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

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