Canonical over the last four years or so has brought businesses a growing range of services and software tools to help them make better use of the Ubuntu platform. Many of these services, such as Landscape systems management and technical support, have proven valuable for companies that want to more easily manage and maintain Ubuntu in their business.

Rather than having to decide which tools or services are useful, we decided to make things simple by bringing together all the necessary tools and services into a single offering, Ubuntu Advantage.

Ubuntu Advantage has four service components:

* systems management

* enterprise technical support

* legal assurance

* access to knowledge base

At Canonical, we believe these are they key service areas that help enterprises make successful use of Ubuntu in their business. As new technology features and capabilities are incorporated into the Ubuntu platform, the Ubuntu Advantage service offering will also grow to support those new platform capabilities.

The systems management service category offers Canonical’s Landscape systems management and monitoring tool. Within any enterprise it is crucial for IT departments to have the necessary systems management tool to avoid having to spend copious amounts of time managing and maintaining systems with patches and security upgrades. Although, these tasks are vital for enterprise systems to remain safe, they can also be tedious and unnecessarily time consuming without the right tools. The package management and automation features of Landscape help to remove much of this manual work.

Ubuntu Advantage includes enterprise-level technical support for the desktop and server to give businesses direct backing from the source of Ubuntu, Canonical. This is a valuable service because businesses can deploy Ubuntu with a greater sense of security; should they run into any problems, they have the support from the organisation which released it.

Our aim is to provide comprehensive support, but we also want to give customers flexibility with the type of service they receive as we recognise that different machines will run different workloads and need different levels of support. On the server there are three options ranging from support for basic server workloads to the most complex setups:

* Essential Server – to cover common workloads such as file and print serving

* Standard Server – for more advanced business needs like server virtualisation and integration into existing Windows networks

* Advanced Server – to cover complex configurations such as high-availability and clustering

On the desktop there were two main usage types we want to cover, general business use and developer use:

* Standard Desktop – covers general end users using standard business applications such as email, office suites and web browsing

* Advanced Desktop – covers developers that have more complex desktop configurations, such as desktop virtualisation, and use advanced developer tools

A major aim of Ubuntu Advantage is to ease the adoption of Ubuntu by providing quick and easy access to a definitive answers. The online Knowledge Base gives customers a central repository from which they can quickly reference at any time definitive guides on how to resolve common issues or information about best practices deployments. Canonical’s support engineers create the content in the knowledge base keeping it accurate and up-to-date on the latest releases.

It’s also crucial that staff using Ubuntu feel comfortable with it, because the more confident they feel the more they can take advantage of Ubuntu’s many features and the fewer problems they will come across. So we also included training credits in Ubuntu Advantage. These can be redeemed to train end users on how to make the most of Ubuntu Desktop for their daily job, or they can be redeemed for system administrator training to help them more easily deploy and manage Ubuntu systems.

We know it is important for many organisations to have legal assurance to enable the adoption of an open source platform, which is why we have also included our legal assurance programme, Ubuntu Assurance, with all Ubuntu Advantage service options.

Ubuntu Advantage provides simplicity and an easier way for businesses to purchase the necessary tools and services to manage, support and use their Ubuntu platform more effectively and efficiently. Ultimately, it saves them precious time and money that can be spent elsewhere in their businesses. Initial reception has been very positive and we look forward to getting more feedback on the new services as users become familiar with them and hopefully see the value in them.

The Ubuntu Advantage website is live at: visit http://bit.ly/cOasJ3

Fern Ho, Ubuntu Advantage Product Manager

Earlier this year, MuleSoft approached us with the desire to partner and offer to work with Canonical to improve our default java container, Tomcat, for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server. The idea was to make Tomcat on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS easier to download, install, and configure on Ubuntu than JBOSS is on RHEL. The Ubuntu Server engineering team worked with Mulesoft engineering to update Tomcat upstream and those updates were pulled into Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. We are now pleased to announce that the Apache Tomcat package for Ubuntu has been updated and refreshed to the latest Apache release (6.0.26). The team over at MuleSoft has also taken on the task of cleaning up a lot of the utilities, as well as bug fixes that improve the configuration process for starting Tomcat. To see the technical details, you can read Jason Brittain’s blog.

Mulesoft is a great example of our ISV community stepping up with key community contributions. With Ubuntu being community driven, Mulesoft worked closely with Ubuntu Server engineering to bring the Tomcat packages up to the latest release and pushed those changes upstream. Contributions from the community are key to the success of Ubuntu. MuleSoft also provides enterprise class support for running Apache Tomcat on Ubuntu Server in mission-critical deployments.

