Sean Michael Kerner

Networks with the fastest servers or the biggest bandwidth pipes don’t necessarily deliver any given application the fastest anymore. New application acceleration appliances and services hit the market recently, with vendors shooting right at faster application delivery. Citrix is pushing its fastest-ever appliance while Juniper is pronouncing its vision and introducing a new management tool. […]

A new open source-led effort wants to bring open choice to the systems management space. The Open Management Consortium (OMC) claims that it isn’t anti-proprietary software but is about providing a true open standards approach to systems management. The OMC effort is starting off with a who’s who of core open source systems management projects, […]

Enterprises can now get their business intelligence open source style. Pentaho and JasperSoft have updated their BI platforms as each vendor ramps up efforts to gain a slice of the BI pie. For its part, JasperSoft claims that its open source BI software is already deployed in over 10,000 businesses and has had more than […]

Microsoft’s next-generation browser, Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), is rounding the corner and getting the “spit and polish” it needs as it heads into the stretch run of its final release. According to one Microsoft developer, IE 7 is now actually considered to be “layout complete.” In an online chat hosted by Microsoft’s IE development team, […]

BOSTON — Open source startups are changing the rules of the traditional enterprise software market. At least that’s what a panel made up of MySQL, JBoss, SugarCRM and XenSource heads and moderated by VA Software chairman Larry Augustin was happy to proclaim loudly and clearly at a LinuxWorld session here this week. John Roberts, CEO […]

BOSTON — Dell’s Chief Technology Office Kevin Kettler presented a powerful vision Dell has for extending virtualization beyond its traditional uses and into the mainstream. Kettler began his keynote presentation at LinuxWorld this week by reminding the crowd of a comment his boss, Dell founder Michael Dell made, during a LinuxWorld 2000 keynote. Dell said […]

Yours truly and other Linux aficionados are in Boston this week for the love fest known as Linux World Conference and Expo. This year’s show is gearing up to represent the year of the ecosystem, as there won’t be any major distribution announcements from the Linux heavies. Red Hat released Fedora Core 5 last week […]

It’s a familiar refrain. A new Linux kernel is released and a short time later it’s augmented by a point release that addresses a potential security vulnerability. The new 2.6.16.1 Linux kernel point release follows the 2.6.16 release by a week and includes various bug fixes, as well as a fix for a potential security […]

It’s just an early alpha release at this point, but Mozilla Firefox 2.0 “Bon Echo” is an early showcase for the next round of the modern browser wars. The first browser war was a blow-by-blow, feature-for-feature battle between every Netscape and Microsoft Internet Explorer release. The new browser war isn’t going to be much different, […]

Zombies aren’t just for horror flicks. There are hundreds of thousands of zombies on the Internet today, coupled into “botnets” that are harnessed by their malevolent overlords to wreak havoc. The havoc typically involves Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) type attacks but can also be used to scan other computers and steal personal information. Killing […]