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DST 2007 and SteelEye Products (by Dave Bermingham)

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 impacts Daylight Savings Time in the United States by extending it by one month. 

What this means for the United States and other countries which followed suit is that daylight savings will start earlier and end later.  Beginning in 2007, Daylight Saving Time begins for most of the United States at 2 a.m. on the Second Sunday in March and ends at 2 a.m. on the First Sunday of November.

What does this mean to you besides losing an hour of sleep in March?  Well, software that does not take the new Energy Policy Act of 2005 into account will minimally report wrong dates for a period of time; this includes everything from digital watches to complex control systems.  Software that is more time sensitive may in fact fail completely.

Here at SteelEye Technology, we realize that failure is not an option when it comes to protecting your business critical systems.  Therefore, we have done extensive testing against all of our solutions and have found no issues with our core applications in regards to the DST 2007 change.  However, there are some known issues with Java, a key piece of the complete LifeKeeper solution.  The complete details of the Java problems can be found here: http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Intl/USDST/

We recommend that all of our customers apply any relevant OS or application patch provided by their vendor.  Beyond that, you have the following choice as far as LifeKeeper is concerned:

1. Do nothing and everything will work except the LK GUI client display messages will show the time incorrectly in a few locations. All logged information will continue to show the correct time.  The only time the GUI would be incorrect would be from March 11, 2007 through April 2, 2007 and from October 29, 2007 through November 4, 2007 and subsequent years during the overlap period prior to the changes introduced in DST 2007.

2. Upgrade LifeKeeper to the latest version which is 6.1.1 and it includes JRE 1.5.X which has the problem fixed.

SIOS and SteelEye Experts Present at Tech Events

Yoshinori Sato, a Linux kernel engineer and maintainer employed by our parent company SIOS Technology, will present at FOSDEM on the port of the 2.6 Linux kernel to the SH-2(A) processor.  More about Sato-san's presentation is here.

SteelEye CTO James Bottomley will conduct a session titled  "Achieving High Availability and Data Protection with Linux" at Novell BrainShare where SteelEye is a gold sponsor.

If you are attending either of these events, please attend these sessions to see the SIOS/SteelEye experts in action.

Comments on Novell/Microsoft Details

Novell and Microsoft today announced the first details of their Linux/Windows data center initiatives.  As providers of products to both Linux and Windows environments, we have a perhaps interesting take on these initiatives.  Our thoughts on each of the four areas are below:

Virtualization – Nothing earth shattering announced here.  MS is continuing to embrace Linux as a guest OS in MS Virtual Server 2005 R2 and will continue this support in Longhorn’s Viridian.  As well, MS plans to support running Windows in SUSE's ZEN.  The coupling here obviously is to take on the market leader in this space – VMWARE.  It will be interesting to see how Windows licensing plays into this puzzle once all of the parts are ready.  Are they going to try to squeeze out VMWARE by not offering as attractive server license pricing for people running VMWARE ESX?  That would be our guess. VMWARE is already preparing for that battle.

Web Services-Based Management – This is a step in the right direction for MS.  In the past MS choose to offer limited options for managing anything other than Windows OS.  Now with their new partnership, they are going to have to take their blinders off and realize that people actually use software other than MS in the data center.  So now customers will able to use MOM (aka, System Center Operation Manager 2007) to manage both Windows and Linux more fully as well as putting the appropriate open source hooks specified in the WS-Management in Windows to allow management of Windows from other management consoles, especially ZENWorks Orchestrator.

Directory and Identity Interoperability – They said much of nothing here other than they are working on better interoperability and will have more information in the near future.  This is an important task that must been done right to ensure that whatever LDAP solution you choose, you will be supported by both MS and Linux.  If support is better between MS and SUSE directory services, then this will be a great selling feature for SUSE over Red Hat.

Document Format Compatibility – In order for Linux to have a chance to take hold on the desktop, this will have to be as seamless as sharing documents between different versions of MS Office.  It seems as if in the past it was just OpenOffice trying to co-exist with MS.  Now Microsoft will be a more active participant and hopefully this cooperation will help achieve transparent interoperability between both Office platforms.