Linux Gazette: Linux Management goes Big Time: Volution Interview with Craig Burton

“As I began to look into Volution, I suspected it might be the
first enterprise product with the potential to elevate Linux into
position as serious — i.e. marketable — enterprise
infrastructure. Volution competes directly with the offerings of
all the established vendors. An there’s nothing exclusive about it,
at least where other Linux distributions are concerned. It works
with all of them. Caldera also plans to make it work with SCO’s
UnixWare (decended from the original AT&T UNIX), which Caldera
purchased last year.”

“This scope is due partly to Volution’s use of SLP (Service
Location Protocol ) a standard Internet (RFC2165) protocol that
allows discovery, location and configuration of network services
such as mail, print and Web hosting. Caldera has developed a
version of SLP, called OpenSLP, that it has contributed to the open
source community (www.openslp.org). With OpenSLP, services make
their presence known to Volution’s management agent without needing
to go through any kind of setup, cofiguration or other
modification.”

“To make more sense of what Caldera is doing with Volution,
I called on Craig Burton, who is perhaps the world’s leading
authority on network services (a topic he did much to define both
at Novell in the Eighties and The Burton Group in the
Nineties). In late January I called on Craig to help make
sense of what Caldera is doing with Volution. Normally a curmudgeon
about vendor’s new products and claims, he makes an exception in
the case of Volution. I asked him why.”

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