Red Hat, Amazon deliver Linux on demand

November 8, 2007 —

Red Hat Wednesday made its Enterprise Linux OS available on demand by releasing
it for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service that hosts business applications.

The move is part of Red Hat's so-called "automation" strategy, which
aims to deliver a Linux and open-source infrastructure for simplifying how applications
run and are managed.

A private
beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2 is now available, with a
public beta slated to be made available before the end of the year. The base
prices for the service are US$19 per month, per user, and $0.21, $0.53 or $0.94
for every computer hour used on the EC2 services, depending on the size, bandwidth
and storage fees of the services purchased. EC2 is Amazon's Web-based service
that hosts business applications for customers.

Red Hat also Wednesday released a new OS for delivering ISV (independent software
vendor) applications on appliances and made available Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5.1, with improvements to its virtualization offering that extends support to
virtual guests for Windows XP, Server 2000, Server 2003 and the Windows 2008
beta, the company said.

Red Hat said its virtualization software is now being deployed on more than
18,000 servers, although company executives, speaking on a conference call,
wouldn't say whether those servers were in full deployment or test environments.
The company is under pressure to deliver virtualization for Red Hat Enterprise
Linux that is on par with competitors.

The new Red Hat Appliance OS will enable third-party ISVs to take their applications
and customize and configure them on appliances they can sell to customers to
run either in dedicated, virtualized or hosted environments. The software is
expected to be available in the first half of 2008. The new appliance OS includes
the Virtual Appliance Development Kit to help ISVs configure their applications
to be run in an appliance container.

Red Hat already offers the leading enterprise Linux OS in the world, but is
being pressured by Wall Street to take the company to the next level. To do
this, Red Hat is trying to expand its offerings beyond enterprise Linux OS to
avoid being a one-trick pony and stay competitive with the likes of larger software
vendors like Oracle that are encroaching on its turf. The company purchased
open-source Java middleware company JBoss last year as a part of this strategy.

Red Hat ultimately wants to design an open-source infrastructure for delivering
applications on various flavors of network infrastructure, whether they be delivered
on virtual servers, dedicated services or so-called on-demand services clouds
like EC2, said Scott Crenshaw, vice president of enterprise Linux at Red Hat.
He said the company plans to build into the "fabric of the infrastructure"
tools to manage quality of service, application mobility and availability so
the infrastructure is as intuitive as possible for IT managers to navigate and
manage.

IDG News Service