Leading open-source solution
provider Red Hat had a number of major announcements during the past week that
included the following:
- Red Hat and Platform Computing will offer Red Hat HPC
Solution
- The availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, with
integrated virtualization
- The Fedora Project reporting installations of the new
Fedora 8 surpassing 54,000
- The beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a
Web service
- A Linux automation strategy designed to simplify the
work of IT departments by allowing any application to run on any server at any
time
Beneficial Price/Performance
Red Hat announced an agreement with Platform
Computing, a leader in high performance computing (HPC) infrastructure software,
to jointly offer a new product--the Red Hat HPC Solution. It fully
integrates Platform's Open Cluster Stack1 with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The new
offering provides users with an end-to-end solution with a range of tools
necessary to deploy and manage an HPC cluster in a wide range of environments,
from SMB to Enterprise, while offering competitive pricing and outstanding
performance.
Businesses are increasingly utilizing HPC clusters to gain a
competitive edge; the new Red Hat HPC Solution allows users to deploy their HPC
applications in a more cost-effective manner, while providing tools in a single,
easy-to-deploy package, the companies said. The Red Hat solution incorporates
the operating system, device drivers, cluster installer, resource and
application monitor, and job scheduler for every node in the cluster.
The
integrated HPC software stack includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is
designed to deliver maximum application performance using today's low-cost,
industry-standard systems. The solution also incorporates the device drivers and
interconnect support necessary for efficiently running a high-performance
cluster, and also includes Platform's Lava-based job scheduler to rapidly
schedule user workloads. All of the components, supported by Red Hat's global
24x7 enterprise-level services, are delivered in one product, reducing the
complexity and time needed to set up and optimize an HPC cluster.
The
Red Hat HPC Solution has completed certification on a range of hardware
platforms and will be available at the end of 2007.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1
Red Hat announced the availability of Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 5.1, with integrated virtualization. This release provides the
most compelling platform for customers and software developers ever, the company
said, with industry-leading virtualization capabilities complementing Red Hat's
newly announced Linux Automation strategy. It offers the industry's
broadest deployment ecosystem, covering standalone systems, virtualized systems,
appliances and web-scale "cloud" computing environments.
Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 5.1 virtualization delivers considerably broader server support
than proprietary virtualization products, and up to twice the performance. This
allows greater server consolidation and eliminates a key obstacle to deploying
virtualization more widely. And Red Hat Enterprise
Red Hat Enterprise
Linux's deployment flexibility uniquely allows customers to deploy a single
platform, virtual or physical, small or large, throughout their enterprise. By
providing one platform that spans the broadest range of x86, x86-64, POWER,
Itanium and mainframe servers, regardless of size, core count or capacity,
customers can gain dramatic operational and cost efficiencies when compared to
proprietary solutions. And fully integrated virtualization, included at no
additional cost, amplifies these benefits. Notably, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1
provides enhanced support for virtualization of Microsoft Windows guests,
providing significant performance improvements for Windows XP, Windows Server
2000, 2003 and Windows 2008 beta guests.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 is
immediately available to customers via Red Hat Network, Red Hat's management and
automation platform. Red Hat Network provides customers a common platform for
managing both physical and virtual servers, eliminating the need for
organizations to acquire, manage and train their staff on new tools to manage
virtual servers. Red Hat Network allows customers to provision, monitor and
manage their servers throughout the entire lifecycle.
Red Hat Enterprise
Linux virtualization includes the ability to perform live migration, allowing
customers to seamlessly move running applications from one server to another,
maximizing resource utilization in the face of changing business requirements.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform includes high-availability
clustering, storage virtualization, and failover software to provide enhanced
levels of application availability, for both physical and virtual servers.
Community Welcomes Fedora 8
The Fedora Project, a Red Hat-sponsored and
community-supported open source collaboration, announced that installations of
the latest version of its distribution, Fedora 8, have surpassed 54,000 since it
became available November 8. Fedora 8 enhancements include the expanded ability
for users to create custom spins or appliances, increased security features, a
new look and feel, and numerous technical advances.
