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Open-Xchange, a provider of business-class open source e-mail and collaboration software, announced today an agreement with LinuxMagic, the developers of MagicMail, which supplies e-mail, messaging and spam protection products to ISPs, telcos and enterprises across North America, as well as protecting and servicing millions of e-mail accounts worldwide. LinuxMagic will incorporate the Open-Xchange software in its MagicMail offering that is designed as a turn-key solution for ISPs and telcos with 2,000 to 200,000 users. MagicMail comes with integrated anti-spam protection and support from LinuxMagic, one of the foremost experts in e-mail and spam security, as well as a stable redundant infrastructure built on Linux technology.

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Novell and Tencent, reportedly China’s biggest Internet service portal, have set up a research lab in Shenzhen, China, to jointly develop an Internet Data Center (IDC) cloud computing platform. Tencent, which is supposed to have 480 million active users and 568.6 million IM accounts, is going to use SUSE Linux and PlateSpin Orchestrate as its auto-deployment system. It’s also suppose to use Novell’s intelligent workload management solutions, including PlateSpin Workload Management, to create an IDC cloud platform that users can use to build, purchase and run business apps. IDC vendors typically lease resources from solution providers and resell them.

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Novell and Tencent on Thursday announced the establishment of a research laboratory in Shenzhen, China to jointly develop an Internet Data Center (IDC) cloud computing platform. Tencent, China's largest Internet service portal with more than 480 million active users, is adopting SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server and PlateSpin Orchestrate as its auto-deployment system. As part of the agreement, Tencent will also utilize intelligent workload management solutions from Novell, including PlateSpin Workload Management, to create a flexible and easy-to-expand IDC cloud platform that will allow users to build, purchase and run business applications in a faster and more convenient way. "Tencent has recognized the value of our solutions to its business," said Dr. Sen Ming Chang, managing director of Novell East Asia. "This cloud computing laboratory will create a powerful IDC cloud platform that will not only promote IDC industry development but also help companies improve productivity and reduce costs. Our collaboration with Tencent further proves Novell's leadership in cloud computing and the intelligent workload management market. We spare no effort to provide customers with excellent solutions and services, and hope more companies like Tencent will adopt our virtual solutions."

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University of Salamanca in Spain selected Linux-based Open-Xchange for e-mail and groupware at its nine campus facilities. More than 30,000 students use Open-Xchange for e-mail and 2,700 faculty and administration use the Open-Xchange premium groupware package for e-mail, calendaring, information management and document sharing. The implementation was handled by Quer System, an Open-Xchange Business Partner based in Spain. "The Open-Xchange collaboration software is the ideal solution to provide our students, professors and administration with complete groupware and webmail," said Reyes Hernández who is responsible for the e-mail services within the university. "After having evaluated other products, Open-Xchange Server 6 has been the only one that offered everything that was needed for our users, including connections to the most frequently-used clients (Outlook, Thunderbird, Mac), as well as synchronization with mobile devices. Plus, we're able to integrate Open-Xchange in our complex IT infrastructure."

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Wind River Linux Secure, a secure embedded Linux that should be available in 1H11, is in evaluation by the National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP) to be certified to Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level 4+ (EAL4+). If it passes, it’ll be the first commercial embedded Linux operating system accepted by NIAP. It will initially be available on some Intel, Power and ARM chips. Wind River also has a framework to automate the testing of Android apps.

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PC sales worldwide were up at least 20% in Q2. Gartner puts it at 20.7%, IDC at 22.4%. IDC thinks that Dell is the number two vendor to HP again. Gartner says, na, Acer’s still number two and Dell’s still in the number three doghouse. Global sales beat expectations. IDC found desktop PC shipments exceeded expectations, “helping to confirm signs that businesses are moving ahead with replacements, while portable PC sales trailed forecast estimates, reflecting the effects of a thus-far jobless recovery on consumer spending.” Netbook sales, while still ahead of the overall mobile market, slowed to the low 20% range compared with more than 70% in the last two quarters, according Gartner. This it says means they’ve entered the “mature growth stage.”

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In the midst of one of the diciest global economies in generations, with whole countries going bust, Intel has delivered the single best quarter in its 42-year history. The news sparked the tech sector and an erratic Wall Street in general.

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Amazon EC2 has a new Linux-based instance type designed for HPC applications and other demanding network-bound applications. It’s called Cluster Compute Instances. Treading on Penguin and SGI’s toes, both of which have HPC clouds, it claims complex computational workloads such as tightly coupled parallel processes and applications sensitive to network performance will see the same high compute and networking performance delivered by custom-built infrastructures but with the cloud’s elasticity.

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SCO Wednesday filed notice that it means to appeal the Utah district court decision that Novell owns the Unix copyrights to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver. It was a 10th Circuit decision that got SCO the jury trial that it wanted in the first place and now it wants the jury’s verdict overturned. It’s bound to argue that Utah didn’t follow Denver’s instructions the way it was supposed to, that Denver decided copyrights did transfer and that Utah was supposed to decide which ones – otherwise why would Novell be appealing to the Supreme Court that the transaction didn’t follow the letter of the Copyright Act.

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Red Hat is seeking to drive a wedge between Cisco and its ally VMware. It has supported Cisco’s server effort since the first UCS boxes started shipping last summer and Cisco wants to be the king of virtualization. So now Red Hat has integrated Cisco’s Virtual Network Link (VN-Link) technology with its kernel-based KVM virtualization. VN-Link is UCS’ way of keeping tabs on the network traffic in and out of virtual machines. It automates the movement of network and storage services so they can follow virtual machines as they move around the datacenter, helping to ensure consistent policy-driven network capabilities across all servers, physical or virtual, in a data center.

