Data Center Linux Capabilities Address Security Storage and High Availability

1 January 1970

The Open Source Development Labs ( OSDL ), a global consortium of companies dedicated to accelerating the adoption of Linux®, today announced that OSDL Data Center Linux Capabilities version 1.1 ( DCL 1.1 ) is now available. The new document expands priorities published last year by the Lab around Data Center Linux in four main areas: security, hot-plug, clustering, and storage networking.

''There has been tremendous response to DCL since the first version was released a year ago. Vendors, enterprise end users and developers from around the world have pulled together to contribute important improvements to DCL,'' said Tim Witham, CTO of OSDL. ''The DCL working group continues to connect the requirements of the enterprise end user with technical resources in the development community and with the engineering teams of our membership.''
Technology analyst firm IDC predicts that the overall market revenue for Linux computers and software will exceed $35 billion by 2008.

The DCL Working Group has also expanded in recent months to include participation by more international developers, vendors, and end users including Bull in France, NTT in Japan and Red Flag in China.

''Bull is committed to providing innovative solutions for the data center on a Linux platform and we wanted to increase our participation in the important work of OSDL’s Data Center Linux Working Group,'' said Joe Alexander, director of Strategic Planning at Bull and member of the DCL steering committee. ''We think it is critical that the DCL Capabilities Document reflects the requirements of customers in all markets around the world.''

''Linux is making important strides into the data center in Japan and elsewhere,'' said Hitoshi Shibagaki, executive director of NTT. ''NTT is working with OSDL and the development community through DCL to advance the capabilities for Linux.''

''Red Flag is helping business and government in China realize the benefits of Linux in the data center by participating in DCL with contributions around local requirements important to our markets,'' said Chris Zhao, CEO of Red Flag Software.

Since the release of the DCL 1.0 capabilities document in February of 2004, OSDL identified four priority technology areas important to Linux users, vendors and the development community at large: security, hot-plug, clustering and storage. In response to the need to gather input in these areas from the broadest possible set of contributors, OSDL established a special interest group ( SIG ) in each of these four areas. OSDL SIGs are open to anyone interested in contributing in a specific technology. OSDL membership is not required for SIG participation. The OSDL SIGs are designed to complement existing development community forums.

''In the past year we have reached out to global enterprise Linux customers and to specialists in the broader Linux community to help us better understand the direction of Linux in the data center,'' said Steve Geary, chair of the DCL Working Group and director World Wide Linux and Open Source R&D at HP. ''Customers told us to focus more work on NFS and the new SIGs really stressed the importance of security to the success of Linux in the data center.''
The Lab’s new storage SIG, created by interested developers and vendors to contribute to the DCL, made significant progress in organizing feedback from enterprise end users on network storage and driving the development and testing of Network File System ( NFS ) V4 on Linux for enterprise use. The new storage SIG also expanded work on volume management and multi-path I/O.

The Lab’s new security SIG has attracted some of the leading development experts on security and Linux, including subsystem maintainer Chris Wright. The group has built threat profiles for specific computing environments that are driving new requirements for Linux security in the DCL Capabilities Document.

The OSDL DCL Capabilities document, available free online from OSDL at OSDL Data Center Linux, is a public reference blueprint for Linux distributions, major end users or Linux kernel developers to build Linux kernel features and associated libraries that are required in the enterprise data center. The definition does not cover data center applications, which are under development by commercial vendors and open source project members.

Lab members currently participating in the Data Center Linux Working Group include: Aduva, AMD, Bakbone Software, Bull, Computer Associates, Comverse, EMC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Intel, Miracle Linux, NEC, Network Appliance, Novell, NTT Corporation, NTT Data Intellilink, Portlock Software, Red Flag, Sun Microsystems, Ten Art-ni, Turbolinux, and Unisys.