and Governance
* Distribution Corporate Governance
* Lessons learned in building up your distribution
* Marketing
* Communication
* Copyrights
* Applying your copyright and license choices

We hope to receive proposals for:

* 50 minute expert panel discussions
* 50 minute full presentations
* 25 minute half presentations
* 5-10 minute lightning talks (e.g. success stories, …)

To submit a proposal, please contact Bruno Cornec at bruno.cornec@hp.com and include the following information:

* Your name
* Brief bio noting any previous speaking experience
* Talk title
* Brief outline of your proposed talk
* Notes of any special equipment / facilities you may require

Third day at the EMEA Red Hat partner Summit

Time again to attend the Keynote !

Werner Knoblich eVP Red Hat EMEA, covered as usual the latest results from Red Hat in EMEA:

• YoY 34% increase
• 3% increase on the indirect to reach 63%
• 155 more new net people in EMEA reaching 1000 (only 100, 8 years ago !)

Werner mentioned the future role of virtualization, insisting on the importance of the openvirtualization alliance to avoid a future MicroSoft to be created, and the commitment of IBM, HP and Intel in it.

Rhys Austin,Senior Business Development Manager for HP Industry Standard Server (ISS) EMEA, was presenting the instant-on enterprise with HP CloudSystem as next keynote. He started insisting on the importance of the channel for HP, as it is for Red Hat.He mentioned that the Business department is today outpacing the IT department. So Cloud is thought to be helpful in that approach, including buying external resources to the company. Concerns around cloud are in order: Lock in, Performanace, Availability and Security; and external vs internal integration.
Rhys then described the multiple aspects a cloud architecture should cover, depending also on the user’s point
of view, and presented how HP ClouSystem could give answers to all these feature requests and concerns.

Rhys also presented HP Cloud Maps, aligned with Red Hat Cloud strategy to accelerate application deployment and create cloud services (RAC and JBoss already provided). And Rhys detailed how Red Hat products fit into HP CloudSystem.

He finally exposed that partners need to question their customers’ cloud strategy to not risk loosing business
and be positioned in that new play either as provider, aggregator or broker. HP cannot do that without partners.

Joel Berman, VP Global Field Marketing at Red Hat, was kind enough to mention how our Solution Center in Grenoble and the joint Open Source Solutions
Initiative that I initiated there between HP, Intel and Red Hat could help customers and partners make more business w
ith us ! But that was not the nicest mention for us that day

Craig Muzilla, VP of the Middleware Business Unit at Red Hat, then went on stage to describe where Red Hat is on the JBoss side, in a session called “JBoss Everywhere – Better for the Enterprise. Ready for the Cloud”. He insisted on how JBoss is now used strategically by large companies such as SFR, NYSE, Allianz, …

Red Hat announced JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 (supporting JEE 6, and CDI contributed to JCP)
Red Hat announced also JBoss Enterprise Data Grid 6 (foundation for Cloud computing)

Craig went on describing the future of JBoss around mobility, cloud and SOA. He also covered MRG and BRMS.

We then had a very fruitfull meeting with Jim Totton and Joel Berman, which continued on our booth as well with Lars Hermann. After a bit of booth duty, it was time again to deliver our second session around best practices for RISC/Unix to RHEL on HP Xeon based ProLiant migration. You can get ideas of the topics we covered by reading the excellent blog article of Arnaud who is leading that activity at WW level for HP.
We had less people than the day before, but hopefully this will lead to some concrete further on contacts around concrete migration opportunities !

Again a dense day, but it was not the end, as we still had to attend the dinner at the Guiness StoreHouse, where Red Hat announces their prices for the best partners of the year, and organize a fun evening with the 700+ partners representatives that are attending.

And I must confess that this part of the day was the most interesting for us !! More on that in the next article.

Second day at the EMEA Red Hat partner Summit

So time to go back to the keynotes again !

