It seems we’ve been a bit out of touch. Rather than bore you with excuses, let’s cut to the chase. Over the last year, we’ve slowed down—and then stopped altogether—publishing articles in Red Hat Magazine. And some of you have been contacting us to ask why.

There’s really a couple of reasons.

First of all, we’ve been running Red Hat Magazine a long time—under the RHM banner since November 2004. Before that we were a monthly newsletter called Under the Brim.

Point is, things change. We were once a text-only, link-heavy monthly email. Back then, we didn’t write very much original content—well, except for Shadowman. He (and his third-person narrative) have been around a while. He’s seen us publish through email, on the web—we even tried an issue in print. In the last few years, we dipped our toes into the online daily news space with both excitement and apprehension. We launched videos. We recorded podcasts. Some stuff we kept; some stuff we moved aside.

And now it’s time for another change.

We’re sorry we didn’t get around to telling you earlier. But, truth is, we weren’t quite sure what we were doing next. Some planets had to align. Some realities had to be faced. And there’s still a lot of work to be done. But we didn’t want to leave you hanging any longer.

We haven’t forgotten you. We’ve been hard at work figuring out just where we go from here. The content we have is too good to leave languishing in a corner. Our writers are too talented to not see the light of day. We’re working on delivering the open source message in a different way. There will be more info soon, and you’ll be among the first to know.

In the meantime, enjoy our archives. We’ll keep them here for now. Watch the email list for announcements. It’s been a long, strange, and wonderful trip. And it’s not over yet.

Red Hat Magazine

Open source is answering the call at government agencies on all levels as they look for opportunities to carve out costs and improve security, transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Why? Open source is stable, trustworthy, and secure, and Red Hat solutions are being used across government agencies to create efficiencies, eliminate vendor lock-in, meet mission-critical IT demands, and improve service delivery.

It’s that time of year again–the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World are fast approaching, and with them, Red Hat’s annual awards ceremonies. But first, we need nominations. And for that we appeal to our customers, readers, partners, and friends. That’s you.

Nominate that innovative business you worked with, or the admin who always has the right answers. Winners will receive free admission to Red Hat Summit and JBoss World, participation in exclusive events, and the admiration and accolades of their peers. Here’s the details:

2009 Innovation Awards – Nominations Open

Nominations are now open for the 2009 Innovation Awards, to be presented at this year’s co-located Red Hat Summit and JBoss World on September 1-4, 2009 in Chicago.

Innovation Awards were created to recognize technological achievements that demonstrate creative thinking and determined problem solving. The program includes the Extensive Ecosystem category which was created to recognize customers who are working with Red Hat and JBoss partners to create innovative architectures based on open source solutions. Please submit nominations by the deadline of May 31, 2009.

Questions? Contact the Red Hat Customer Reference Team at communications@redhat.com.

Innovation Award Categories: Five categories will each recognize two winning projects, one from Red Hat and one from JBoss. The Outstanding Open Source Architecture category will recognize one winner who is deploying both Red Hat and JBoss solutions. From these category winners, a Red Hat Innovator of the Year
and a JBoss Innovator of the Year will be selected by the community through online voting and announced at the awards ceremony.

Managed Excellence

Recognition of the impressive use of management tools, including Red Hat Network® and JBoss Operations Network®, to drive down total cost of ownership (TCO) and increase the return on investment (ROI).

Optimized Systems

Recognition of striking performance, scalability, and/or usability enhancements delivered with open source solutions.

Superior Alternatives

Recognition of the most successful migration from proprietary solutions to open source alternatives.

Extensive Ecosystem

Recognition of the use of the growing Red Hat and JBoss partner ecosystem to create innovative architectures based on open source solutions.

Carved Out Costs

Recognition of customers who have leveraged open source solutions to significantly cut costs and extract added value from existing systems.

Outstanding Open Source Architecture

Recognition of the use of Red Hat, JBoss, and partner offerings to create innovative architectures based on open source solutions.

>> Nominate an innovator now.

2009 RHCE of the Year

Red Hat Certified Engineer of the Year contest is a celebration of the hard work, expertise, and ingenuity of some of the world’s premier IT professionals.

If you are an RHCE®, now is your chance to wow us with why you should be selected as an 2009 RHCE of the Year. Maybe you’re administering 100 different boxes. Maybe you’ve solved an insurmountable problem. No doubt, you’ve got talent. Now is the time to prove it.

The five winners will get a free trip to the 2009 Summit in Chicago, September 1-4, 2009. The award includes three nights of accommodations, round-trip coach airfare, conference registration cost, and Chicago-style entertainment each night. The winners will also receive a 2009 RHCE of the Year plaque and will be honored at the RHCE Summit Reception.

>> Enter the RHCE of the Year contest

The deadline for entries is July 13, 2009. See terms and conditions for complete contest details.

Want to read essays from past winners? Check out our RHCE Success Stories.

Not current? In celebration of 10 years of RHCE, see our special promotion for RHCEs to help you update your skills.

More Red Hat Summit and JBoss World information

• Find more info on both awards at the official awards website.
• The official event websites: Red Hat Summit and JBoss World.
• Keep up with Summit news. Follow us on twitter: redhatsummit
• Past Innovation Award winners
• Past RHCE of the Year success stories

On Monday March 30, Intel announced the availability of their much anticipated new line of processors, the Intel® Xeon® Processor 5500 series–nicknamed Nehalem.

Red Hat, a long-time partner of the market-leading chip maker , collaborated on the chip’s debut, testing and optimizing the recently released Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 5.3 on the new processor.

Changes include a new processor architecture, platform architecture, memory subsystem, I/O subsystem, and options (including SSD and 10GbE).

So what’s the big deal? Why all the fuss? Here’s just a few of the improvements wrought by the combination of Intel’s processing power and Red Hat advancements in performance and efficiency.

Improved performance

According to Stream performance data, the new Intel Xeon 5500 series processor delivers a 2.25 times performance improvement, when compared to the performance of the preceding processor series (the Intel Xeon 5400). This allows the new processor to handle datacenter workloads at nearly twice the efficiency.

Intelligent performance

The processor can dynamically adapt throughput to the workload. Intel Hyper-Threading Technology lets system administrators increase workloads and add capabilities without slowing the system down—there’s plenty of reserve for usage peaks. Expanded physical server limits in Enterprise Linux 5.3 (255 CPUs and 1 TB main memory) improve system scalability dramatically.

Virtualization

Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Intel Virtualization Technology (Intel VT) deliver high consolidation ratios. These virtualization enhancements provide greater scalability and performance, and allow for the virtualization of a wide range of workloads, even those that are I/O intensive.

Automated energy efficiency

The combination of technologies supports low-latency changes between power states. This can help lower power consumption during off-peak hours . Integrated power gates and memory controllers deliver energy efficiency from the hardware side, while enhanced power management and CPU clock frequency scaling help conserve power from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux side.

Red Hat and Intel have a long history of working together to take open source technology to its full potential. Whether it’s combined open source contributions or corporate partnerships, the x86 platform and the open source software revolution have changed the face of computing. Integrated virtualization—and continued rapid improvements in processor technology—keeps the changes coming.

More information

• Red Hat and Intel: Industry Leaders Redefine Datacenter Price-Performance (Red Hat Press)
• What you need to know about Intel’s Nehalem CPU (ars technica)
• Internet: Meet your new processor (Intel.com)

John “J5″ Palmieri explains how the Fedora community–codename MyFedora–is bringing Fedora users together by integrating self-contained applications into a single framework application. This interface enables Fedora users to see and keep track of what applications other community members are working with.

Sometimes open source ideals make for the strangest–and most wonderful–bedfellows. We met Dr. Vandana Shiva–physicist, scientist, environmentalist, and activist–several years ago. Her work saving seeds and protecting traditional knowledge in the farming industry parallels the openness, transparency, collaboration and freedom of open source ideology. Her simple, clear explanation of why knowledge should be shared–and the devastating results should it be hoarded–is part of the essential truth that makes the work we do so incredibly important. But don’t take our word for it.

Get more information about Dr. Shiva’s work.

Matt Domsch from Dell talks about how Fedora’s worldwide network of mirrors are making it that much easier to download Fedora quickly.

FUNC is the brainchild of Michael DeHaan, Adrian Likins, Seth Vidal, and Greg DeKoenigsberg. In this edition of Spotlight On, Michael, Adrian, and Seth discuss how FUNC makes it easy to write commands across large numbers of machines remotely and securely, as well as where the name FUNC comes from.

Even more information

• FUNC project pages at Fedora Hosted

Do you know what’s happening in middleware? Budget crunch keeping you from attending industry gatherings? Bring the conference to your desktop. Take a minute (or a few hours) and attend the JBoss Virtual Experience.

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 LIVE online
(on-demand February 16th – May 11th, 2009)

Find out more or register now.

Join our executives, key developers, and your business peers. Attend keynote sessions for executive insight into the future of open source and the middleware roadmap for 2009 and beyond. Visit the Exhibit Hall and chat live with booth representatives. Come to the Networking Cafe for in-depth technical and business discussions, birds-of-a-feather chats, and live Q&A with our speakers.

Whether you’re a developer, enterprise architect, or senior IT manager, this one-day event will show you how JBoss can help you build, integrate, deploy, and manage mission-critical applications and services while lowering your costs without sacrificing performance, security, or functionality.

For updates, follow us on Twitter.

Here’s a few more details:

Keynotes with live Q&A:

• Business keynote by Jim Whitehurst (live event only) and Craig Muzilla
• technical keynote by Rob Cardwell and Sacha Labourey

Sessions with live Q&A:

• business, technical and government
• 2 panel discussions: Customer viewpoint and Developer panel

Exhibit Hall:
Red Hat booths, including:

• JBoss Enterprise Middleware
• JBoss Operations Network
• JBoss.org
• Customer Reference
• MRG (Messaging, Realtime, and Grid)
• Cloud Computing

Partner booths include:

• Alfresco
• Carahsoft
• CityTech
• Consilium1
• DLT
• Dell
• EnterpriseDB
• Exadel
• Freedom OSS
• Ingres
• Jaspersoft
• USolutions
• Vizuri

Media sponsor:

• DZone

Networking cafe:

• Birds-of-a-Feather sessions with JBoss Rock Stars

Find out more or register now.

Red Hat Engineer Michael DeHaan talks about why he developed Cobbler, and how it simplifies network installations for datacenters and other large-scale linux environments. For more info, check out the the Cobbler page at fedorahosted.org.

Even more information

• Open source systems management: Two conferences, two talks by Michael DeHaan (July 2008)
• Cobbler: How to set up a network boot server in 10 minutes by Michael DeHaan (August 2007)