LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit

If you didn’t believe that virtualization was making a huge splash into the Linux and open source community, maybe this will help shape your opinion – Virtualization has its own track at the next LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit being held at the Marriott Marquis in New York, NY on February 14th and 15th of 2007.

The summit includes proven best practices from IT pioneers who have used open source to enable robust, innovative solutions that deliver solid business impact. It offers two full days of real-world peer case studies, intensive technical training, insightful keynotes, and cutting-edge solutions to prepare you for the next generation of open initiatives.

The virtualization track currently consists of the following sessions:

• Case Study: Shared Penguins: How to Have Hundreds of Virtual Servers With a Shared Root – Speaker Steve Womer of Nationwide Insurance: We have implemented a shared file system, in our zLinux environment. This allows us to share the linux binaries among several hundred servers, reducing our disk requirements by 57%. This session will discuss our approach, advantages and disadvantages.

• Virtualization and the Next generation Data Center – Mike Grandinetti from Virtual Iron moderates a panel discussion – Virtualization holds great promise, but many first and second generation virtualization technologies compound the problem by adding cost and complexity in the form of virtual server sprawl, new management requirements and performance overhead. Emerging virtualization technologies are addressing these shortcomings and enabling leading enterprises to take virtualization to the next level. Virtualization has become a key strategy to reduce the complexity and cost involved with managing and operating data centers. This panel session will discuss these emerging technologies and examine how they can be leveraged to make the data center more efficient, flexible and agile while dramatically reducing cost and complexity.

• GEP and PGA: Linux Grid Computing in Financial Modeling and Drug Discovery – Speaker Daming Li of LITEC Systems Corporation – Gene Expression Programming (GEP) and Parallel Genetic Algorithm (PGA) on Linux grid computing cluster have proven to be a very effective way of tackling intensive mathematical problems in financial modeling and drug discovery. Based on the features of stock objects, we present our GEP grid computing models including the fitness that appropriated to the special rules of stocks, give experiments and analysis on the real stock price index of NYSE. The results show that the precision that predicts by using our models is higher than traditional method. The availability of molecular structures of drug targets and candidate compounds has opened the door for the application of large scale grid computing technology to conduct virtual drug design. Through the use of PGA on Linux grid computing cluster, we developed the computing power to effectively discover potential drug candidates. Our models generate better profiles of combinatorial drug candidates optimized by PGA.

• Virtualize Your Entire Data Center – Speaker Alasdair Rawsthorne from Transitive – Virtualization solutions for Intel’s industry-standard microprocessors are well known in the industry, and data center managers are implementing them increasingly to consolidate servers to achieve higher utilization, provide resilience, and to improve costs by operating much more flexibly than in the past. The latest hardware virtualization technology, which for the first time provides true instruction set architecture (ISA) independence, has synergies with other emerging virtualization technologies that allow managers to virtualize an entire data center without any application source code or binary changes and at speeds comparable to native ports.

  This talk will show you how to consolidate RISC and UNIX workloads onto industry-standard microprocessors, to achieve even greater consolidation than previously. An architectural description introduces you to new technologies for moving applications between platforms. A case study examines the process of virtualizing an entire heterogeneous data center, and a demo gives you a first hand experience of a single virtualized consolidated system supporting multiple instruction sets and operating systems.

• Linux Virtualization Technology Alternatives – Speaker Kir Kolyshkin of OpenVZ – Different virtualization approaches (emulation, hypervisor-based, operating system-level) and their pros and cons are outlined. Details of the OS-level virtualization approach are given, using OpenVZ as an implementation example. Operating system features – virtualization, isolation, resource management and checkpointing – are described, as well as user-level tools. Possible usage scenarios of virtualization are presented.

• Virtualization’s Impact on Enterprise Security – Speaker Kris Lamb of ISS – Virtualization alone does not equal security. As virtualization is rapidly deployed worldwide, it is critical to understand the business risks at the network, application and behavioral levels. Kris Lamb of Internet Security Systems will discuss issues related to securing virtual assets from exploits and malware and how to provide defense-in-depth for your environment. Throughout this session, Lamb will reveal how the evolving virtualization market space can be leveraged to innovate organizations’ security processes to both protect the infrastructure as well as meet the rising standard of due care with corporate compliance.

• Case Study: Living in a Virtual World – Speaker Bruce McMillan of Solvay – This session will describe the server consolidation project of Solvay Pharmaceuticals, Inc. in Marietta, GA. Topics covered will include; needs analysis, proof of concept, design and testing, implementation, cost savings and lessons learned.

You can register for the summit, here.