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July 28, 2011

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst says he will be speaking at the LinuxCon this year on opening day about the challenges that still lie ahead as we embark on another twenty years of Linux.

We wanted to know more about Whitehurst's perspective as we prepare for the big event and the formal celebration of the 20th anniversary of Linux. Here's what he told us.

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The Linux operating systems turns twenty years-old this year, and Red Hat is a huge part of its story. How do you view Linux and its future as we begin to celebrate this important milestone?

Whitehurst: Linux is clearly the operating system driving Web 2.0 and cloud computing. Virtually any new application and/or any new web start-up is building a Linux-based stack. That's huge-- Linux has gone from being a "viable alternative" to traditional operating systems to being the "default choice." We should all be very proud of that.

How are customer requirements and expectations changing with regards to Linux?

Whitehurst: That's a tough one to answer. As Linux grows and matures, the customers, and therefore the requirements, are becoming more diverse. There are some very technical enterprise customers who have specific demands around performance, scalability, reliability and security. But there are also the mainstream customers who really just want it to work. They want their preferred applications certified to run on Linux and they want their partners to be able to provide services around Linux.

What is the most important challenge for Linux today in the enterprise, and what needs to happen to address it?

Whitehurst: At this point I think almost everyone will agree that Linux is a viable alternative to traditional operating systems. That fight has been won and won successfully. The next few years will be around turning that acceptance into usage. Linux is still just a quarter of server OS installations. That should ultimately be well north of 50 percent. There's a lot of tackling to make that happen, but we're well on our way.

Industry pundits are speculating that Red Hat will hit the $1 billion revenue milestone this year. You've written about the company being an example for other open source companies with regards to profitability. What does this particular milestone mean to you, your company and to Linux itself?

Whitehurst: I think Red Hat's success is important to Linux and the broad open source community. Our success demonstrates that it is possible to leverage the power of participation and still build a viable and profitable business. Our profitability serves as an example for others which ultimately drives additional investments by companies, individuals and venture capitalists in Linux and development in the open source segment.

The LinuxCon Gala is the official celebration of the 20th Anniversary of Linux and a number of notable Linux luminaries are expected, such as Linus Torvalds, the founder of the Linux operating system. Who do you hope to see there and why?

Whitehurst: I sure want to to meet Linus-- no question about that! Believe it or not, we haven't had the opportunity to meet yet. He's an extraordinary individual, and I'm hoping to get some time with him.

In other Linux news

The OpenStack project is benefiting from a rapidly growing volume of interest in its cloud platform from IT vendors, service providers and potential customers. In July 2010, OpenStack was formed as a cloud operating system that ties together pools of standard server systems.

The project was announced as a joint collaboration between Rackspace and NASA, but has now grown to consist of 83 companies including familiar names such as Citrix, Dell, Cisco, Intel, Ubuntu Linux developer Canonical, Sun Hosting and Avantex in the CaaHS (Cloud as a Hosting Service).

On July 20, the project held an EMEA OpenStack Day in London to celebrate the first anniversary of its foundation, and about 350 OpenStack partners and prospective customers attended the event.

OpenStack's success can be attributed to a number of factors, but its open source nature and support for all common hypervisors, such as vmWare's vSphere, Xen, XenServer and KVM, help assure enterprise customers that they will not get locked into a single vendor's proprietary solution.

"There was some 'white space' if you will before OpenStack, where people were waiting for some kind of standard to emerge," said Mark Collier, vice president of business development at Rackspace's Cloud Builders support operation.

Collier explained that Rackspace's backing had been important to the project's success. Because the infrastructure firm is so large, it can demonstrate that the platform is truly scalable, he said.

But OpenStack is also vendor agnostic as well as hypervisor agnostic, and this flexibility "gives people the confidence that they won't be cemented into just one vendor's roadmap", he added. OpenStack is also more than just a set of specifications.

At the very heart of the project is open-source code that anyone can take, use and build on, said OpenStack founder Jonathan Bryce, who compared it with the Linux desktop operating system in that respect.

Like the Linux operating system, OpenStack is all about developing an ecosystem with plenty of room for vendors and Linux hosting providers to add their own value, he added. Citrix, for example, has based its own Project Olympus Enterprise Cloud Solutions on OpenStack, and has become one of the major developers working on the code.

"Overall, Citrix has played a vital role in OpenStack development, and they don't see it as a threat as they can make money from adding value and selling customers other infrastructure products such as NetScaler with it," said Collier.

So far, OpenStack consists mostly of the Compute module, which manages the pool of virtual machines inside the cloud, and the Object Storage module, which similarly pools storage resources to create a single, distributed storage system.

Future updates on the project are set to include a web-based management portal that will provide a self-service automated provisioning capability similar to vmWare's vCloud Director, plus an ID management system intended to offer identity services for user authentication.

The management portal, known as OpenStack Dashboard, was demonstrated at the London anniversary event. The portal allows users to access a browser-based interface to perform and control tasks such as provisioning and taking snapshot images of virtual machines, according to Bryce.

Although the OpenStack Dashboard is being used now, Bryce said that it will not become a fullly official project, at least not for now, as OpenStack calls the components of its cloud suite until sometime later this year.

And while all of this is happening, the OpenStacks's ID management system is being designed so that users will be able to sign in to public and private clouds, and be authenticated through their organisation's Active Directory infrastructure.

This is at a very early stage, according to Bryce, but it's already usable and is likely to ship as an initial release within a few months.

OpenStack is also preparing the next release of its Cloud Operating System for September. Called Diablo, the upgrade will separate network handling from the Compute module, and make the former activity a standalone service with its own APIs, giving customers greater flexibility in how they manage networking.

