Red Hat Revenue

Tech business prognosticators often tune into financial reports from iconic Linux vendor Red Hat as an indicator of industry health. The fourth quarter of 2012 shows some promising results for Red Hat, with revenue up 17% over the year and profits rising to US$  43 million compared with US$  35 million for 2012Q3. The company attributed much of the increase to growth in large contracts in the US$ 5-10 million range.

Of course, Red Hat is not just a Linux software company but is (perhaps primarily) a Linux service company, and they seem to be fully aware the future for software services is in the cloud. Red Hat Enterprise Linux now supports a preview version of OpenStack Folsom, with full integration expected for an upcoming release.

Despite the promising rise in revenue, Red Hat's stock price fell 7% because the increase was slightly below what Wall Street analysts had predicted.

Supercomputing Revenue Up Nearly 30%

Revenue in the high-end supercomputer segment of HPC systems, which sell for US$ 500,000 and up, increased 29.3% to US$ 5.6 billion from 2011, according to IDC's recent "Worldwide High-Performance Technical Server QView" report.

According to the report, supercomputers accounted for 50.9% of total technical server revenue for 2012. The report states that a major part of the growth came from just a few large systems sold by Fujitsu, IBM, HP, and Cray. For example, the Fujitsu "K" system installed at Japan's RIKEN, accounted for more than US$ 500 million of the total.

Additionally, IBM led all vendors with a 32.0% share of overall factory revenue, followed by HP with 30.8%. Dell held third place, with 13.5% of worldwide technical server revenue, the announcement said.

"HPC technical servers, especially Supercomputers, have been closely linked not only to scientific advances but also to industrial innovation and economic competitiveness. For this reason, nations and regions across the world are increasing their investments in supercomputing even in today's challenging economic conditions," said Earl Joseph, Program Vice President for Technical Computing at IDC.

IDC forecasts that the HPC technical server market as a whole will reach revenues of more than US$ 14 billion by 2015. Visit IDC.com to read the announcement.http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24032313#.UVGw7I4_020.

MongoDB 2.4 Released

The MongoDB Engineering Team has released MongoDB 2.4, the latest stable version of the database, with several new features, performance improvements, and bug fixes.

MongoDB is an open source, document-oriented database designed for ease of development and scaling. According to the product website, the latest version includes the following new features: hash-based sharding, capped arrays, geospatial enhancements, faster counts, working set analyzer, and V8 JavaScript engine.

MongoDB 2.4 also adds support for boolean searches in MongoDB databases as a beta feature. According to the website, the new functionality lets you "search text in data stored in MongoDB, using an index that updates in real-time and is always consistent with the data set."

Additionally, MongoDB 2.4 includes two new security enhancements: Kerberos modular authentication and role-based access control. The website states that Kerberos is part of MongoDB Enterprise and allows integration with enterprise-level user management systems. The role-based access control feature allows more granular management of privileges. Note that Kerberos authentication is only present in MongoDB Enterprise Edition.