If you use Tomcat and have servers running in test or production, check out MuleSoft’s add-on product for Tomcat, called Tcat Server . Mulesoft’s Tcat server adds remote diagnostics, version controlled deployments, Tomcat clustering, and clustered restarts to Apache Tomcat deployments. In addition, the management server has a REST API for extending via scripting, or hooking it into your overall systems management interfaces. Tcat Server is free to use in development and is available at no incremental cost to MuleSoft’s Tomcat support service offering.

Tcat Server is available from Mulesoft

John Pugh, ISV Channel Manager

On Wednesday Dell announced a comprehensive overview of its enterprise strategy. Significant in its announcement, was the addition of Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) as an infrastructure solution, joining the proprietary offerings from VMWare and Microsoft. This is the first major offering of a true open source Cloud solution backed by a major corporate vendor.

Dell will offer a series of ‘blueprint’ configurations that have been optimised for different use cases  and scale. These will include PowerEdge-C hardware, UEC software and full technical support – you will be able to buy these straight from Dell or you can use the ‘blueprints’ as a base to create your own bespoke solution. The Dell team have great strength and experience here and will provide detailed guidance on all the ‘blueprint’ solutions, as well as enterprise class deployments.

Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud leads the Linux field with integration of cloud capabilities directly into the OS. UEC is based on Eucalyptus which builds on the de facto cloud API standards of Amazon EC2 and S3. The relationship between Canonical and Eucalyptus Systems ensures that you have one escalation path to resolve any issues with the OS or the cloud service. Offering the same APIs as the dominant public cloud offering, Amazon EC2, you can build your applications to run on either platform. The Dell solution will be based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS – which is released on April 29th.

Behind the scenes we’ve worked with Dell’s DCS team for over six months to test and validate the integration of the cloud stack on their new PowerEdge-C series. Within the industry, the DCS team has an excellent reputation for full design, integration, installation anddeployment. It has been both challenging and exciting working to meet and exceed their expectations, a result of excellent cooperation between the Dell core team, our Cloud & Server team and Eucalyptus.

Mark Murphy, Global Alliances Director

A few weeks ago myself and Dustin Kirkland had the privilege of travelling to the Intel facility in Hillsboro, Oregon to work with Billy Cox, Rekha Raghu, Paul Guermonprez, Trevor Cooper and Kamal Natesan of Intel and Dan Nurmi and Neil Soman of Eucalyptus Systems and a few others on developing a proof of concept whitepaper on the use of Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud on Intel Xeon processors (Nehalem).

The whitepaper is published today on the Intel site (registration required) so it seems like a good time to talk about why we collaborated.

The Intel Cloud Builder program is intended to develop some best practice information for businesses and institutions looking to take advantage of the promise of cloud computing. As we do consistently with UEC, we are being specific when we talk about cloud as the ability to build Infrastructure as a Service behind a corporate firewall – that is on your own systems, protected by your own security protocols.

In Portland we had access to some great hardware and as an ex-Intel man, it was good to mess directly with the metal again. Intel defined a number of use and test cases and the guys from Intel, Eucalyptus and myself were able to have some fun putting UEC through its paces. And the results were good. We documented them and the whitepaper gives numerous code and scenario examples to help anyone new to cloud to get up to speed really quickly and the make the most of the capabilities of the Xeon processor in supporting an internal IaaS infrastructure. You can find out how to get started on UEC with existing documentation. but this whitepaper takes it to the next stage.

Being able to test the software as part of the Intel Cloud Builder program and jointly publish this whitepaper is a great endorsement of what is still a young technology. And I hope it will give users confidence to start building their own UEC deployment on x86 technology.

Nick Barcet, Ubuntu Server Product Manager

This week were very pleased to see three companies behind three great technologies announce their support for Ubuntu. In the run up to the LTS in late April we are keen that our users are aware of the growing number of application options that they can have on their preferred operating system. These will be a mix of open source solutions, the ‘enterprise’ version of open source solutions or  proprietary applications. A healthy and growing ecosystem is an obvious prerequisite for any successful OS.

PGP has extended its enterprise-focused data protection solutions to include Ubuntu in addition to Windows and Mac. For companies running a mixed environment (an increasingly common scenario as Ubuntu begins to find a place in businesses as a replacement technology) security and administrative concerns are reduced as the same tool can used whatever the choice of OS.

GroundWorks Open Source announced its support for Ubuntu Server. GWOS’ excellent systems monitoring and management tools will give users a great, low-cost option for their Ubuntu deployments, something that is very important as Ubuntu Server is pushed into larger and more critical use environments.

Finally LikeWise and the Ubuntu development team were able to confirm the latest version Likewise Open 5.4 has made the alpha of Ubuntu 10.04 where it will undergo rigorous testing for stability before confirmation in the release. Users from 9.10 and 8.04LTS will have a direct upgrade path at release and a version supported for five years when they do.

