eWEEK Labs’ Top Products Of 2009

Palm WebOS

From the way it integrates all like communications into a single interface, to the way it seamlessly moves from local search to Web search, to its intuitive gesture-based user controls, Palm WebOS is a joy to use.

Although it’s currently available only on the Palm Pre and Pixi – neither of which is the OS’ definitive hardware platform – and although I have my doubts as to whether third-party developers will create enough action on the platform to make it successful long-term, Palm WebOS is a thoughtful and well-designed mobile platform.

—Andrew Garcia

SUSE Studio 1.0

One of the most compelling things about Linux as a platform is its elasticity. It’s possible to take a general-purpose Linux-based operating system and strip it down to just enough components to carry out the task at hand, making the open-source amalgamation a popular choice for customisation-heavy scenarios such as embedded devices and high-performance computing.

As virtualisation and cloud computing have grown in popularity, the potential audience for stripped-down, reconfigurable systems has grown as well, leading general-purpose OS vendors to offer more modular versions of their wares.

The most impressive of these efforts I’ve seen so far is Novell’s SUSE Studio 1.0, a web-based service for building custom Linux appliances based on Novell’s SUSE Enterprise and openSUSE distributions. SUSE Studio boasts a slick interface that manages to accept a lot of complex input while remaining very responsive.

The service is well-integrated with Novell’s existing Linux software framework: It’s easy to grab software packages from the official repositories for SUSE and openSUSE, and it’s easy to locate and integrate packages built with Novell’s openSUSE Build Service, which both broadens the available software and provides an easy route to building your own packages.

SUSE Studio also makes great use of the excellent package dependency-checking and -resolving capabilities that have long been a part of SUSE distributions. This helps a great deal when combining components from disparate sources.

SUSE Studio impressed me with its “test drive” feature, which enabled me to try out an appliance remotely before downloading it – a real timesaver. Also, I could record any changes made during these test drives and apply them to my appliance project. Finally, the service offered me the options of exporting my projects in a handful of different formats, including those for VMware and Xen virtualisation hosts.

—Jason Brooks

vSphere 4

VMware is the standard setter in virtual IT compute infrastructure, and the company pressed this advantage when it re-minted and significantly expanded its flagship product, VMware Infrastructure, as vSphere 4.

As I said in my review of vSphere in June, “The VMware marketing team has been working overtime to promote vSphere 4 as the first cloud operating system. IT managers can safely set aside this breathless chatter and focus on the fact that vSphere will allow IT departments to place application workloads on the most cost-effective compute resource.” This could be in a cloud environment or in a private data centre. The cool thing is that the choice is possible, and that IT managers who use vSphere are in a position to make changes to workload placement in the future.

vSphere’s impact can also be seen in the role it plays in two of eWEEK Labs’ other Products of the Year. At the March release of the Intel Xeon 5500 “Nehalem” processor family, virtualisation – specifically, VMware’s then-beta vSphere 4 – was at the centre of demonstrations of the processor family’s vastly improved capacity and power efficiency demonstrations. And when networking giant Cisco announced its entry into the compute side of the data centre with its Unified Computing System, VMware’s vSphere was again at the centre of the conversation.

Coming out of the abstraction “clouds” that abound around virtualisation, VMware made a specific enhancement that I still think is groundbreaking in the field: In vSphere 4, it is possible to integrate a third-party virtual network switch. (The Cisco Nexus 1000v was the first such switch to be supported.) This advance makes it possible for IT organisations to immediately utilise the networking expertise of their Cisco networking engineers. Now, instead of having system admins architecting complex network implementations, experienced engineers can be put on the job.

This is an example of how virtualisation technology should rapidly evolve to preserve the cost-savings that have been realised from server consolidation projects. Other virtualisation vendors either are struggling to catch up to the pace being set by VMware or lack the wide-scale installed base to match the well-deserved leadership position that VMware maintained in 2009.

—Cameron Sturdevant