Paul Cormier, eVP of Products and Technolopgies at Red Hat, started with a bit of IT history (’80 locked with Dec and Sun, ’90 locked with Microsoft, ’00 Open Source with Red Hat, ’10 Red Hat Cloud) then we went on explaining the Fedora community and linkage to RHEL, as well as JBoss and RHEV foundations. And Cloud foudation (with Cloud Forms and Open Shift as seen yesterday). I’d have expect a bit more of content on the Cloud aspects at Red Hat and its infrastructure.

Jean Staten Healy of IBM then did its yearly advertising campain again with their now famous 1B$ dedicated to Linux… in 2001 ! Ok, to be fair she also mentioned a lot KVM and the Open Virtualization Alliance whose HP is also a governing member. Of course take it with a grain of salt, as I’m working for a compettor, but I was really not impressed.

St Boniface was the starting part of the next talk of Ron Tolido of Cap Gemini, as an evangelist. OSL evangelism shouldn’t be needed anymore (being concretely in front of customers regularly, believe me this is just plain wrong and still has to happen !!).
Cloud has the same issue for him. His talk is on benchmark and the economics of total open source and the cloud. He was involved in Business Technology Agora sessions, which goal is to understand what business expects from IT. Business want to spend more budget on the higest part of the stack rather than on what he calls the invisible infrastructure which is for him boring (again, that’s probably I’m not a business consultant as I strongly disagree here again !).
All in all, no more IT engineers are needed and you “just” need to glue FLOSS components to have a great IIT. He was the one who bought the dog from Joel Berman joke on the IT consultant !!

I think it’s really a pity today to have such attitude to bash the guys who make the IT run really. Because at the end of the day, when it’s not working, who do you call ? Your favorite call center (where ever it happens to be ?) or your beloved system engineer (if you still happen to have one around to help you) ?

So I was quite happy to be able to have a pause with the Drum Café afterwards, which allowed us to beat on something at least Best part of the morning definitely !

We then had a very interesting meeting with Werner Knoblich, Gus Robertson and Robert Eiselt in order to sync up on our joint HP, Intel and Red Hat activities.

Some booth duty was planed for the luch period, before I attended a Lab on cgroups.
This is a technology which was really needed for Linux, when compared to other enterprise Unices. But the way it has been developed and integrated make it very powerful, and one of the most promising, probably after SELinux and IPtables. The ability to control resources used by what ever process is fine grained and gives lots of power to the administrator to avoid abuses, limit consumption, … up to the creation of containers !

I was not able to attend the whole Lab, due to another important snc meeting we had with the
Red Hat Regional managers (Phil Andrews, Franz Meyer, Brian Cornell). Very intereting as well. Then after some booth duty again, we delivered our first session, which was attended by some 30 persons and after that it was time to move on to the sponsor dinner and we had again some more interesting discussions with people from Nimbula and Red Hat which ended up very late during the night.

First day at the Red Hat EMEA Partner Summit

Arrived in Dublin the 5th of June at 6:00PM local time for the Red Hat EMEA Partner Summit 2011, we did the booth setup with my colleague and friend Arnaud Meurant in less than 1 hour with a demo DL 980 G7 unit and a working DL 380 G6 with RHEL 6.1, KVM and SR-IOV demos thanks to Intel Gigabit cards that my other colleague and friend Jean-Marc Andre had build up.

We then attended the keynote sessions of the evening.

Petra Heinrich VP Partners and Alliances EMEA for Red Hat said, not without humour, that the sun was now declining and clouds coming, as usual during the Red Hat Partner Summit !
Red Hat’s own Ronan Kirby then made a presentation of Ireland and Old Ireland explaining the mixed origins of the country (Celts, Vivkings, Normans, Brits, …).
He metioned the 960 multinationals employing 138000 people in R&D and IT.(compared to the 4 Million people in the country)

Joel Berman, VP Global Field Marketing, introduced the ecosystem of partners (16 sponsors helped make that event happened). And this year HP was Gold sponsor for the first time !
Joel always make a very relax but still very professionnal introduction to sessions (not counting some ecellent jokes on the IT world). One sentence I noted from his first speech about Cloud was: “You don’t call it fog computing because marketing guy are not that stupid”.

Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat CEO, then made the keynote, starting by showing how new communication means are supporting the movement in Egypt, Tunisia, … People are looking for transparency and accountability. Social changes are driving the political changes. Where and how innovation occurs has changed.

He underlined that there is Way too much hyper around cloud. It’s a paradigm shift as large as moving from the mainframe to client server. Cloud is important due to the fact it is a user driven innovation. At Google, Facebook, … Open Source helped users made what they wanted. No vendor was doing that. And they can’t control it. And no one knows where it goes.

One of the area supported by cloud is collaboration. Engineers of Google, Facebook share technologies. They first need to improve techno, doing what is right, before fighting with each other.
Then it’s transparency. The wining model is the best architecture of participation. Not only the best technologists. Red Hat doesn’t need to have everything at hands, but the right relationships to create technology that will solve users problems.
Finally choice. From CIO’s perspective paying up front to hope it works is painful. So they feel locked and frustrated. Each provider will have to show where they bring value.

All these points are also qualities of Open Source.
In a world of cloud the HyperVisor is becoming more important than the OS (as it was before). And the choice is not feature/functionality but whether we create the next Microsoft, or favour collaboration around open alternatives allowing a vibrant ecosystem.
Apps need to be written once and run on every cloud, not locked on one.

Jim did a very enlightening talk, which is bringing a real vision, and not only a bunch of empty statements. I think his contribution to make Red Hat a successful company was visible to everybody attending.

Scott Crenshaw, VP Cloud BU at Red Hat, then took over. For him, this year Cloud will move from PoC to production. However customer do not have more budget (+4% max) so yhey’ll move money from old SW to cloud SW. Red Hat is here to help their partners winning business and money in the change.
He then presented CLoudForms (IaaS) and OpenShift (PaaS) and the Open Virtualization Alliance whose HP is a governing member.
Scott then promoted cloud as lowering cost and transforming IT speed and agility.
Technology issues are much simpler in cloud than the political and cultural (buying online instead of internaly). Cloud also presents threats to xSP (disintermediation, pre-built solution reducing need of integrators). Red Hat commitment is to help partners becoming expoerts so they are the one in front of their customers. Because partners already know their customers, especially around verticals solutions.

I found it was difficult to come after Jim to speak again of cloud, where he put the bar very high while here we were back to more classical concepts and content. I was lucky enough to also be introduced afterwards more precisely into CloudForms and OpenShfit, so I know now what is behind, which wasn’t completely the case after this presentation.

Then after multiple interactions on the HP/Intel booth till 11:00PM, it was time to go back to hotel and finish the presentation for the day after

Meeting at HP Discover Las Vegas

The week of the 5th of June will be quite intense on my side. Departing the 5th afternoon to start working at the EMEA Red Hat Partner Summit during 3 days. Then even before the end of it, flying to Las Vegas on the 8th of June to be at the end of that day at the HP Discover event. I’ll then deliver a session on our Migration Roadmap from RISC to Linux on Thursday. And on Friday I’ll go on with 2 sessions, one on our joint HP+Intel+Red Hat Open Source Solutions Initiative and one on MondoRescue.

Even if it’ll be dense, as I also have additional meetings planed around, I’d be happy to meet with anyone wanting to discuss Linux at HP, Open Source in general, some of the projects I’m involved in, or early music But you’ll have to do that before Saturday as I’m leaving back to Europe.

Meeting at the Red Hat EMEA Partner Summit

For those of you around at the Red Hat EMEA Partner Summit in Dublin 5-8th of June, HP will be Gold sponsor of the event ! And thus I’ll be around to present what we are doing in term of RISC to HP ProLiant/Xeon/RHEL migrations, and also to explain a customer reference in a KVM Virtualization Data Center context.

So you may meet with me on the HP/Intel booth to speak of that, or MondoRescue, Project-Builder.org, , LinuxCOE, FOSSology or whatever Open Source and/or HP related topic you would like to discuss !

Hope to see you there soon. The next opportunity will be for US folks during the HP Discover event, the same week, in Las vegas. But that’s another story coming later on