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Recently Red Hat released an update to JBoss Operations Network (JBoss ON), our integrated management platform for centralized systems management of JBoss Enterprise Middleware. JBoss ON provides JBoss-specific management information that can be used standalone or integrated with existing tools from other system management vendors. It enables customers to:
JBoss ON management functions include discovery and inventory, configuration management, application deployment (and roll-back), availability management, performance management, and content management. This functionality is important in optimizing performance, maintaining visibility and auditing to maintain systems and share vital information and statistics through diverse teams.
All of these features help our customers more quickly and effectively manage their mission-critical JBoss Enterprise Middleware deployments, and now can help our customers manage their cloud deployments as well. Recently we asked IDC Research to formally poll our customers about their satisfaction with JBoss ON and we were not surprised by the positive feedback.
The study was primarily conducted in order to measure ROI and is based on standard IDC ROI methodology used to calculate average cost savings resulting from higher availability, including changes in downtime, improved IT efficiency, and increased user productivity resulting from using JBoss Operations Network.
Based on data from interviews with IT managers from organizations using JBoss Operations Network, IDC’s JBoss ON ROI analysis yielded an average 634% ROI — more than six times the initial investment — and an average payback period for the initial investment of 5.3 months for the IT organizations in the study. Further, IT managers also claimed improved end-user productivity, while downtime hours per month were reduced. Participants also identified other annual savings through improvements in IT efficiency, absolute software/hardware savings, and other indirect cost savings.
To learn more about JBoss ON and how it can reduce complexity and improve visibility, please go to this link to watch the webinar, visit the web page, and read the full IDC Research JBoss ON ROI study, please visit www.jboss.com.
Today, as part of a larger announcement around Red Hat Cloud Foundations, we unveiled the first phase of our strategy to address a critical component of any cloud computing deployment—how will an enterprise build, deploy, integrate and manage mission critical business applications in the cloud? In an area that can get complex, Red Hat’s answer is decidedly simple. Build any way, Deploy anywhere.
As Red Hat expands further and deeper into unlocking the potential of cloud computing for our customers, our PaaS offering advances JBoss Open Choice, allowing customers to build on a variety of programming models, APIs and languages, e.g., Seam, Spring, GWT, or Ruby. The clear advantage of this approach is that it is standards based and developers can leverage a myriad of programming models in order to move existing applications from on-premise cloud deployments to public clouds more easily, building applications in a way that works better for the enterprise needs.
Red Hat’s PaaS strategy is based on the concept of—build any way—deploy anywhere. Once an application is developed, all that is needed is a single cloud engine to deploy on a variety of different cloud computing models. Whether its on-premise, public or a hybrid cloud model, organizations should be able to leverage the same workload on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Amazon EC2, IBM Cloud, Rackspace, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Windows Hyper V and many other current environments and even those that emerge in the future. By enabling portable cloud services, Red Hat PaaS can deliver greater flexibility, lower costs, and leverage existing investments. You can view a brief demo of what’s possible on our PaaS solutions page, http://www.redhat.com/paas.
Red Hat PaaS services will offer powerful application and integration runtime services whose APIs can be used by application developers when they build applications. Each service can be run and scaled independently from the container, allowing developers and administrators to customize the application runtime environment for any given application and its workload. These services span application development and integration requirements including: application, data, transaction, presentation, messaging, integration, rules and business process services.
Management and provisioning services are key to deliver the full value of cloud computing, and the Red Hat Cloud Engine provides a comprehensive set of management and provisioning services specifically for cloud deployments. JBoss Developer Studio, JBoss Operations Network, and a browser interface are tools that enable developers and administrators to create and manage their IaaS and PaaS resources. These services are designed to enable developers and administrators to;
Enterprises, cloud service providers and ISVs can get started today by building and deploying integrated applications with JBoss Enterprise Middleware utilizing Red Hat Consulting Services. Delivered by Red Hat’s middleware consulting practice, the engagement will provide strategic recommendations and on-site technical expertise to set up middleware as a service in any cloud environment. Each Red Hat cloud engagement is deliverables-based, actively engaging in-house teams and leaving them with the tools and expertise needed to successfully maintain and enhance their new cloud environments.
This announcement marks the beginning of a robust and rich set of solutions that aims to fundamentally change the way our customers deploy mission critical applications. Stay tuned for technical deep dives and strategy briefings as we continue to outline Red Hat’s PaaS strategy. For a replay of the press conference, visit here. To read the full PaaS press announcement visit, here.
The interfaces through which we communicate with public clouds haven’t coalesced into a single set of options and perhaps never will, claims of “de facto standards” notwithstanding. That’s partly because large cloud providers have a certain vested interest in making it difficult for users to leave once they’ve checked in.
However, clouds also target different feature sets and different types of users, which is reflected in different application programming interfaces (API), pricing models, hardware and software infrastructure, and points of differentiation. Red Hat sees this first hand with our discussions with cloud service providers around the world. Our experience isn’t unique. Approaches to and needs for storage, messaging, high availability, latency and so forth differ widely.
Furthermore, cloud computing is still developing rapidly. As an industry, we’re still at a stage where there’s a great deal of experimentation going on. The sweet spots for public cloud use cases are still being discovered.
One implication is that there is a need for a broad-based mechanism for cloud users to provide feedback to public cloud providers.
The issue isn’t so much large enterprises which, by dint of their size, will often have a direct path of communication into a public cloud provider. Rather it’s the small organizations and developers—who are driving a great deal of innovation in the cloud computing space—that often lack a good way to get their feature requests, including API feature requests, heard.
