But Wait, There's More

Red Hat and Buddies Pursue Common Criteria Security Certification with Future RHEL 5

The ink is barely dry on all of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 materials, and the company is already gearing up for the launch of RHEL 5. While Red Hat is not being terribly specific about what is in RHEL 5 just yet, the company did announce last week that it is working with server maker IBM and security expert Trusted Computer Solutions to begin the Common Criteria security certification for the forthcoming RHEL 5, which is due in late 2006.

The Common Criteria testing is time-consuming and expensive, particularly since Linux runs on so many platforms. (In fact, more platforms than any operating system in the history of computing.) Red Hat and IBM are teaming up to test the future Linux on IBM's xSeries, pSeries, and zSeries servers as well as its BladeCenter blade servers. The eServer 325 Opteron-based rack servers and the iSeries servers appear to have been snubbed in the testing, which is being done in IBM's Austin, Texas, labs. Red Hat plans to certify RHEL 5 at the EAL 4+ level, including the Controlled Access Protection Profile (CAPP), the Labeled Security Protection Profile (LSPP), and the Role-Based Access Control Protection Profile (RBACPP). Trusted Computer Solutions has a role of making this technology available to customers ahead of general availability for those demanding the highest security levels.

HP Buys RLX for Linux Blade Server Management

Hewlett-Packard announced this week that it has acquired the software products of RLX Technologies, the originator of the enterprise blade server concept that has been struggling in recent years to find a niche for itself in the IT business. In late 2004, after bringing in a an outside CEO, Doug Erwin, to manage the company, RLX exited the blade server business to focus on enhancing and selling its Linux-based Control Tower system management software, which is used to provision and manage both Linux and Windows servers but which has much deeper functionality on Linux.

Rick Becker, general manager of HP's BladeSystem unit within its Industry Standard Server group, said that the entire engineering team of RLX, which is comprised of 35 people who luckily work up the road from HP's Houston facility, will be offered employment at HP. The few managers (such as Erwin) left at RLX were not offered jobs. RLX had about 200 customers worldwide, but that is not why HP bought the company.

The RLX acquisition is the third small but important deal in systems management that HP has done in recent weeks. HP just shelled out around $625 million to buy AppIQ, a storage management software firm, and Peregrine Systems, which does IT asset tracking, a few weeks ago to bolster its OpenView systems management products. RLX's Control Tower will plug into OpenView as well. Specifically, according to Becker, starting in the first half of 2006, HP will have its sales force and channel up to speed on selling Control Tower on HP's BladeSystem blade servers as well as on its ProLiant rack-mounted and tower servers. For the Linux diehards, Control Tower will remain a standalone product, says Becker. But for those who are managing heterogeneous servers, Control Tower will be integrated with HP's System Insight Manager management programs for its ProLiant and Integrity servers, and will, in fact, be sold as a plug in; HP sells its plug ins under the Essential brand name. System Insight Manager is a merged tool from the old Compaq ProLiant and HP Unix server lines that spans all of HP's server platforms, and it provides component-level management (such as server provisioning and monitoring). The OpenView software sits higher in the network, managing security and business policies, and SIM plugs into OpenView much as Control Tower will plug into SIM as an Essential plug in. Control Tower will be integrated into SIM sometime in the second half of 2006, according to Becker.

While HP obviously plans for Control Tower to offer the best support and integration on its own ProLiant and BladeSystem machines, Becker knows that HP has to offer support on other vendors' iron--just like RLX realized it would have to do when it exited the blade server business back in December 2004. Becker says that HP will absolutely support the management of its competitors' servers with Control Tower going forward.

Virtual Iron Secures More Venture Funding

Linux server virtualization software supplier Virtual Iron announced last week that it had completed its third round of venture capital funding, raising $8.5 million with an option to raise another $2 million from the round. Intel's venture capital arm was the lead investor, with Goldman Sachs, Highland Capital Partners, and Matrix Partners all ponying up some dough. The latter three had already put $20 million in capital into Virtual Iron in its first two rounds.

