Micro
Burst
IT SPENDING
Despite global economic
woes, U. S. corporate IT
spending rose
6%
in the second quarter,
according to the Bureau of
Economic Analysis.
SOURCE: MAVEN WAVE PAR TNERS,
AUGUS T 2011
OPEN SOURCE
OpenStack Eyes
‘Extreme Scale’
In Upgrade
CAREERS
H-1B Visa Cap Must Go, Says NYC Mayor
NEW YORK MAYOR Michael Bloom berg is calling for “eliminating the cap on H1B visas” because restric tive U.S. visa policies — particularly
limitations on employmentbased green cards
— are a form of “national suicide.”
In a speech late last month at the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce offices in Washington,
Bloomberg said that “temporary visas like
the H1B program help fill critical gaps in our
workforce, but the numbers are too few and
the filing process too long and unpredictable.”
Bloomberg has long called for eliminating
the visa cap to ease access to employmentbased
green cards. He’s also an advocate of altering
visa policies to attract foreign entrepreneurs and
encourage foreign students to stay in the U.S.
His latest comments come at a time when
demand for H1B visas is relatively light — as is
IT hiring overall. Before the recession, all avail
able yearlong visas were snapped up in a week.
In his speech, Bloomberg didn’t address
arguments from H1B opponents, who view
the visa as a way for companies to bring in low
cost employees or displace U.S.based workers
through offshore outsourcing.
OpenStack developers have updated the project’s open-source cloud
software with a new graphical interface and a unified authentication-management system.
One goal behind the update is to
“make OpenStack easier to use and
administer,” said Jonathan Bryce,
chairman of the OpenStack Project
Policy Board. “And we’ve continued to
improve for extreme scale” to enable
OpenStack to accommodate “tens
of thousands” of servers, he added,
noting that “other options out there
aren’t really considering that scale.”
Overall, this release — named
Diablo — will include over 70 new
features and enhancements, a
number of which address the goal
of massive scalability. A new distrib-
uted scheduler will deploy virtual
machines anywhere in the system,
and a new multicluster container
sync feature can replicate data
across different remote clusters.
The image-management service
now allows users to search for spe-
cific virtual machine instances.
Developed by NASA for its Nebula
cloud project, OpenStack open-source software runs large cloud
installations. So far, it has been
downloaded over 50,000 times.
— JOAB JAckSON,
IDG NewS ServIce