First established in
Fedora 7, the ability to create custom spins or appliances that allow users to
create a combination of specific software to meet individual requirements has
been expanded in Fedora 8. Fedora 8 marks the debut of three new spins: Games,
Developer, and Electronic Lab spins that offer prepared customization for users
with a specific interest in gaming, development, and electronics applications
respectively. The new Fedora spins exemplify the easy customization of the
Fedora Project's newest distribution and demonstrate the freedom, ability, and
desire of the community of developers to remix Fedora in the ways that are most
useful to them.
Fedora 8 offers both GNOME and KDE-based Live CDs and a
general-purpose installable DVD for workstations and servers. It also includes
improved Live USB support, making it possible to install, boot, and run the
entire distribution off of a USB key without touching the computer's hard disk
at all. This enhancement makes Fedora attractive to those who wish to experiment
with Linux without exposing their data.
In addition, Fedora 8
incorporates a wide array of technical advances. This distribution becomes the
first to enable PulseAudio, a sound server that acts as a proxy between all of a
user's sound applications, by default. With PulseAudio, users can enjoy features
such as different volumes for different applications, hot-plugging support for
USB sound devices and support for audio over the network. Fedora 8 additionally
includes improved graphical tools for firewall configuration, enhanced printer
management and an update for Bluetooth integration. Network Manager, the
easy-to-use wireless configuration tool written by Red Hat and adopted by many
prominent Linux distributions, has also been updated.
As is customary
with recent releases, Fedora 8 boasts an entirely new default look and feel on
the desktop, all based on community artwork. The Fedora 8 theme of "infinity"
includes a default background that changes shades, growing brighter or darker in
accordance with the time of day.
For more information on Fedora 8, to
download the distribution or to join in this community effort, visit http://fedoraproject.org.
Enterprise Linux on a Cloud
Red Hat announced the beta availability of Red Hat
Enterprise Linux on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a Web service
that provides resizeable computing capacity in the cloud. This collaboration
makes all the capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including the Red Hat
Network management service, technical support, and over 3,400 certified
applications, available to customers on Amazon's network infrastructure and data
centers.
The combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Amazon EC2
changes the economics of computing, the company said, by allowing customers to
pay only for the infrastructure software services and capacity that they
actually use. Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2 enables customers to
increase or decrease capacity within minutes, removing the need to over-buy
software and hardware capacity as a set of resources to handle periodic spikes
in demand.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with integrated virtualization,
provides a seamless deployment solution bridging both on-premise and cloud
computing. As part of this solution, Red Hat Network offers a common set of
management and automation tools across on-premises deployments and the Amazon
EC2 cloud computing environment. Red Hat will provide technical support and
maintenance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2. This is the first
commercially supported operating system available on Amazon EC2, the company
said.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2 is available as a private
beta today, with public beta availability planned during the fourth quarter.
Base prices are $19 per month, per user and 21 cents, 53 cents, or 94 cents for
every compute hour used on Amazon's EC2 service, depending on whether customers
choose a small, large, or extra-large compute instance size, plus bandwidth and
storage fees. For more information on the offering, visit www.redhat.com/solutions/cloud.
For
more information about Red Hat, please visit www.redhat.com. For more news, more
often, visit www.press.redhat.com.
Red Hat Appliance Platform
Red Hat announced plans to enable independent
software vendors (ISVs) to deliver appliance-based solutions to their customers,
broadening their market reach while minimizing their development and support
costs. The Red Hat Appliance Operating System will allow applications that are
certified on Red Hat Enterprise Linux to be deployed as software appliances on
the broadest range of servers in the industry, including those running Red Hat
Enterprise Linux, VMware ESX, and Microsoft Windows Viridian.
Red
Hat's Linux Automation strategy, announced at the same time, delivers a
standardized development, deployment, and management infrastructure for the
entire Red Hat Enterprise Linux ecosystem.
The Red Hat Appliance
Operating System (AOS) is built from the industry's leading open source
operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with which it shares full ABI and
API compatibility. It includes the Virtual Appliance Development Kit (vADK) that
will allow ISVs to easily configure the operating system along with their
middleware and applications to produce a complete system image. Thousands of
existing software vendors will be able to leverage this new deployment model
without extra development effort.
Red Hat says it reduces complexity for
ISVs, allowing them to develop, test and certify a solution once. Deployment is
then seamless across standalone servers, virtual machines, appliances and
Web-scale "cloud" computing environments. ISVs significantly reduce their
development costs by standardizing on a single operating system--"certify
once, deploy anywhere."
Red Hat also announced that a wide range of
software solutions on Red Hat Exchange are available for trial and purchase as
pre-configured software appliances. Customers can quickly and easily purchase
and deploy an integrated solution consisting of third-party software, JBoss
middleware, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with no installation or configuration
complexity. The total time necessary to purchase, install, and use these
solutions is just minutes, the company said.
The Red Hat Appliance
Operating System is planned for availability in the first half of 2008.
Independent Software Vendors interested in the participating in Red Hat's
Appliance program may contact appliance-info@redhat.com.
Red Hat Linux Automation
Red Hat announced its strategy to solve key problems
facing the IT industry by enabling increased operational choice, flexibility and
efficiency. Increasing IT complexity and server capacity, coupled with
application proliferation, requires new automation paradigms that allow CIOs to
handle rapidly changing business needs, the company said. As a leading open
source infrastructure company, Red Hat enables customers to automate and
simplify their Linux infrastructure, with the intent of allowing any application
to run on any server, at any time.
At the core of Red Hat's Linux
Automation strategy is the broad ecosystem provided by Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
This allows customers to extract the greatest return on their IT investment by
allowing them to deploy applications in the way that meets their business needs
most effectively, the company said. This includes stand-alone servers, virtual
servers, on-demand "cloud" computing environments, and appliance-based
solutions--all with a common set of development, deployment, management,
and automation tools.
The intent is to let software partners gain access
to this entire ecosystem with a single application certification--"certify
once, deploy anywhere." Red Hat manages the complexity of these environments so
that customers and ISVs can automate core functionality, deployment, and
management processes consistently and efficiently across their entire
infrastructure.
Red Hat's Linux Automation strategy covers all
facets of the IT environment necessary to enable any application to be run
anywhere, at any time. It creates an infrastructure which is built for
automation, including virtualization, identity management, high availability,
and performance capabilities. The strategy will deliver a rich set of
automation, management, and orchestration tools--now available and under
development--by Red Hat and its partners.
Customers can choose to
deploy every Red Hat Enterprise Linux-certified application on the widest range
of environments in the industry, including:
- Standalone server systems, scaling from the smallest
single-processor systems to the largest servers (including 1,024 processor
multi-core servers and mainframes).
- Virtual servers, which can provide improved service
levels, operation flexibility and efficiency through features such as live
migration, dynamic resource allocation, high availability, and clustering.
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 that provides new
virtualization capabilities, including performance enhancements for Microsoft
Windows-based guests.
- Red Hat Network with its seamless management and
automation across physical and virtual servers.
- Cloud computing and software-as-a-service deployments
that allow customers to seamlessly extend their computing resources outside the
walls of their data centers into "the cloud" to provide an on-demand
infrastructure that scales to meet business needs. Red Hat Enterprise Linux on
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) makes all the capabilities of Red Hat
Enterprise Linux available on Amazon's network.
- Software appliances allow ISVs to distribute their
applications as complete pre-packaged solutions, with the operating system
included. This can simplify deployment, management, and
maintenance.
- Red Hat's Appliance Operating System and
Appliance Development Kit enable and simplify a wide range of deployment
options, including:
- Fully featured application stacks
available from ISVs or through Red Hat Exchange.
- Lightweight portable media
solutions--self-contained, pre-provisioned media, such as USB keys and live
CDs.
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux
applications can be executed on Microsoft Windows Viridian servers using the Red
Hat Appliance Operating System, providing a new way for ISVs and customers to
deploy more manageable applications.
About Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat, a leading open source solutions provider, is
headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, with more than 50 satellite offices
spanning the globe. CIOs have ranked Red Hat first for value in Enterprise
Software for three consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value
study. Red Hat provides high-quality, low-cost technology with its operating
system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications,
management, and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the
JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite. Red Hat also offers support, training, and
consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.
About Platform Computing
Platform Computing is a pioneer and the global leader
in high performance computing (HPC) infrastructure software. The company
delivers integrated software solutions that enable organizations to improve
time-to-results and reduce computing costs. Many of the world's largest
companies rely on Platform for workload management and cluster and grid
management. Platform has over 2,200 global customers and strategic relationships
with Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Red Hat, and SAS, along with the
industry's broadest support for HPC applications. Building on 15 years of market
leadership, Platform continues to define the HPC market. Visit http://www.platform.com.
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