Virtual Iron, formerly known as Katana Technology, launched itself with great fanfare at LinuxWorld in January as the first virtualization software maker that can gang up individual servers into a single virtual machine as well as carve up a single physical machine into many virtual machines. The partitions in a Virtual Iron machine configuration can span from one-tenth of a processor to 16 processors, spread across many servers. The Virtual Iron VFe software also has built-in SAN and network virtualization technologies, too.

Mandriva, NEC Work on Linux Solutions for the Education, Public Markets

Commercial Linux distributor Mandriva has partnered with PC and server maker NEC to attack the educational and public sectors with Linux wares. The deal is limited to the NEC Computers division of NEC, which sells its PCs, laptops, and servers in the European market. The company's did not specify exactly how they would develop solutions for these two economic sectors, above and beyond getting Mandriva's Corporate Desktop and Corporate Server Linux 2.6 variants certified on NEC iron. But what is obvious is why they chose the educational and public sectors as a focus. This is where Linux is building up the most steam and where IT managers are trying to cut spending while boosting security.

SGI Gets $100 Million Credit Line as It Plans Turnaround

Supercomputer maker Silicon Graphics is trying to turn itself around after a difficult transition from its MIPS-IRIX server business to an Itanium-Linux business, and said last week that it had secured credit lines from Wells Fargo Foothill and Ableco Finance for a total of $100 million to help it get through the rough patches. The two-year credit facility consists of a $50 million revolving line of credit and a term loan of $50 million. SGI's had an existing credit line of $50 million, but it required $20 million cash collateral. The fact that the new credit facility is twice the size with no collateral is an indication that the bankers are convinced that SGI can get its financial house in order and tap into the demand for Linux supercomputers.

SGI also announced that a former company executive, Brian Samuels, who also had stints with Tandem Computers and Digital Equipment (now both part of Hewlett-Packard), has been named senior vice president of global sales, service, and marketing at the company. Samuels will take over responsibility for all sales channels except those to the U.S. government, which will continue to be managed through the SGI Federal unit, which has its own president, Anthony Robbins. Samuels will report to SGI's chairman and CEO, Bob Bishop.

Lakeview Technology Validates H.A. Clusters and EchoStream FS on AIX, SCO OpenServer 6, and Linux

High availability software maker Lakeview Technology has validated its H.A. Clusters clustering and EchoStream FS data replication software on IBM's latest pSeries machines running Big Blue's AIX Unix variant as well as Linux implementations from Red Hat and Novell. The two high availability software products also run on Linux partitions on IBM's iSeries servers (which are based on IBM's Power processors, like the pSeries) as well as on the company's xSeries X86 and X64 servers, which run Linux as well. It can even run on Linux partitions within IBM's zSeries mainframes, and on AIX partitions on the iSeries boxes. Back in June, H.A. Clusters and EchoStream FS were certified to run on the SCO Group's OpenServer 6 implementation of Unix.

Encrypting Data Tapes: Soon to Be All the Rage

Last week, our Big Iron mainframe newsletter reported that IBM was working on special encryption features that will allow mainframes to begin encrypting data stored on tape archives. These features for the z/OS platform use the native encryption facilities in zSeries processor complexes and their encryption keys to allow tapes to be encrypted and then decrypted at remote sites where tapes are often stored or used for data interchange. As far as I know, this is the first time such tamper-proof encryption has been delivered natively in a server, and it probably won't be too long before the iSeries has such features.

But you might have a lot of different platforms to cope with, and Iron Mountain, one of the big names in offsite data vaults with over 40,000 customers, doesn't want you to wait to get your data encrypted, and has recommended that companies buy an encryption appliance to encrypt the data they store on tape. Iron Mountain is practicing what it is preaching, and has opted for the DataFort encryption appliance from Decru, a division of NAS array maker Network Appliances, to do its internal data encryption. Don't let your data tapes be the ones making headlines on the news.