Red Hat evolves in the name of reducing
infrastructure costs
2 November, 2005
By Liam Lahey
Red Hat said its primary technology plans for 2006 through
2007 would be to continue to reduce IT infrastructure costs
for its' customers. Virtualization, stateless Linux and developer
enablement are the keys to reducing IT costs, company officials
said.
For a while now, Red Hat's running advantage over other Linux
distributions had been the strong partnerships the company
made with major vendors when it appeared it was the only solid
game in town. Those were the pre- Novell SuSE days, and vendors
(such as Oracle and IBM) all got behind Red Hat.
Nowadays, Red Hat has real competition in Novell SuSE, said
Warren Shiau, senior IT analyst for The Strategic Council
in Toronto. Shiau said the enhancements Red Hat has made to
its Enterprise Linux and the company's forthcoming solutions
are all good news. Furthermore, Red Hat is giving Unix shops
pause to consider Linux in terms of a long-term platform strategy.
"Red Hat is the (enterprise Linux) market leader (in
North America) in revenue," Shiau said. "Integrated
virtualization is far better than an add-on solution . . .
it's a cleaner, simpler solution to manage.
"But this is also where Unix and Windows is headed as
well. That said any Unix installation is regarded as a viable
market opportunity for Linux. Many Unix shops are looking
in the long-term at Linux for their platform."
In 2003, Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat launched Red Hat Enterprise
Linux (version 3) and the company's Open Source Architecture
strategy. After focusing on issues surrounding reliability,
high performance, security, scalable systems, identity management,
virtualized storage solutions and the application and hardware
ecosystem, the second phase of the plan is to define the technologies
that will keep Red Hat Enterprise Linux among the leading
commercial open source solution providers and continue to
drive down IT costs.
"Red Hat has over 10 years' experience in open source
and Linux. Ours is a purely open source strategy which is
a contrast to the hybrid model employed by our competition,"
said Leigh Day, director of corporate communications for Red
Hat. "Red Hat's core market has been the enterprise for
the last three years. We are now seeing the deployments become
more expansive as enterprise customers are also now interested
in taking the value Linux has brought to their infrastructures
to other parts of critical computing. Virtualization and stateless
Linux will add agility and flexibility to enterprise infrastructures
and will help enterprise customers derive even greater value
from their Linux deployments."
For late 2006, the next major release of Red Hat Enterprise
Linux will feature a fully integrated server virtualization
capability. Working with the Xen community and partners, Red
Hat's development efforts in this space will ensure maximum
system utilization and availability by optimizing the core
operating system platform for virtualized environments.
Meanwhile, Red Hat's pricing model for server virtualization
technology will be designed to give customers the freedom
to run an unlimited number of virtualized instances for a
flat subscription price. Customers will be able to enjoy the
benefits of a dynamic virtualized environment without the
need to track complex pricing models.
Red Hat said it would work with its partners and customers
to help increase the quality and time-to-market of software
development projects, through the leverage of open source
tools and processes.
Red Hat's specific plans for enabling developers will include
continued investment in open source tools such as Eclipse,
SystemTAP, Frysk and others, as well as an expansion of developer-focused
content, services and training targeted at commercial application
developers. Red Hat will also begin to leverage its substantial
testing and certification experience to help customers decrease
their internal platform validation efforts, as the desire
to validate more open source components increase.
Previews of the technologies are available now via www.fedora.redhat.com.
The Strategic Council's Shiau said Red Hat will have its
work cut out for itself. Novell SuSE Linux in many ways is
considered to have the more comprehensive stack built up around
Linux versus Red Hat, he said.
"SuSE has more functionality, more solutions, but fewer
agreements with major vendors," Shiau said. "SuSE
. . . most people say it has the advantage of building out
of its' stack."
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