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Tilera stuck its low-power Linux-running 64-core processor to Intel and AMD Tuesday in a head-on challenge to the x86’s infrastructure dominance, particularly in Web 2.0 and cloud accounts, where Tilera’s many-core design is supposed to excel at executing their millions of small parallel tasks simultaneously. Way better, it says, than the high-power legacy processors with their minimal performance improvements across generations. Tilera’s system on a chip (SoC) is breaking out of the embedded appliance ghetto where it’s been living and going into the server business with what is supposed to be the most power-efficient and highest compute density system ever, the building blocks for squeezing 10,000 cores into an 8kW rack. Quanta Computer, the big ODM and a recent investor in Tilera, has built a 2U box codenamed S2Q out of eight Tilera TilePro64 chips reportedly good for up to 1.3 trillion operations a second and costing only 400 Watts to run.

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GoAnywhere Director, the proven Managed File Transfer solution from Linoma Software, adds another certification to its list this week with the receipt of the “Ready for Power Systems” validation from IBM. GoAnywhere Director was validated through testing by IBM to meet the criteria for applications that run on its Power Systems. The Ready for Power Systems validation demonstrates GoAnywhere Director runs on the i7, AIX, and Linux operating systems for IBM i and p servers. Before receiving Ready for Power Systems validation, applications are tested to meet IBM’s standards – integration with IBM system management software, system and processor energy use, role-based access and application security, application availability for HA, and its ability to run in virtualized environments.

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In the run-up to the two next Cloud Expos, 6th Cloud Expo (June 21–22, 2010) in Prague, Czech Republic and 7th Cloud Expo (November 1–4, 2010) being held at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Silicon Valley, it's time to give my earlier list a complete overhaul. Here, accordingly, is an expanded list of the most active players in the Cloud Ecosystem.

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Terascala, the parallel file systems and Lustre-based high-throughput storage appliance house, has switched horses. Founder and CEO Larry Genovesi has stepped down to be CTO and the company has brought in Steve Butler as CEO. Prior to joining Terascala, Butler was CEO of ManageSoft, the enterprise software management firm acquired by Flexera Software last month, and before that CEO of Segue Software, which was acquired by Borland. His resume suggests he’s good at selling the things he runs.

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SCO Thursday lost its bid to get the jury verdict awarding Novell the Unix copyrights overturned along with its bid to get the copyrights despite the jury decision. It also lost its right to sue IBM for copying Unix code into Linux. Unless it decides to appeal, it’s all over for SCO and it’s not clear SCO has the financial staying power to last through an appeal. The legal bill for another appeal is already paid; it’s SCO basic viability that’s in question. A call to SCO’s general counsel went unanswered. The decision ultimately rests with the bankruptcy trustee in charge of SCO.

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Novell is going to support MeeGo, the Moblin-derived Intel-Nokia Linux operating system for netbooks. It says it expects SUSE MeeGo to be pre-installed on a variety of devices from OEMs in the next 12 months. Whether Novell remains alive long enough to see the stuff delivered remains to be seen. ODMs, including Samsung and MSI, have shipped netbook and mobile devices powered by SUSE Moblin. A contributor to the Moblin project, Novell is now also a key participant in the development of MeeGo and has set up a Novell OpenLabs in Taiwan, in conjunction with the local government.

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The unholy alliance of Microsoft and Novell says it’s got some HPC supercomputing cross-platform widgetry developed in their joint Interoperability Lab in Massachusetts that’s good for customers deploying server workload management across SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Windows HPC Server. It should tickle their infrastructure efficiency and cost savings by simplifying systems management through dual-boot and hybrid cluster solutions. They can balance server workloads using both SLES and Windows HPC Server and switch between the two environments. The pair has got a list of highfalutin brand name customers already using the stuff.

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ARM, with backing from IBM, Freescale, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and TI, has set up a not-for-profit open source software engineering company called Linaro to bring some order to the Linux operating systems running on the welter of different ARM-based System-on-Chips (SoCs). Evidently a tidy packet worth tens of millions is going into this thing. Well, it is meant put a stick in Wintel’s rounder wheel. The idea is to smooth out the kinks in ARM’s ecosystem, reduce the engineering time spent on non-differentiating, low-level software that touches the silicon, cut time-to-market and improve performance.

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Traditionally, infrastructure resources have been at the mercy of the IT system administrator. Development teams using Agile Development Methodologies are made rigid by this dated and inefficient system. “What if” scenarios are generally never attempted because the upfront cost of IT resources needed to reallocate the necessary infrastructure is too high. Unfortunately, Agile development efforts often fail because the development team does not control the management and deployment of the artifacts they develop. In his session at the 6th International Cloud Expo, Diego Parrilla, VP Product Management at Abiquo, will discuss how to reduce dependence on IT for day-to-day operations, eliminate waste, and boost productivity in the process. Abiquo enables this by giving management teams hands-on control of resource allocation without risking damage to any virtual machine. Infrastructure changes are made easily and instantly by anyone with administrator capabilities and do not affect other teams’ resources.

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Further cementing its position as the fastest-growing and highest-energy cloud computing event in the world, the organizers of the 6th International Cloud Expo being held at the Prague Hilton in the Czech Republic on June 21-22, 2010, announced today that the event will also feature - on June 21st - a @CloudCamp unconference. CloudCamp @ CloudExpo Europe is aimed at anyone working with, or interested in working with, cloud technologies.

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