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Jun. 30, 2010

Speaking at the Red Hat Annual Summit in Boston on June 23rd, Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager of the Linux cloud computing division at Red Hat, Crenshaw took a few shots at Microsoft and its own cloud concept. While everybody was trying to figure out how to get in on the cloud idea, only Red Hat and Microsoft seem to deliver a solution for clouds. Or can they?

He correctly pointed out that while there will be many so-called Internet clouds, companies looking to acquire "real capacity" on public clouds will want to virtualize and run their applications on private clouds first and then know that they can be ported to public clouds, without having to reprogram or rewrite anything in their software.

It's always the same old battle, Windows versus Linux, only with Hyper-V and KVM server hypervisors thrown in for some cloudy measures... Both stacks can support elements of the other's stack, which makes such a clean delineation almost impossible.

And what Crenshaw's simplification of the market also leaves out is the substantial amount of work that servers humming away inside of corporations do atop other operating systems and sometimes using CPUs that don't even come from Intel or AMD in the first place.

"Overall, Microsoft has taken an approach to the cloud, not surprisingly, that is very proprietary in nature as it seeks to lock in its customers. On the other hand, Red Hat's roots are open in nature. That's very different, said Crenshaw."

He also warned attendees at Red Hat Summit that clouds are at the very early stages of development right now, and that no one was sure what the best practices and technologies for clouds would be two, three, or four years down the road.

"This is not the time for customers to adopt a new architecture that locks them into a single vendor. That vendor may or may not be able to deliver what is needed in the future," he added.

But make no mistake. For them to work well, clouds will take more than just putting a label on some piece of code and painting it sky blue, as Red Hat has done with Foundations Edition One. It takes some major changes to the underlying way software is designed, put together and sold to end users in the Enterprise segment.

As part of its Certified Cloud Provider program, Red Hat said it would price Enterprise Linux software licenses by the hour for cloud providers who are partners and would soon do the same for its JBoss tools. If a cloud provider can only charge by the hour there's no reason they should have to pay by the year. Others disagree.

Red Hat is also working with cloud providers to guarantee that applications certified on standalone RHEL and JBoss software will be fully compatible with and automatically run on certified public or private clouds. And, Red Hat is working to provide seamless support for its software no matter if it is deployed on a cloud or a physical server while providing cloud images of its own software that have more rigorous security settings than the out-of-the-box RHEL and JBoss server software.

In April, Red Hat already announced that customers using its premium edition RHEL or RHEL Advanced Platform, the latter being the most expensive support license that Red Hat sells because it has unlimited virtualization, could move those licenses out to the Amazon EC2 public cloud. Those with basic or standard RHEL support contracts cannot move their licenses out to EC2.

Red Hat has effectively wrapped a marketing name around its cloudy software packages, called Cloud Foundations Edition One, that walks companies through the phases to go cloudy: virtualizing their servers, building a private cloud and then adding public clouds.

And that certainly applies to any technology from any vendor and at any given time, some will say. And Microsoft and Red Hat purporting to be a complete cloud provider, including Cisco Systems, EMC and VMware Acadia partnership, IBM and HP are asking IT firms to choose their cloud provider now and start building clouds.

Clouds are just virtualized servers with metered pricing and a mechanism for allowing people to share the resources.

The "Cloud Stack" includes Enterprise MRG to manage, meter and control virtual servers and storage, Red Hat Network Satellite to configures, provision and deploy virtual servers and their applications on private and public clouds using Red Hat's KVM and Hyper-V if need be, and of course the JBoss Operations Network that manages and monitors applications running atop private or public clouds on JBoss, WebSphere or MS Dot.Net.

And while Linux cloud computing is still a relatively new term and almost everybody in the IT sector sees it's moniker an average of 5 to 10 times a day, it is still in its infancy and could easily take another 2 to 3 years before it starts to really gain some altitude in the Enterprise segment of the IT industry.

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Source: Red Hat.

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