Innovation at LinuxWorld
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This blog is being written on the expo floor at LinuxWorld in San Francisco. I’m going to take a little time to shamelessly promote two Silicon Strategies Marketing clients exhibiting here, not because they are our clients, but because they have something unique and valuable to offer IT.
First is Open-Xchange, a dual-source outfit, ala MySQL. Open-Xchange is a LAMP-based groupware product. What makes OX special is not that it is Open Source, but that it exceeds the functionality of the top-selling groupware servers, and at a fraction of the cost.
OX goes beyond messaging and simple shared resources, and adds other stuff teams need to share including basic document management, knowledge management, and project management. And all these features are very elegantly stitched together to create a simple end user experience.
The other OX plus is that everything can be accessed through a web interface. Though Outlook and Evolution type clients are fully supported, the web interface is juicy enough to make even jaded folks like myself enjoy using the product. Highly recommended.
Our other innovative client is Virtual Iron. Virtual Iron has taken virtualization to the nth degree, while preserving the sanctity of your software investment. Whereas tools like VMWare and Xen can divide one box into many smaller logical boxes, Virtual Iron can do that while also globbing many physical boxes into one huge virtual computer (which could then be divided into many smaller virtual servers if desired).
Though cool from a technology standpoint, the real benefit to IT is rapidity. New servers can be created, destroyed, expanded, contracted, split, and merged on demand. Hardware resources can be shifted between different virtual machines on the fly, and while Linux et al is running. This all saves on hardware budgets, staff time, and more. None of your software needs to be special - it all sees a single, huge x86 SMP box, so everything works out of the shrink wrap.
Virtual Iron is not for everyone, but organizations that are changing rapidly and launching new initiatives will benefit from what Virtual Iron calls a “dynamic IT infrastructure.” Business agility is the name of the game.
And since this is a marketing blog, I must heap praise on MailFrontier for some funny and clever promotions. They slapped stickers above urinals in the Moscone Center bathrooms that read “This probably isn’t the best place to sell you penis enlargement. Neither is your email. We can take care of that.” I have no idea what they did in the lady’s room.
