Red Hat Advances Open Virtualization to Drive for Market Leadership

Company defines the next phase of open source infrastructure solutions required for enterprise-wide adoption of virtualization

Malaysia, 24 June 2008 – Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced three strategic initiatives targeting enterprise-wide adoption of next-generation virtualization. These initiatives will enable customers to deploy virtualization across their IT infrastructure by offering features and cost benefits that go beyond competitive solutions. With this portfolio growth, Red Hat solutions provide the market with comprehensive virtualization capabilities.

Unlike many virtualization solutions in the market today, Red Hat's technologies enable customers to deploy a virtualization infrastructure that is flexible enough to meet their individual business needs. At the same time, Red Hat's strict adherence to open interfaces offers customers the flexibility to choose components from multiple vendors. These technologies are developed by Red Hat in collaboration with its partners and customers using the open source development model, resulting in more functional, higher quality solutions. With this announcement, open source virtualization is well positioned to overtake existing virtualization technologies.

Demonstrating Red Hat's commitment to its Linux Automation strategy, these technologies allow customers to deploy x86-based virtualization solutions consistently across their IT infrastructure. Using one set of tools to manage both physical and virtual servers, this architecture enables customers to implement cloud, Software as a Service (SaaS), appliance, and traditional IT infrastructures. By maximizing flexibility customers are able to reduce costs and complexity.

Today Red Hat introduces:

l Embedded Linux Hypervisor – a lightweight, embeddable hypervisor for hosting virtualized Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows environments. This hypervisor delivers virtualization with all the advantages of Linux – superior security, high performance and a wide range of hardware support – all in a small footprint that is easily embedded into servers and desktop computers. Red Hat is announcing beta availability of this hypervisor at www.ovirt.org. The hypervisor is based on the KVM project (kvm.qumranet.com), which has been integrated into the Linux kernel since 2006. It supports live migration of virtual machines from system to system in real time and high availability features. KVM technology has rapidly emerged as the next-generation virtualization technology, following on from the highly successful Xen implementation.

l Virtual Infrastructure Management – easy-to-use, multi-system management is critical for production deployment of virtualized systems. Red Hat's close collaboration with its customers over the past two years has resulted in successful deployments ranging from test and development to on-demand grid, supporting some of the world's largest cloud deployments. The accumulation of this expertise has resulted in the industry's first open source virtual infrastructure management solution, which will enable enterprise IT to build and manage internal clouds. This coordination of test and development, grid, and production applications onto a unified internal cloud will be transformational in driving out operational and capital costs, while enabling IT to provide a higher level of service to their lines of business. Red Hat is announcing beta availability of these management technologies at www.oVirt.org.

l Security Infrastructure – virtualization in production environments presents significant security concerns for enterprise IT. The dynamic and shared aspects of virtual systems requires identity, policy and audit capability integrated into the infrastructure layer, so that critical resources – such as compute cycles, data storage and network access – are controlled and audited according to business application policies. Across the industry, the lack of a comprehensive virtualization security infrastructure has hampered consolidation of applications onto a shared infrastructure. To address this gap, Red Hat has announced the www.freeIPA.org project to advance and deliver integrated security technologies such that virtualization can be used ubiquitously across the enterprise.

“Red Hat is leading the drive to open source virtualization solutions that deliver what proprietary products can't: open standards, true multi-vendor support, and the ultimate in deployment and operational flexibility,” said Paul Cormier, President of Products and Technology at Red Hat. “Today's announcements are a key step in extending the benefits of virtualization to every IT deployment. We continue to see huge improvements in functionality, performance and time to market because of our close relationship with our open source partners. For example, Intel and IBM have worked with us for many years covering virtualization technologies that span from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 to today's KVM-based announcements. We see this as the beginning of open source solutions becoming dominant in the software virtualization market, as it has in others, such as Linux itself.”

"Customers are demanding advanced Virtualization solutions that are easy to deploy and manage," said Doug Fisher, corporate vice president and general manager, Intel's System Software Division. “Intel is providing the technology underpinnings to deliver these solutions through enhanced hardware assist for Virtualization. In addition, Intel and Red Hat have worked extensively with the open source community to drive innovative virtualization solutions to the industry. By combining the advancements in Intel(r) Virtualization Technology supported by the native KVM hypervisor, Red Hat's Virtualization infrastructure, and open source community innovations, we are able to offer our customers a solution with outstanding performance, scalability and agility."

"IBM works closely with Red Hat and the open source community to drive innovation within the Linux kernel,” said Daniel Frye, vice president, open systems development at IBM. "IBM has a heterogenous approach toward virtualization, with KVM one of several options. KVM leverages the core features of the Linux kernel, including paravirtualization interfaces contributed by IBM engineers. By combining Linux virtualization infrastructure with open management interfaces such as CIM and libvirt, we gain a solution that eliminates lock-in and breaks down the barriers to enterprise wide adoption of virtualization."

"Much as it has in the operating system and relational database markets, open source is poised to have a disruptive impact on the virtualization space, lowering costs for customers and offering alternatives to proprietary lock-in," said Stephen O'Grady, Principal Analyst with RedMonk. "By embracing and fueling development around technologies such as KVM, Red Hat aims to provide customers with high quality, open source virtualization options."

According to a recent survey by Network Management and NetQoS polling over 100 IT professionals at the Interop conference, 51 percent of organizations use virtualization, and this is expected to rise to 83 percent within two years.