I hope you take time to consider these options as part of your Ubuntu deployment. Expect to see more of these types of announcements as we broaden support for the 10.04 release. We will also be able to give details soon of some programs for the ISVs themselves to more easily come on board with the LTS release and understand why it is a great addition to their portfolios. We’re looking well set for a great release.

Steve George, Corporate Services at Canonical

The Ubuntu Server Team wants to know how you use Ubuntu Server Edition in day-to-day operations to help the team prioritize the support and development of the product.  This is the second edition of this initiative which was first introduced in 2008.

In an effort to better understand, support and further the Ubuntu Server Edition we would like to ask you to take this survey which should take between 15 to 30 minutes to complete. The information provided will help us determine where we can improve support, where to add additional resources and to generate a better understanding of the community which we work within.

Please note that this survey is being conducted by the Ubuntu Server Team community together with the Canonical Product Management. Information about the team is available at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ServerTeam/

To take the survey, please go to http://survey.ubuntu.com/

Thanks

Nick Barcet, Ubuntu Server Edition product manager

In early November, Canonical and Accountz finalized packaging for Business Accountz Enterprise 120 day trial into the Ubuntu Partner repository. With the addition of Accountz, Ubuntu now has enterprise class accounting software designed for businesses of all sizes.

Business Accountz Enterprise is designed to keep books for businesses of all sizes. A simple install from the Ubuntu Partner respository allows a company to try out Business Accountz Enterprise for 120 days at no-cost.

The features of this package include:

• Manage suppliers
• Design and print purchase orders
• Track bills
• Automate transactions
• Manage customers
• Design and print invoices
• Send quotes and estimates
• Track invoices
• Manage bookkeeping
• Free lifetime forum support

For more information on Business Accountz, please go to their website.

Enterprise class tools are making their way into Ubuntu. One such tool for enterprise class backup is Arkeia Network Backup. Arkeia has been a partner of Canonical for some time and recently have completed work to be added to the Ubuntu Partner Repository.

Arkeia has made Arkeia Network Backup version 8 available to Ubuntu users via the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Partner Repository. Not only did Arkeia make their product available, they made it FREE exclusively to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS users. That is right, you read correctly, FREE.

Arkeia Network Backup, Enterprise Edition for Ubuntu is fully-featured and is not time-limited.   One free, perpetual license is granted per individual or company and only web registration is required.

The enterprise license includes:

• one backup server running on Ubuntu
• up to 250GB capacity for backup to disk
• support of any single drive, tape or disk
• 2 client agents to backup many types of client machines including Windows workstations and desktops, and the vast majority of Linux machines, Mac OS X and BSD computers

Arkeia Network Backup features an easy-to-use web interface so that backup policy setup and management is a breeze. Arkeia’s backup engine leverages parallelism extensively, making Arkeia Network Backup one of the fastest backup and restore solutions in the market.  Source-side data deduplication will be available in early 2010, making backups and restores faster and easier than ever. More than 150 different applications and platforms are supported with specific packages.

If you are running Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS and wish to install Arkeia Network Backup, simply run “sudo apt-get install arkeia” to get started.

For more information about Arkeia go to http://arkeia.com. For more information about Arkeia and Ubuntu go to http://arkeia.com/en/partners/technology-partners/ubuntu .

JP

The cloud is getting a lot of attention. Understandably and rightly so – it is one of the hottest topics around. An on-line panel discussion on how businesses can incorporate cloud computing into their existing datacenter operations will take place in a webinar hosted by rPath on 24 September 2009. You’ll hear from the some of the most experienced experts in the field:

Michael Crandell, Chief Executive Officer of RightScale

Erik Troan, founder and Chief Technology Officer of rPath

Dr. Rich Wolski, Chief Technology Officer of Eucalyptus Systems

Matt Zimmerman, Chief Technology Officer of Canonical

David Berlind , Chief Content Officer of TechWeb

We’re looking forward to participating on this webinar, so please join us on 24 September 2009 at 11:00 a.m. PST.

For more information and registration please go to the the rPath registration page.

Canonical’s certification of Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition for a range of HP ProLiant servers has now been officially recognised by HP through reference on their website – yup, Ubuntu now has its own page – www.hp.com/go/ubuntu.

More good news for users of Ubuntu Server on HP ProLiant hardware -  the ‘HP ProLiant Support Pack for Ubuntu’ is now available for 9.04, with lots of management agents and drivers to make life easier for you.

