red hat

Open Virtualization Alliance adds 100-plus members

The Open Virtualization Alliance, a consortium committed to fostering the adoption of open virtualization technologies, today announced total membership of more than 200, up from 65 in just over three months. New members include CA Technologies, DataStax and Jaspersoft.

I spoke with Scott Crenshaw, VP and GM of Cloud for Red Hat, who told CNET that infrastructure as important as virtualization needs an open alternative. And Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) has emerged as a strategic initiative at many large companies, including Intel and HP. KVM is a full virtualization solution for Linux on x86 hardware that provides for multiple virtual … Read more

Open-source Scala gains commercial backing

The open-source Scala programming language is getting a big boost today in form of venture-funding for a new start-up.

Typesafe is launching the first commercial entity behind Scala, founded by Scala creator Martin Odersky and flush with $3 million from Greylock Partners.

Scala is a general purpose programming language designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way. It integrates features of object-oriented and functional languages and reduces code size in comparison to Java.

Greylock also funded Red Hat and Cloudera so it's no surprise that Typesafe will be taking a page from those companies … Read more

Database economics in cloud and virtualization

Many of the most interesting big economic landmarks in IT have happened around what might be called "re-platforming," as users take existing applications and redeploy them on new platforms, such as we see when applications move from corporate data centers to the Amazon Web Services EC2 or the Rackspace Cloud.

We see this trend every few years, for example when the IT masses switched from the mainframe to the client server world, and then again when we went from big iron Unix to Intel-driven X86 commodity platforms. Today, cloud and virtualization represent the next major re-platforming trend as … Read more

Red Hat acquires Makara for cloud platform

Red Hat jumped back into the acquisition game announcing this morning that it has acquired

Makara, a start-up focused on providing a cloud platform (platform-as-a-service, or PaaS) for Java and PHP applications on both public and private clouds.

The open-source stalwart has been on the PaaS march for the last few months for a number of reasons, including the necessity to support applications in multiple environments and demand for private cloud solutions from large enterprises.

If you read between the lines from Red Hat executive comments (and the rumor mill), it seemed like Red Hat had Makara, or a Makara-like … Read more

Red Hat announces Enterprise Linux 6

Red Hat today announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, the latest release of its operating platform, saying it is designed to support the new enterprise architectures of today, whether physical, virtual, or cloud-based.

The company said the new release includes "hundreds of technical feature enhancements" that are designed to improve agility, reduce costs, and reduce IT complexity. It also includes a range of updated server and desktop apps. More importantly, the company said the new release is designed to be as "future proof" as possible.

Pricing was not announced, but the company is … Read more

Red Hat adds to its cloud appeal

Red Hat made several announcements Wednesday related to the development of public and private clouds, including updates to its Cloud Foundation portfolio, the effort to make its Deltacloud a standard API, a flagship cloud customer, and a new platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering.

The company is working to create a comprehensive cloud offering--at least in theory--with new products that address the various layers of what can be considered cloud infrastructure.

This is all interesting, especially because Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens recently stated that cloud services are at least a decade away. Apparently, the company is taking the long-term view that the … Read more

Benchmarking performance in a virtualized world

The central concept behind benchmarks was historically pretty simple. What's the horsepower of some vendor's "Big Iron"? After all, most systems--the important ones, anyway--were the big boxes sitting in a data center someplace doing important stuff like booking orders or counting money.

They cost a lot. They were based on proprietary architectures that made low-level technical comparisons between vendors difficult. And they were a core part of an enterprise's business.

This was largely the environment that spawned the benchmark business. Ideally, buyers would run their own tests, using their own applications, but this was difficult … Read more

VMware and Red Hat: The war for the data center

Once upon a time Red Hat was content to be the enterprise Linux leader and VMware was happy to be the dominant virtual infrastructure vendor.

No more.

As the two companies have sought growth, they've increasingly stepped on each other's toes, with recent VMware marketing taking strong swipes at its erstwhile partner, Red Hat, highlighting Pizza Hut as a high-profile customer defection from Red Hat to VMware.

Can't the two companies just get along?

Probably not. Back in 2006, Red Hat and VMware announced an "expanded relationship to support customers and ISVs who are deploying virtualization.&… Read more

Apache Cassandra gets boost from Riptano (Q&A)

A new company called Riptano recently launched to provide support and services for the Apache Cassandra project, a nonrelational open-source database designed for high performance that has a strong presence in Web shops like Twitter, Digg, and Reddit. I recently had the chance to chat with Matt Pfeil, founder of Riptano, and he provided some insight into the project and the new world of NoSQL database approaches.

What exactly is Cassandra and who uses it? Cassandra is a highly scalable, distributed, open source database. It's a top-level Apache project with committers from Riptano, Rackspace, Digg, Facebook, and others.

Cassandra … Read more