Brian Proffitt

A key worry about using remote data centers is security — who’s handling (and viewing) the data? Brian Proffitt talks about the relative benefits of an in-house virtualized solution. A private cloud can be a very attractive solution, but just like seeing that attractive person across the room you want to approach, care must be […]

Linux expert Brian Proffitt provides an overview of vnStat, the popular Linux networking tool. Getting network stats on a Linux machine is not particularly difficult. With tools like sar, Iperf, and vnStat available for nearly every distribution, command-line aficionados can get the low-down on their network with just a few useful commands. Take, for instance, […]

Systems management solutions tend to be complex and pricey. Linux expert Brian Profitt overviews the leading open source vendors and their solutions. You could call them the “Little 4,” a play on the “Big 4” systems management companies: BMC, CA Technologies, HP, and IBM. The Little 4 may be smaller in terms of their bottom […]

For some time, the big commercial Linux vendors have been happily wandering orchard of low-hanging enterprise fruit, almost completely eschewing markets such as consumers or small- to medium-sized businesses. That single-minded focus may not serve them well against a relative newcomer to the enterprise Linux market: a newcomer that has quickly obtained a large percentage […]

Last week, Jim Lynch wrote what seemed to be a tongue-in-cheek admonition on how the Linux Mint distribution is so darned good, the venerable pastime of distribution hopping would soon be rendered moot. “Distrohopping is one of the great pastimes for computer geeks. Let’s not let it fade away because Linux has gotten too easy […]

Ed Note: This is Brian Proffitt’s final contribution to Enterprise Unix Roundup. Farewell, Brian, it’s been a great three years. We will all miss your candor and wit. Roundup will return next week with Paul Rubens in the pundit seat. Reading deep-level stuff about kernels tends to make my mind wander a bit, you see. […]

Last week, Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems, stated in an interview that much of the current animosity from the open source community toward Sun has its origins in the way Sun used to treat the community. Phipps, being his usual straightforward self, phrased it as Sun “screwed up,” a quote guaranteed […]

First thing out of the gate on Monday’s news cycle was the announcement from HP that it is committing its Tru64 Unix Advanced File System (AdvFS) code to an open source license. Not just any open source license, either; AdvFS is now under the GNU General Public License (v2), which officially makes AdvFS free software. […]

One of the unsung heroes of the Unix realm is — I kid you not — IBM. Stop laughing, I’m serious. I completely realize that IBM is a (if not the) giant of Unix and Linux on just about any platform it makes, and to assign the label “unsung” probably sounds a bit ridiculous. But, […]

An interesting news item popped up this week, which got me wondering about a new way for Unix to stand out in the marketplace. Network World released a report focusing on power consumption comparison tests that were run between Linux and Windows 2008 on Dell, IBM and HP machines. The findings? Overall, the Linux server […]