These are strong steps forward in the recognition of Ubuntu as a server OS for enterprise deployment by many users. We have worked with HP over many months to push this forward enable Ubuntu on HP ProLiant servers and have been very pleased by their commitment to provide a very wide range of operating system choices user preferences.

We expect there is more to come and we remain committed as ever to enabling Ubuntu to run really well on the hardware that our users prefer

Gerry Carr, Head of Platform Marketing

Next week (31 August through 3 September) VMorld 2009 kicks off in San Francisco at the Moscone Center. For the second year, Canonical has a booth to demonstrate Ubuntu’s virtualization and cloud computing capabilities.

Last year VMWorld 2008 was in sunny Las Vegas. We talked to thousands of people throughout the show, and only found a handful who hadn’t used Ubuntu – don’t worry we sent every one away with a free CD so they could put that right! It was a great show with lots of interest in Ubuntu following on from the 8.04 LTS release, and our virtualization solution.

We expect the 2009 show to be just as much fun. Ubuntu has been on the top of the VMWare charts as a base OS for many virtual machine images, so we hope that the new virtualization features coming in 9.10 will be well received. In 9.04 we previewed Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) our private or on-premises cloud. This gives anyone who has their own servers the ability to set-up a cloud similar to Amazon’s EC2.

We’ll be presenting a talk for enterprises on how cloud computing can help them at the Solution Exchange Theatre on Wednesday 2nd September at 11:50 am. Entitled “The Clear Path to a Cloudy Enterprise”, it will be given by John Pugh, one of Canonical’s Partner Managers. If you would like to hear about the future of cloud computing, how open source offers a real alternative, and how Ubuntu can be used in this scenario then this talk should be informative and fun.

If you are going to be at VMWorld then please come along to the Canonical booth (#2403) and say hello to us. We would love to talk to you about Ubuntu, how you’re using it, and how you can get more from it – see you
in San Francisco!

Moving Ubuntu into the enterprise, especially on the server, has been a significant undertaking. While the Ubuntu Server Edition has been around since late 2005, it really came into its own in mid 2006 with Ubuntu 6.06LTS — the first Long Term Supported version. The LTS versions are released every two years and supported for a full five years on the server.

Since then the product has been enhanced significantly, shipping with the best open source tools. For those wishing to take advantage of the latest kernel builds and utilities the Server version tracks the regular Ubuntu’s six-month cadence. It is proving to be a very popular platform with hundreds of thousands of corporate and SMB users globally. If you have not seen the most recent server statistics then you should. Registration required.

With the current economic crisis, we’re seeing more enterprises looking for greater value and lower costs in their server infrastructures. One of the interesting findings from a recent survey (see figure below) is the range of hardware technologies on which Ubuntu finds itself. Just last week we spoke to a Chicago-based finance house that runs entirely on Ubuntu server and runs their open and proprietary stack on Ubuntu on Hewlett Packard machines mostly, with some Dell in the mix. These heterogeneous environments are pretty common and the range of software it is run on pretty wide. Our survey also indicted that hardware support is very important to our users.

Which is why it is great news that HP are partnering with us to move towards full certification of Ubuntu on Proliant servers – more about this over the next few months. This will give another layer of assurance to users and customers – particularly in the enterprise – with market leader HP recognizing the growing importance of Ubuntu to enterprise and SMB customers. The certification means HP will list Ubuntu as a supported operating system and verify the work undertaken by Canonical to ensure full certified compatibility. Furthermore both companies are fully co-operating at the engineering level to provide full underlying confidence for HP customers using the certified servers.

This is great news for users who’ve adopted Ubuntu as their enterprise class server software and even better new for those using HP Proliant servers.

Mark Murphy – Alliances Manager, Canonical

Hardware Profile - CLICK TO ENLARGE

Over the last two months Canonical and the Ubuntu server community ran a user survey to delve into the detail of Ubuntu server use. You can see the original launch plan here. The audience was self-selecting; we promoted it through the Ubuntu website and some other popular Linux server forums. Our friends at the analyst house, Redmonk, advised us on some of the questions and we have shared the raw data with them for their learning. In the end 6819 people representing the same number of organisations completed the survey. This was no easy task as there were many questions so our thanks to all the participants.

The survey is available here (registration required) and there is extensive commentary available with the survey itself. At a very high level it paints a picture of Ubuntu in use for common workloads in production ready environments across a vast number of sectors. The respondents tended to come from Europe and North America, which is probably an accurate reflection of business use of Ubuntu Server Edition currently. The size of organisation stretch from the lone wolf right up to 10,000+ organisations – to reflect this we have taken some splits of the data to see where response varied by size.

In short, if you are using or contemplating using Ubuntu Server Edition this is essential reading.

Gerry Carr – Head of platform marketing

An example of the data available in the Server Survey