Servers: Interviews

Simon Horman works as a software engineer for VA Linux Systems Japan. In his downtime he also busies himself working on open source projects such as kexec-tools, kexec for Xen IA64, the Linux Virtual Server Project, and the Linux High-Availability Project, which seeks to provide high availability clustering solutions for Linux. At this year's linux.conf.au in Melbourne, Horman will leave his Tokyo base to participate in the conference and to help organise the informal Linux HA Birds of a Feather session. He speaks to Howard Dahdah ahead of his arrival.

From the start, Henry Malmgren was determined to get to the South Pole. After graduating from Texas Tech University in 1998 with a degree in MIS he applied for a job in the Antarctic every year before NSF contractor Raytheon finally hired him as a network engineer in 2001. Since then he has alternated between the Denver headquarters and the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, spending two summers and two winters there before finally working his way up to IT manager. Staying over is a commitment: Once the winter starts, there's no way to get in and out of the base until summer begins eight to nine months later. "I thought I would just do this for a single season, but somehow it always seemed too easy to keep coming back," he says.

December is a relatively slow time of year at MLB Advanced Media, the company that brings you the official Major League Baseball Web sites. From pitch-by-pitch accounts of games to streaming audio and video -- plus news, schedules, statistics and more -- it has baseball covered. Doing so requires serious horsepower, so much so that the company's Manhattan data center is pretty much tapped out in terms of space and power, according to Ryan Nelson, director of operations for the firm. Strategic use of virtualization technology enabled him nevertheless to forge ahead with implementing new products during the 2007 season, and promises to smooth a shift to a new data center in Chicago in time for the 2008 season.

Rackspace provides datacentre facilities under a managed hosting scheme. It is building a new UK datacentre and has had a green aspect to its business for about a year and a half. How is that affecting its operations?

APC founder and CTO Neil Rasmussen was in London recently to talk about datacentres, power and efficiency - themes that have become headline news as they transmogrify into green issues. We took the opportunity to ask him - inter alia - whether the datacentre can ever be green.

Ted Kummert, corporate vice president for the data and storage platform at Microsoft, came over nine months ago from Microsoft's security, access and solutions division to lead the SQL Server effort and usher the 2008 version into general release. Kummert says performance and scalability improvements will continue to put pressure on rivals like IBM and Oracle. In an interview with Network World senior editor John Fontana, he also discusses goals around a new release timetable, prescribed upgrade paths for users, a services element and virtualization.

Mike Neil, Microsoft's general manager of virtualization, is on the big stage with a hot technology. The lights are on him as he prepares for next year's delivery of Windows Server Virtualization, which first was a feature and now is an add-on to Windows Server 2008. Neil, who joined Microsoft four years ago as part of the Connectix acquisition, recently talked with Network World Senior Editor John Fontana about critics, competition, licensing and feature delays.

Citrix's announcement that it would acquire XenSource demonstrates the company's plans to support the most relevant application delivery technologies possible, company officials say. The software, according to Citrix Chief Strategy Officer Wes Wasson, will not only enhance Citrix's desktop and server products, but also be put to use in the company's application-networking tools also acquired with NetScaler and Orbital Data. Network World Senior Editor Denise Dubie talked with Wasson yesterday to learn more about why Citrix made this move now and what it means to corporate IT customers.

Citrix acquired XenSource Wednesday for US$500 million. With the acquisition, Citrix will also acquire the virtualization talent of XenSource, among them CEO Peter Levine. Network World Senior Editor Deni Connor caught up with Levine Wednesday and talked about the acquisition and how the combination of Citrix' and XenSource's technologies will benefit customers going forward.

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is getting ready to launch Barcelona, its first quad-core server chip.

John Fowler, Sun's executive vice president of systems, spoke with Patrick Thibodeau last week about the company's new alliance with Intel. Excerpts from the interview follow: