By: Con Zymaris conz@cyber.com.au and Alvin Sim alvin@cyber.com.au
Created:
1999-01-21
Modified: 1999-01-27
Abstract: This is a brief rundown of what transpired when one of our colleagues gave a presentation of the growth of Linux in Business to around 500 influential Australian IT-industry movers and shakers.
On Wednesday, January the 20th, 1999, Westan, a large PC hardware distributor here in Australia, hosted a major industry and reseller event. On hand were the contingent from Cybersource headed by Richard Keech, Manager of Red Hat Support at Cybersource. Richard went on to present a paper titled Will Linux rival Microsoft?, and the event proved to be a wonderful platform for serious advocacy of using Linux in Business. As a context to who the audience were likely to be, here are some of the other topics that were presented and the organisations which presented them:
The event was held at the Carlton Crest Hotel, right opposite Albert Park Lake.(As an aside, those of you who will be watching the Melbourne Formula 1 Grand Prix, will likely see this venue in the background somewhere.) It was organised by Westan (www.westan.com.au) Invited were around 500 industry guests, mostly from PC resellers, vendors, and consultancies.
Opening statements were made by Victor Tan (managing director of Westan.) His comments included discussion about growing trends such as the Internet, how bigger resellers were increasing in size at the expense of the smaller players and that the most important focus for resellers in general was in providing value-adding services, and diversification. These statements proved an excellent segue into Richard's talk about mainstream resellers looking at Linux as a way to differentiate and add service value.
As a background, our previous efforts at doing a Linux-in-Business presentation had been to either smaller audiences (such as the Linux Business Breakfast) or to groups of Linux users (the converted, shall we say ;-) Since we were takling to a much larger cross-section of the IT community, Richard took some care to provide enough technical 'meat' for those more tech-savvy members of the audience, and deeper explanations of Linux platform and philosphy facts for the rest of us.
One thing that got the audience's attention (as with past presentations) was his use of Applix Presents (www.applix.com) for the presentation package. It also caused some head-scratching ;-). When our team rocked up for the event preperations, Richard was asked to hand over his Powerpoint presentation to the audio-visual engineer who would then prep the file on one of the Windows systems connected to the large SVGA video projector. Said techie was slightly surprised when told that, no, this presentation wasn't in PowerPoint, nor on Windows. Regardless, he helped Richard hook up our Toshiba laptop running Red Hat 5.2 and Applix Office 4.4.1. and everything ran like clockwork. More to the point, Richard's Linux based slideshow presentation was the only one which had no hiccups. All others (under Windows) seemed to falter at one point or another.
Something else that had caught the audience's gaze was Richard's extremely bright red hat; an Official Red Hat Fedora. It would not be surprising to find these hats popping up in more and more IT related events throughout this year, especially as the Linux name spreads quickly. Regardless, it makes for an excellent visual cue for people to remember the presentation by. It also made Richard an easy-to-track-down target after the official presentations, when scores of people came to chat. Quite a few even asked him for it ;-)
Among the topics Richard covered were
Richard will soon make available HTML version of his Applix Presents presentation at: www/
The presentation following Ricahard's Linux talk came from Larry Delphi (??) of Western Digital, who provided an overview of future trends in hard disk drives. Included was discussion about the IDE adapter eventauly being replaced by 1394 (Firewire, was obscurely not mentioned, just 1394.) Further, SCSI was going to fiber channel,and Parallel port drives were just briefly mentioned. Performance and Quality are the two aspects Western Digital had looked into and performance is the driving force behind "ATA/66" (burst rate of 66Mb/s) which is double the speed of ATA/33 (standard motherboard support these days). Larry mentioned that quality is achieved by their "Data Lifeguard" feature - basically runs a physical level "checkdisk" after 8 hrs - transparent to software. When requests come in, it would 'save' its current checkdisk, process request, and come back to scanning where it left off. There wasn't much Linux-specific info on this, but may be of general tech interest, thus its inclusion here.
National Semiconductor's Jayant Bhat (aka. Cyrix representitive) was on next. He stipulated that Cyrix are not 'out of the game' but decided to 'play the game differently'. Cyrix will instead prefer to focus on a different approach, and that's to break a PC down to 'simpler' devices ("Information Appliances"). They're promoting their "PC on a Chip" stance ("Media PC2") hoping to capture the 'sub $500 PC.' They are also hoping to get them embedded into low end products which serve the user's needs: ie. games machine for kids, tv-boxes for tv/webtv/etc, dvd-box etc. He did say they'll still develop products on the general purpose CPU front.
Greg from Advansys was up next, and he talked about the advantages of the 1394 standards, using it to illustrate the fact that it's going to be the 'bus' of the future, where everything is going to talk across the wire - featuring: - 63 devices, or up to 1023 hubs -> 65k devices. features include:
He quoted a camcorder running at 28kb/s on the 1394 1394 Standards/speed comparison:
(nb: the last two are SCSI. Also these numbers were taken down as rough notes, so caveat emptor!)
One question was about Linux support. Greg's response was that they're committed, and it should be supported in the kernel (but this needs to be confirmed.)
Next came Chris Tay from PK Electronics who talked about their revolutionary 'hot swappable' UPSs that come in 1KVA packs and can be housed in a 4 box cabinet and loadshared across the whole bank of UPS's. Redundancy is based on how much current is drawn out of it. In scenario: 4 box cabinet x 4 modules (which act as individual UPS's if not in cabinet!) = 4kVA of power. If 3kva is needed on a 4kva cabinet, then it's what they call "n+1" redundancy.. (ie. 1 extra for swapable), if as per scenario, only 2kva is req'd - then it's "n+2" .. this is unique to PK's UPS structure/cabinet. Chris also stated that PK are open-spec adovocates and that they will assist in Linux connectivity by providing the pinouts for power monitoring to the Linux community.
There weren't any more Linux related presentations, so people mingled around the mini-trade show booths and came around to see the Linux display. Rocket Micro Systems and Red Hat provided some Red Hat Linux boxed sets which were raffled off to the audience. The event finished around 10:00pm.