Red Hat Preps Enterprise Linux 4
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CRN India: Red Hat aims to more deeply penetrate the enterprise by launching its first Linux distribution based on the Linux 2.6 kernel.
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(InfoWorld) - Red Hat has pushed out the first public beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, an upgrade to its operating system thatÂ includes virtualization technologiesÂ intended to help companies get more use from their hardware. The final version of the product is due to ship by year's end, although it was unclear this week if Red Hat will meet that target. RHEL 5 Beta 1, which was released Friday, was originally due to ship in July, with a second beta expected in September. The beta appears to be aimed mostly at existing subscribers to the Red Hat Network. Non-customers can try out the software but they have to contact a local Red Hat office or apply atÂ http://www.redhat.com/rhel/details/eval (The page says RHEL 4 but Red Hat says it's for RHEL 5 as well). The beta is for testing purposes and Red Hat emphasized that it's not intended for production use. It's asking for feedback to hone the final version of the product, and wants to hear about how it is implementing the open-source Xen virtualization technology in particular. Xen allows companies to run multiple operating systems on a server at the same time, making better use of computing power that's often otherwise left idle. Virtualization on mainframes has been around for a long time, but it's now being adopted on lower-end servers as well as they become more powerful. Novell has already incorporated Xen into its Linux distribution, Suse Linux 10 Server, released in July. And MicrosoftÂ has said that Windows Longhorn Server will be compatible with Xen-enabled versions of Linux, allowing customers to run Linux and Windows side by side on the same server. Other new features in the RHEL 5 beta include the disk dumping tool Kdump, which can speed reboot times and is handy for developers who have to reboot systems several times a day, and the SystemTap and Frysk analysis and development tools. The beta also includes a technical preview of what Red Hat calls its stateless Linux technology, which reduces dependencies on individual clients to make the OS easier to manage and modify remotely. The server OS is available for most of the popular hardware platforms; availability for the client OS is more limited. Details areÂ available here.
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Having established itself as the leading enterprise Linux vendor,&#160;Red Hat is in a pivotal phase of reinventing itself as a broader open-source software provider and a long-term technology leader a la Microsoft and Oracle. It&#39;s a tall order, and among other things it will take a business plan that lets the company move smoothly through this make-or-break stage.Coming up with that internal plan lies on the shoulders of 30-year IT veteran Nick Van Wyk. Van Wyk joined Red Hat last year from EMC, taking a newly created role as vice president of operations to optimize Red Hat&#39;s subscription model and create better business processes to support the company&#39;s channel.Two weeks ago, Red Hat also appointed him to a new role as senior director, transformation, in charge of examining the company&#39;s internal processes and operations to &quot;reposition all of our systems to support the next stage of our evolution,&quot; he said.That stage includes capitalizing on its April 2006 purchase of JBoss and the open-source middleware package that comes along with it, as well as growing from a company with annual revenue of about $500 million to a billion-dollar company. Red Hat, whose affections toward other vendors can be fickle, also is challenged to build out a stronger ecosystem of partners to support not only Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS but also JBoss and any new technologies it brings to the table.In the current technology business climate, Red Hat is a bit of an anomaly. The company has managed to exist for nearly 10 years with one core competency: a Linux server distribution it supports and provides maintenance for. The company has branched out into other areas of software, such as desktop Linux and virtualization, but for the most part, the server OS has been its bread and butter.Recognizing it can&#39;t subsist long on this diet in an environment of consolidation and diversification, Red Hat made a calculated risk and purchased JBoss. It&#39;s now trying to position itself to make the most out of that and possible other new product developments or purchases, Van Wyk said.&quot;As we move forward, we will more be described as an open source services and solutions company,&quot; he said. &quot;That&#39;s an enhanced position for Red Hat.&quot;In its present situation, Red Hat has &quot;a base, a critical mass of applications from which to grow,&quot; said George Weiss, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. But investors are more interested in what comes next than in how well Red Hat is currently executing, he said.&quot;It&#39;s not a look at the present basis, it&#39;s what you can do to instill market confidence that you have a sufficiently scalable business model, and the operating system alone is not going to be it,&quot; Weiss said.Van Wyk knows full well the pressure on the company, and said that during Red Hat&#39;s two-to-three-year transformation, the company will be making changes to ensure it can meet both the internal and the external needs of scaling an IT company.The company is currently examining how it handles a host of functions, among them lead management, partner relationship management, subscriptions, financial systems and technical support. The next step in the transition will be to make changes where necessary to ensure the business is operating efficiently and providing the highest levels of customer service, he said.&quot;This whole idea of ease -- the ease of doing business with Red Hat, the ease of support, the automation of those technologies, the time to acquire OS technologies, zero time to subscribe -- those are all built into [our goals],&quot; Van Wyk said. &quot;These are things that have been said to us that customers want to have.&quot;Van Wyk declined to go into detail about exactly how Red Hat will execute on this strategy, saying the company won&#39;t really have a clear idea of the changes it will make until the initial assessment is complete.One thing Red Hat should consider is more acquisitions, said Raven Zachary, open source research director for The 451 Group. But Red Hat should move fast to acquire companies that will help them get into new markets -- such as database and data management -- because larger IT vendors are eyeing similar purchases.&quot;They have companies like Oracle, Microsoft, IBM and SAP competing for the same targets,&quot; he said. &quot;Red Hat doesn&#39;t have the capital to compete with those suitors. They need to move very quickly before we get into an era where the largest IT vendors are competing for these targets.&quot;
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A timid little guy In brief Red Hat has lurched closer toward the Xen server virtualization package by including the software in a beta release of its server operating system. And now the company is begging people to test out just how well Xen functions with RHEL 5.â¦
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SEPTEMBER 07, 2004  - IT services and hardware vendor Unisys Corp. has upped its involvement with Linux by joining the Red Hat Partner Community one month after unveiling support for Linux on its ES7000 servers (see story).