Diablo will also update the Object Storage module to allow organizations to create a shared pool of storage using low-cost commodity hardware, removing the need for costly storage area network infrastructure.

With these new functions in place, OpenStack will start to look much more like a complete cloud computing stack that can match the capabilities of vmWare's recently announced vSphere 5 and Cloud Infrastructure Suite.

But Rackspace argued that vmWare should not be seen as leading the cloud industry, since the vast majority of cloud infrastructure operating in the world actually runs atop the Xen hypervisor, such as Amazon's EC2 and its own public cloud platform.

"vmWare is the leader in the server virtualisation perspective, but they have no meaningful adoption in the large-scale cloud world," said Collier.

As cloud adoption grows, OpenStack participants believe a platform based on open standards is more likely to lead the way, especially when organizations and enterprises start using a hybrid cloud strategy that lets them run some workloads internally while others are farmed off to public clouds.

"Will Cloud service providers be drawn to the technologies enterprises are using for internal clouds, or will companies be drawn to what their service provider is already using? We think it will be the latter," Collier said.

In other Linux news

Now owned and managed by Attachmate, SUSE Linux is getting ready for its Cloud Strategy. SUSE is about to face some challenges in the cloud, however.

Nils Brauckmann, president and general manager of Attachmate’s SUSE Business Unit, expects to announce a comprehensive Cloud Strategy in the next sixty to ninety days. You could say that, in a way, SUSE is well-suited for the Cloud. In fact, ask anybody in the open source community and they will quickly tell you that Linux is THE defacto standard for most Cloud deployments today.

Additionally, SUSE Linux has very close relationships with IBM and vmWare-- it always had, right from the beginning.

In fact, vmWare was rumored to be among the bidders for Novell’s SUSE business, but Attachmate eventually acquired all of Novell, some say at an inflated price than what it was really worth, however.

So far, the SUSE Cloud effort has included support for Amazon Web Services; SUSE Studio to help software developers deliver services; SUSE Manager for Linux management and of course Sun's Cloud Hosting deloyments. Plus, SUSE works closely with the KVM and Xen virtualization standards as well.

Still, SUSE lacks an all-encompassing cloud solution in the way the others do. More than a year ago, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced the all-in Cloud Initiative. And the software giant then updated that cloud rally during the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2011, held two weeks ago.

And while all of this is happening, Avantex Hosting announced on July 1st the successful launch of its Enterprise Cloud Solutions, Cloud Computing Apps, Cloud Replication, Cloud DNS, Cloud Load Balancing and Cloud Backup Services to the enterprise segment of the IT industry. "Avantex has been hard at work over the past year-and-a-half in delivering our Enterprise Cloud Solutions on time," says Jim Taylor, Avantex Hosting's founder and Chief Executive Officer.

For its part, Red Hat has been evangelizing multiple Cloud Efforts, including OpenShift (platform as a service or PaaS). Additionally, like Avantex, Red Hat will sell its cloud strategy to partners during the North America Partner Conference to be held Oct. 25 to 27 in Miami, Florida.

SUSE’s Cloud Strategy is going to require a channel partner component which the company doesn't have already. And so far, SUSE is still working to de-couple its partner program from the Novell partner program, a thing that has been a bit of a pain lately.

SUSE’s partner database was still be hosted on Novell’s web site for now. It’s a safe bet that SUSE will sell its Cloud Vision during the Brainshare conference (Oct. 10-14, in Salt Lake City, Utah). Under Novell’s ownership, brainshare had been a Novell-centric conference.

But this year, content will cover each of Attachmate’s business divisions: Novell, NetIQ and SUSE.

Some concrete examples of Cloud Solutions for the Enterprise Segment

"Since December 2009, Avantex Hosting, Cisco networking engineers and Linux system admins have been busy designing, building, integrating and testing a complex portfolio of enterprise Cloud Services that will ensure 100 percent availability for mission-critical applications that deliver Cloud-based services to Fortune 500 corporations, medium-sized companies, as well as small businesses where downtime isn't an option," said Jim Taylor, CEO of Avantex Hosting.

Taylor offered High Tech News Today a detailed analyzis of what Avantex's Enterprise Cloud Solutions consist of:

Cloud Computing Apps -- Avantex's Cloud Computing Apps were designed specifically for business people on the go. Consisting of mobile apps running on Apple's iPhone, the iPad and Research In Motion's BlackBerry smartphones and the PlayBook, these Cloud Computing Apps include secure email service, calendering apps, texting and Instant Messaging services with 100 percent availability, 24/7/365.

Cloud Replication -- Avantex's Cloud Replication Services (CRS) ensure enterprises of a full disaster recovery (DR) solution between two data centers separated by 100 miles in between. CRS is totally transparent and makes full use of Avantex automated NOC (network operations center) and DR services.

Cloud DNS -- For large and medium-size businesses that require a fail safe and fuly redundant DNS solution, Avantex's Cloud DNS Service will provide full DNS record replication on all email services, site hosting, enterprise application services, first-level name server resolution and host authoritative services at all times, regardless of any incident.

Cloud Load Balancing -- As the name implies, Avantex's Cloud Load Balancing Services will ensure full load balancing on any busy corporate website or eCommerce store front. Avantex's Cloud Load Balancing Services are also available for busy mail servers and Microsoft Exchange Servers, utilizing fully redundant email servers that provide security, reliability and high-availability at all times.

Cloud Backup Services -- For any size business that cannot afford to lose any data, Avantex's Cloud Backup Services will ensure that all information on servers is kept backed up at all times. Available hourly, daily, weekly or monthly, Avantex's Cloud Backup Services run on complex SAN (storage area networks) that feature Raid 5 and Raid 10 disk arrays on reliable IBM, HP and Dell servers.

Source: Red Hat.

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