Twitter Gets Linux Foundation Membership

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organisation dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, has announced that Twitter has joined the foundation.

In addition to Twitter, the Linux Foundation also announced that Inktank and Servergy have also become members.

Helping to advance Linux

“Linux and its ability to be heavily tweaked is fundamental to our technology infrastructure,” said Chris Aniszczyk, manager of open source at Twitter, in a statement. “By joining The Linux Foundation, we can support an organisation that is important to us and collaborate with a community that is advancing Linux as fast as we are improving Twitter.”

As the importance of data, especially real-time data, takes precedence both in the enterprise and in the consumer world, companies are relying on Linux to support more information, more of the time and in more ways than ever. Particularly, social media firms all rely on Linux to build out hugely scalable, low-cost, low-energy server farms to support massive data and traffic.

The Linux Foundation’s “Enterprise End User Report” released earlier this year shows that nearly 72 percent of users will be adding more Linux servers in the next 12 months to support big data, which is double the percentage of users who plan to add Windows servers to support the same function.

The three new Linux Foundation members, Inktank, Servergy and Twitter, represent how Linux is enabling companies to support unprecedented levels of information and providing the foundation for their businesses today and in the future. Inktank and Twitter will be presenting this week at LinuxCon and CloudOpen.

Twitter is a real-time information service on which people post ideas, comments and news in 140 characters or less. Twitter brings users closer to the topics, events and people they care most about around the world. Based in San Francisco, Twitter is available worldwide in 30 languages, with 140 million active users and 400 million Tweets per day.

Real-time data processing

This volume of data puts high demands on real-time data processing and the pace of innovation at the company. Twitter is supported by tens of thousands of Linux machines, which allow the company to customise for its unique needs. Twitter is joining The Linux Foundation to support the mission of promoting, protecting and advancing Linux, the company said.

Twitter’s Chris Aniszczyk will deliver a keynote at LinuxCon on 30 August entitled “The OSS Behind a Tweet”.

Inktank is the services and support company for Ceph, an open-source, distributed storage system that combines object storage, block storage and file system storage in one unified platform.

The technology was created to help organisations scale their storage infrastructure to meet their ever-increasing demand while decreasing storage costs and increasing operational flexibility by freeing them from restrictive, expensive and proprietary storage systems. The company is also actively involved in contributing to OpenStack, CloudStack, btrfs, KVM/QEMU, and several other open-source projects.

“Ceph has a long history of collaboration with the Linux community, including the integration of Ceph into the mainline Linux kernel about three years ago,” Bryan Bogensberger, president and chief operating officer of Inktank, said in a statement. “As the project’s advocate and sponsor, Inktank is formalising its commitment to Linux with its Linux Foundation membership. We are eager to collaborate with developers and business executives from the world’s most aggressive companies to meet their growing storage needs today and into the future.”

High-performance servers

Servergy designs and manufactures a new class of hyper-efficient, high-performance servers for a world where increasing levels of data centre traffic and energy costs are dramatically on the rise. A 2009 Silicon Valley startup now based in McKinney, Texas, Servergy has developed IBM Power Architecture-based, enterprise-class Linux machines that reduce the energy, cooling, space, and carbon and water footprint of traditional data centre servers by as much as 80 percent or more.

“We’ve seen the level of data centre traffic that companies are managing dramatically rise in the last few years, putting both performance and energy costs right at the top of the priority list,” said Bill Mapp, chairman and chief executive of Servergy, in a statement. “Linux helps us to deliver on both with top performance-per-watt for our customers. We look forward to continued contributions to the advancement of Linux and being a part of the growing community of top companies, globally.”

“The addition of Inktank, Servergy and Twitter to The Linux Foundation membership clearly illustrates the dominant role Linux is playing to support technology and business,” Amanda McPherson, vice president of marketing and developer services at The Linux Foundation, said in a statement. “We’re excited to formalise our work with these innovators and to hear from them during this week’s LinuxCon and CloudOpen events.”

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