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May 11, 2010

There are some observers in the Linux community that say there's a looming data center war involving Linux vendor Red Hat and server virtualization provider VMware.

But before we begin on that path, here's a bit of history background. Matt Asay, author of The Open Road Blog and COO of Canonical, recently noted that there are heightened hostilities between Red Hat and VMware in the past two to three months.

In fact, the apparent showdown between Red Hat and VMware even gets a bit more interesting when you add established and emerging server manufacturers from here and there...

Recently, Red Hat enjoyed an enviable position at HP's Americas Partner Conference. The Red Hat / Hewlett-Packard duo is even planning to gang up against database giant Oracle, if you can believe it. Some do, anyway.

What’s driving all this fierce competition? Who will eventually control the data center: Operating system providers such as Red Hat, Novell, Microsoft or server virtualization integrators such as VMware or Cetrix?

More and more today, operating system providers such as Microsoft and Red Hat have their own virtualization products.

However, one of the most intriguing server stories right now involves Cisco Systems. Cisco’s new Unified Computing System which converges networking, storage and servers is catching on with some data center customers, according to electronic distributors like Avnet Technology and Westcon’s Comstor team.

If you keep a close eye on Cisco’s UCS server strategy, you’ll hear some mention of Red Hat — but a lot more noise involving VMware and, to a lesser degree, Cetrix.

There's no question that Red Hat continues to polish its own Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) strategy.

And it’s safe to bet that Red Hat increasingly trains its channel partners on RHEV, especially since about 59.7 percent of Red Hat’s revenues now involve channel partners.

Expect more Red Hat virtualization surprises at the Red Hat Summit, June 22 to 25 in Boston, MA.

But make no mistake, while all of this is going on, VMware isn’t standing still, certainly not by a long shot...

A new Acadia initiative, led by no other than former Compaq CEO Michael Capellas, will soon promote joint VMware, EMC and Cisco offerings all at the same time.

Additionally, VMware’s SpringSource division has been on an acquisition spree to help partners and IT executives more easily manage Linux servers and data centers.

For the most part, many value-added resellers and system integrators still consider Red Hat a Linux company and VMware a virtualization company.

Longer term, Matt Asay is sort of accurate. Channel partners will increasingly view Red Hat and VMware as industry rivals in a way. And at some point, partners may need to choose sides, and that has the great potential of causing some major frictions within the Linux and open source community.

After all, channel partners only want what's best for their clients, and, well yes: themselves as well...

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Source: The Var Guy.

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