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It releases a public beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with virtualization technologies intended to help companies get more use from their hardware.
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InfoWorld - Red Hat's new CEO plans to keep the company focused on its core Linux OS and middleware business while also improving the service it offers to customers, he said Thursday.
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Red Hat put some muscle behind its intention to make its JBoss middleware as ubiquitous in the enterprise as its Linux software on Wednesday, committing new sales, marketing, and technical resources to accelerating the adoption of JBoss among the largest corporations.At its JBoss World conference in Orlando, Florida, Craig Muzilla, vice president of Red Hat&#39;s Middleware Business, said the company hopes JBoss will be a major part of 50 percent of all enterprise software infrastructure deployments by 2015. &quot;We believe it is an achievable, realistic goal,&quot; he said.To reach that goal, Red Hat introduced a multifaceted plan that includes opening technology &quot;acceleration&quot; centers, adding sales and marketing support, and putting together an enterprise-class middleware stack. The stack would be made up of JBoss and other open-source software for management, application integration, and application development.Red Hat purchased JBoss in April 2006 and has been trying to integrate the Java-based application infrastructure, or middleware, with its Linux business to become a multiproduct company.In an interview last week, Red Hat&#39;s new CEO, Jim Whitehurst, said the hardest part of this has been changing JBoss&#39; business model to Red Hat&#39;s. JBoss gave its software away for free and charged for consulting and services. Red Hat has a &quot;.org&quot; community version of its product for anyone to use, as well as a more robust enterprise version for large-scale deployments. He said at the time that Red Hat now will use a similar model for making JBoss more successful in the enterprise.Muzilla echoed Whitehurst&#39;s notion that Red Hat will use the same strategy to boost JBoss in enterprises as it did to make Red Hat Enterprise Linux so successful. However, he said there is still &quot;a lack of understanding that you can really run your enterprise on open-source middleware.&quot;To change that perception, Red Hat plans to offer an &quot;enterprise-hardened, rock-solid&quot; stack of JBoss middleware that includes both existing products, such as JBoss Application Server, JBoss Cache, JBoss Transactions, JBoss Clustering, and JBoss Messaging, and other open-source products, Muzilla said Wednesday. Red Hat will test and certify the middleware stack to ensure the pieces work together and can sustain large-scale enterprise deployments, he said.Sales and customer support also are key to making a successful enterprise play, Muzilla said. In the past six months, Red Hat has added JBoss sales and presales specialists in North America to help sell the middleware to enterprises. The company also is hiring new marketing executives and is planning its first acceleration center. He said the centers will be in places &quot;where there is a lot of customer activity,&quot; without giving more details.Once the new technology labs for JBoss are open, customers will be able to use them to test Red Hat&#39;s JBoss stack, and it&#39;s likely Red Hat will build centers for a specific task, Muzilla said. &quot;Performance will be one lab, interoperability will be another,&quot; he said.
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InfoWorld - The release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 in March should strengthen Red Hat&#39;s lead in the open-source software market and fend off challenges from Oracle, Microsoft, and Novell, an industry analyst said.
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Catching up with Linux in the enterprise at last week's LinuxWorld event.
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InfoWorld - Red Hat&#160;has scheduled a March release for RHEL5 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5), the latest version of its open-source operating system, while it tries to fend off new competitive threats from Oracle&#160;and the Microsoft-Novell&#160;partnership.
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InfoWorld - Red Hat and Exadel are joining forces to try to make the open source Red Hat platform more of a destination for software developers.
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A discussion of four of the kernel features needed for mission-critical server environments, including telecom.
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Top Linux seller begins public testing of new Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, which incorporates Xen technology.
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The new Linux version pools the efforts of Red Hat programmers with outsiders contributing to the project.
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InfoWorld - At the annual LinuxWorld Conference &amp; Expo this week, top-tier vendors in the Linux space will roll out a raft of enterprise products, with a few vendors laying out road maps for pushing their open source strategies higher in the enterprise.
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Red Hat has announced a partnership with Unisys and the availability of security updates to their Enterprise Linux offering today.