| Red Hat strategy spans virtualized, cloud and appliance deployments |
Nov. 07, 2007
Red Hat Executive Vice President of Engineering Paul Cormier on Nov. 7 predicted that Red Hat’s new Linux Automation strategy, which allows Red Hat-certified applications to run anywhere, at any time, will help the company to more than double its current server market share. In addition, he said, Red Hat Enterprise Linux will have “over 50 percent of server market share by 2015.”
Red Hat plans to achieve those goals by automating and simplifying its Linux infrastructure to create a RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux)-based Linux Automation infrastructure. This, in turn, will allow any RHEL application to run on any server, at any time. These applications, including existing RHEL certified applications, will run on physical, virtual and cloud-based servers.
"With new deployment models and technologies making corporate IT deployments much more dynamic, applications are no longer tied to a single server. Linux Automation simplifies that complexity, providing a unified platform for application execution, management and orchestration," said Scott Crenshaw, Red Hat's vice president of enterprise Linux business. "Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the industry's fastest-growing operating environment because of superior performance, reliability, economics and customer support. Red Hat manages an installed base of millions via Red Hat Network. This experience guides our strategy for Linux Automation."
At the core of Red Hat's Linux Automation strategy is the RHEL operating system and application ecosystem. Businesses can choose to use stand-alone servers, virtual servers, on-demand 'cloud' computing environments or RHEL appliance-based vertical software programs. What’s different is that with Red Hat's Linux Automation concept, all the user will see is the application. It won't matter whether it's running on a single processor Pentium system down the hall or on a mainframe 1,000 miles away.
Better still, it won’t matter to IT managers and ISVs, either. By using a common set of development, deployment, management and automation tools, programs can be written and systems, users and applications can be managed regardless of the underlying hardware or where the servers are located.
For ISVs, Red Hat specifically promised that software partners will gain access to this entire ecosystem with a single application certification. "Certify once, deploy anywhere," is how Brian Stevens, Red Hat's chief technology officer and vice president of engineering, described how Linux Automation will work for developers.
Red Hat's executives claim that Linux Automation strategy covers all facets of the IT environment necessary to enable any application to be run anywhere, at any time. It creates an infrastructure that is built for automation, including virtualization, identity management, high availability and performance capabilities. The strategy will deliver a rich set of automation, management and orchestration tools--now available and under development--by Red Hat and its partners.
Crenshaw also said that "customers can choose to deploy every RHEL-certified application on the widest range of environments in the industry. This includes stand-alone server systems, scaling from the smallest single-processor systems to the largest servers, including 1,024 processor multicore servers and mainframes. In an interesting twist, Crenshaw kept pounding on the point that when it comes to servers, it's Red Hat Linux, not any Microsoft operating system, which supports the most hardware.
With RHEL 5.1, which was also released today, business customers will also get improved virtualization support at no additional charge. The company claims that this will give them improved service levels, operation flexibility and efficiency through features such as live migration, dynamic resource allocation, high availability and clustering.
This virtualization support, which is based on Xen, will not be limited to multiple RHEL VMs. RHEL 5.1 will also support high-performance Microsoft Windows-based guests. In particular, Red Hat will support Windows 2000, Windows 2003, XP and the forthcoming Windows 2008 server.
Regardless of whether customers use physical or virtual servers, IT managers will control the servers by using RHN (Red Hat Network). RHN, which has been RHEL's main management tool for years, has been extended to provide seamless management and automation across physical and virtual servers.
In addition, Linux Automation will now extend to cloud computing and SAAS (software as a service) deployments. This will enable businesses to seamlessly extend their compute resources outside the walls of their data center into “the cloud” to provide an on-demand infrastructure that scales up or down to meet their business needs. Once more, RHEL-certified applications will work on these remote platforms and they can be managed with RHN.
This isn't pie in the sky. Red Hat also announced the beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon
EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud). This collaboration makes all the capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Linux available to customers on Amazon's proven network infrastructure and data centers.
Red Hat executives summed up Linux Automation as a platform choice that is based on both on open source and open standards, rather than proprietary alternatives that lock in customers and restrict flexibility and choice. By delivering a common infrastructure platform that brings together certified applications, Linux, multiple platforms and an open ecosystem of software developers, Red Hat believes it will become the most important server software company in the world.
—Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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