5.1 upgrade supports broader virtualization, software appliances and computing in the cloud
Red Hat introduced the first “dot-one” upgrade of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 operating system Wednesday, adding greater virtualization capability, support for independent-software-vendor software appliances and access to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud for accessing additional computing capacity as needed. Red Hat claims the improvements will increase its market share to 50% of servers.
Red Hat is updating its Linux-based server operating system and offering a number of other related improvements aimed at helping the company assume a leadership role in enterprise computing. The enhancements include support for software appliances, improved virtualization, and a partnership with Amazon’s compute “in the cloud” service that lets companies tap additional computing capacity on demand via the Web and access software-as-a service offerings.
The strategy should “more than double our market share to power more than 50% of the world’s servers by 2015. That’s our goal,” said Paul Cormier, vice president of worldwide engineering for Red Hat.
Red Hat launched Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 Wednesday, the first significant upgrade of its RHEL 5 operating system introduced in March. The upgrade and other related initiatives comprise Red Hat’s Linux Automation strategy. Key features include the following:
• Broader deployment of RHEL to virtual and physical servers and across a broad array of server platforms, including x86, x86-64, POWER, Itanium and mainframe servers.Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) on-demand utility computing service. Amazon provides additional computing capacity to enterprises on a pay-per-minute use basis and now enterprises can access RHEL through the service.
• The ability for independent software vendors to deliver appliance-based solutions through the Red Hat Appliance Operating System to be certified for deployment on RHEL.
• A beta release of RHEL through the Amazon
The RHEL upgrades are designed to address the challenges CIOs face from their companies to expand network capability with a flat IT budget, said Scott Crenshaw, vice president of Enterprise Linux for Red Hat.
“We believe [this] will provide answers to the challenges CIOs face today by providing an infrastructure designed at its core for automation, where you can run any application anywhere at any time,” Crenshaw said on a Webcast devoted to the news.
Thousands of software applications are certified to run on RHEL, but hundreds more are offered each day, and the goal of Red Hat’s Linux Automation strategy is to certify them once to run on physical or virtual servers or on Amazon, Crenshaw said. “It’s our road map to extend the open source platform to eliminate the discontinuities that exist today in infrastructure silos,” he said.
RHEL 5, with its virtualization capability, has been deployed on more than 18,000 servers since it was introduced in March, although company officials could not detail how widely virtualization is used in various enterprises. Crenshaw said, anecdotally, that it is being used in production environments, running databases, ERP systems and transaction processing.
Red Hat is reaching out to software appliance makers with a new Red Hat Appliance Operating System and an appliance development kit, says Brian Stevens, Red Hat’s CTO.
A software appliance is a product that includes the code for that specific application but also just the few elements of operating system code needed to run that appliance. Red Hat is accommodating software appliances as long as the applications are RHEL certified, Stevens says. Once certified, they can run on bare metal, in a virtualized server, or in the cloud. The RHEL Appliance Operating System and appliance development kit will be available sometime in the first half of next year.
Other appliances will not run easily in a Red Hat environment if they are not RHEL certified, however. “Other solutions out there for an appliance generate a homegrown Linux, and that just doesn’t scale in the enterprise,” Stevens says. “It introduces manageability problems, it introduces security problems. Our solution addresses that with a certified appliance.”
Red Hat’s support of software appliances is welcome news to appliance vendor rPath, a company started by former Red Hat executives and engineers. “It accelerates the market for what we do, and I think it’s great that they have acknowledged that they have had to respond to this change,” says Billy Marshall, CEO and co-founder of rPath.
As virtualization expands the number of hypervisors installed in servers, there’s less need to pair a large, general-purpose operating system with every software application when the appliance can contain just the operating-system code needed to run the appliance, Marshall says. A software appliance with only the necessary operating-system code takes up much less space on a server than a full-fledged operating system.
However, Marshall needs to know more of the specifications of the Red Hat Appliance Operating System before he’ll know how well it supports such software appliances as rPath’s. “We won’t know until they release the product,” he says, though he thinks it may be a slimmed-down version of a RHEL operating system. Still, he’s concerned that the appliance operating system will contain components that may not mesh with the components the software appliance vendor thinks are best suited to running the particular application.
