Posted by Brad Hudson, SA Team Lead on Oct 9, 2009
Welcome to the inaugural edition of Blogrotate. This blog is weekly filter of some of the most interesting news items as it applies to system administrators. We’ll be tackling such topics as operating systems, hardware, software and utilities and even some humorous items. The SA team here at Pythian all love of crawling through RSS feeds and tech blogs, and we’ll bring the best to you every week.
Operating Systems
Ubuntu 9.10 beta 1 released for both Gnome and KDE desktops. The newest version of Ubuntu, code named “Karmic Koala”, is coming out in 20 days, but the first beta release was released this week. The adventurous can download the install images from the Ubuntu site (or Kubuntu if you prefer). Your editor reports on his first look at installing and running the newest version.
Microsoft licensing is complicated? Steve Ballmer has come out and stated point blank that the Microsoft licensing is too complex, but “I don’t anticipate a big round of simplifying our licensing”. We all knew it, check out Ballmer: Don’t expect simpler licensing soon for more.
Read the rest of this entry . . .
Posted by Paul Vallee on Jun 25, 2009
My old friend and collaborator Theo Schlossnagle at OmniTI posted his slides from his Scalable Internet Architectures talk at VelocityConf 2009.
The slides are brilliant even without seeing Theo talk and I highly recommend the time it takes to flip through them, for anyone who is interested in systems performance. If anyone took an mp3 of this talk I’m dying to hear it, please let me know.
For those of you unfamiliar with OmniTI, Theo is the CEO of this rather remarkable company specializing in Internet-scale architecture consulting. They generalize on Internet-scale architecture, not on one specific dimension the way Pythian specializes on the database tier. This allows them to see Internet-scale workloads from a unique systemic, multidisciplinary point of view; from the user experience all the way up the stack, through the load balancer (or not), the front-end cache, the application server, the database server, the operating system, the storage, and so on. This approach lets them build Internet architectures and solve scalability problems in a unique and powerful, wholistic way.
Pythian first collaborated with OmniTI in 2001, and they deserve all of their success and profile that they’ve built since then. Trivia: both Pythian and OmniTI were founded in September 1997 and both companies continue to be majority-owned and controlled by founders (in Pythian’s case, yours truly).
Here’s the slide deck. Let me know your thoughts.
