Operating system pumps up virtualization, high-availability support
Linux market leader Red Hat on Wednesday unveiled the next generation of its open source operating system, saying the software, which integrates virtualization, storage management and high availability, will reduce complexity and make Linux a viable option for a wider range of businesses.
Red Hat also hopes the new release, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, will better position it against proprietary Unix distributions, as well as Novell, which released SuSE Enterprise Linux 10 with support for the open source Xen hypervisor that RHEL5 includes last summer.
“It seems clear that Linux has fully arrived as a business-critical [operating system] for businesses of every kind and size,” says Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT Research. “Red Hat’s new Advanced Platform solutions suggest that the company is taking a lead in defining and delivering solutions that leverage the capabilities of Linux to its customers’ benefit.”
Analysts also note that enterprise buyers should carefully review the features in the operating system before deciding what to deploy. A Network World Clear Choice test of RHEL 5 found great benefits in the new features, including virtualization and security, but also noted that the updates could cause problems with some applications if the possible impacts of the new features aren’t taken into account.
Red Hat’s update includes two new products: the basic operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which replaces RHEL Enterprise Server and supports servers with as many as two processor sockets and as many as four guest operating systems; and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, a more advanced, virtualization-focused platform that replaces RHEL Advanced Server and supports all server configurations and an unlimited number of virtual machines.
The pricing remains the same as RHEL 4, with a one-year subscription for Red Hat Enterprise Linux starting at about $350 and round-the clock support priced at about $1,300. Annual subscription pricing for RHEL Advanced Platform starts at about $1,500 for standard support and about $2,500 for 24/7 support.
RHEL Advanced Platform is the foundation for a truly virtualized environment and includes the Red Hat Cluster Suite and Global File System products to enable users to not only virtualize servers, but also associated storage, Red Hat says. RHEL 5 lets users move virtual machines among physical servers and virtualized storage is a key supporting technology enabling virtual workloads to access storage no matter where they are physically located.
“For the first time an operating system, high availability and management are brought together integrated in one platform,” said Paul Cormier, executive vice president of engineering at Red Hat, during a press conference in San Francisco introducing the new operating system.
“In the proprietary Unix days, this would cost enormous amounts of dollars,” he said. “You had to pay for the storage stack, the clustering and high availability, the file system, logical volume management – you can see how this adds up to tens of thousands of dollars of additional cost. We put it in one open source software platform.”
RHEL Advanced Platform is the culmination of two-years of work by Red Hat with significant input from customers, partners and the open source community, Cormier said. Where Red Hat once offered just the open source operating system, it has been directing its energies into moving up the stack and creating a complete enterprise infrastructure package. Last year, for example, Red Hat acquired JBoss in order to integrate the open source middleware into its products.
With RHEL Advanced Platform, Red Hat is moving into high availability, clustering and virtualization, areas where it previously depended on partners. The idea is to provide Red Hat customers with a package of open-source-based enterprise capabilities, thus reducing costs when compared with proprietary alternatives. Cormier said that RHEL 5’s database availability offering, for example, can save customers “$200,000 or more per database” compared with the cost of the leading clustered database system.
Red Hat also is simplifying management and has released a new Red Hat Network module for RHEL 5 that enables users to more easily manage virtualized environments by giving them a single place from which to create and manage Linux guests. The Red Hat Network gives users the ability to manage 1,000 virtual systems as a single system would be managed, Cormier said.
In the area of security, Red Hat has made SELinux, a government-backed project that lets users set fine-grained access controls to prevent operating system threats and first introduced in RHEL 4, easier to manage. Other security enhancements in RHEL 5 include native support for capabilities necessary to meet Common Criteria for Trusted Operating systems; support for smart cards; buffer control technologies; and deeper auditing capabilities.
“In the past this technology was only in data centers that had deep expertise; what we’ve tried to do with the platform is simplify it so we can get it out to the masses,” Cormier said.
Still, analysts say that customers should review the features in the operating system carefully to figure out which features fit best in their environments.
“As RHEL 5 and other enterprise operating systems gain more complex features, consolidating their management and selecting which features to deploy where are going to be increasingly significant challenges for IT decision-makers,” says Michael Dortch, director of IT infrastructure management strategies at the Robert Frances Group.