That’s the thinking behind a new Web site, APIwanted.org. It lets users make API suggestions for a given cloud provider and vote for or comment on suggestions that have already been made. In this way, the site systematically brings together the “long tail” of cloud developers. For example, if a lot of small development shops were looking for a specific form of persistent storage, this site offers a mechanism to bring that collective desire to the attention of cloud providers.
In addition to providing an aggregation point, APIwanted.org also offers a forum for collaborative brainstorming. (APIwanted.org is based on IdeaTorrent, which describes itself as “open innovation software.”) This is the same sort of model that works so well with open source software and we expect it to provide some great thinking from the user community around public cloud APIs as well.
Red Hat engineers first became interested in creating this site after getting involved with cloud APIs through the Deltacloud project. There’s no explicit connection between this site and Deltacloud, now an incubator project under the Apache Foundation. However, both this site and Deltacloud reflect Red Hat’s firm belief that cloud APIs should evolve in an open and community-based way rather than being the proprietary creation of individual vendors.
So, if you’re a cloud developer (or even if you’re not), check out the site and start building a community to help shape the future of the public cloud.
The Deltacloud project came about to fill the hole created by the lack of open, community-driven standards for moving computing and data among private clouds and the wide range of public cloud providers. This hole creates friction, slows down adoption of cloud, and raises the true cost of cloud for users and vendors alike. Imagine you are an IDE vendor wanting to enable launching of cloud instances from within the IDE – a feature that users would certainly applaud, but whose implementation forces you to make a choice immediately: do you shoulder the cost of adapting to as many vendor-specific cloud APIs or do you reign in cost by guessing which clouds will gain the largest share of the cloud market (and, best case, excluding yourself from a chunk of the market)?
There’s been activity in standards bodies, most notably the DMTF, in which Red Hat is a participant. But, in fast developing areas of technology—which cloud computing surely is— while the standards process is busy completing its work, we expect projects like Deltacloud to fit the immediate customer need for interoperability.
There are also any number of application programming interfaces (APIs) being promoted by public cloud vendors and others. This is neither unexpected nor even inherently undesirable. After all, different clouds have different purposes and goals. One might expose lots of options; another might choose to keep things simple. One might concentrate on providing customers with tight controls over service levels; another might just focus on cost. Furthermore, regulations in a specific industry can mandate interfaces that relate to audit and compliance that aren’t needed by a more mainstream audience.
Some of these APIs are understandably popular, but as the CNET Blog Network’s James Urquhart notes:
There are plenty of reasons to desire a consistent, standard cloud computing API. However, there are also many reasons why it is just premature to declare a single winner–or any winner, for that matter. As good at the AWS EC2 and S3 APIs are for their respective contexts, they are just popular APIs, and not yet anything that can be declared a de facto standard for the entire cloud community.
Deltacloud takes a third approach. For starters, it’s open source–as are a number of other interoperability frameworks. But Deltacloud goes beyond that in important ways. Significantly, Red Hat contributed it to the Apache Software Foundation last May where it’s now an Incubator project. This moved it under an upstream community and governance model that isn’t under the control of any one vendor. Deltacloud is the only major cloud framework that isn’t tied in some way to a single company’s proprietary code, APIs, or other intellectual property.
Deltacloud’s technical specifics are discussed in more depth in this earlier post. What sets it apart from similar efforts is that it’s the only one that is conceived as a web service. This has several advantages:
Drivers for Amazon EC2, GoGrid, OpenNebula, Rackspace, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Management, RimuHosting, Terremark, and vCloud are all either written or in-process–as is a Microsoft Azure cloud storage driver.
Deltacloud is not about creating a new API to replace ones that are already out there, but to facilitate interoperability and portability among the many disparate clouds that will exist.
Being hosted at Apache incubator, the project now benefits from the Apache governance model, which is based on individual contributions, not corporations.
In addition to individual contributors, the approach is resonating widely. There is a range of interested parties in the Deltacloud project. Many of these parties are at various stages of support and participation. Some include:
The interest is due to the fact that Deltacloud embraces cloud diversity rather than shunning it under a “de facto API” banner, while simultaneously enabling the portability and interoperability needed to realize the full promise of cloud computing. Open source, under an Apache model, enables a true community-driven solution – unique, and needed, in the cloud computing landscape.
Innovation in the Deltacloud project has been instrumental in the progress of Red Hat Cloud Foundations, announced in June 2010.
To interact, participate or find more information on the Deltacloud project, you can go to:
http://incubator.apache.org/deltacloud/.
Following the interest generated from the Open Your World forum held in May, opensource.com will present a series of webinars this fall. Topics will span openness and transparency across all five opensource.com channels: business, education, government, law and life. The webinar series kicks off on Wednesday, September 1 at 1:00 p.m. ET with a discussion on the open innovation revolution with Stefan Lindegaard.
Stefan is a thought leader and open innovation expert and recently published the book The Open Innovation Revolution. There are many commonalities between the open source way and the key concepts of open innovation. During the webinar, Stefan will
To register for the webinar, click here.
Have ideas for a future opensource.com webinar? Contact the opensource.com team here with your suggestions.
Today, the Red Hat team is excited to launch Extended Life Cycle Support (ELS) for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This is an optional subscription offering that provides support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux for longer than its standard seven-year life cycle.
With Extended Life Cycle Support customers can receive limited software maintenance and technical support services for an additional three years, extending the life cycle of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to a full ten years. The seven-year life cycle of a Red Hat Enterprise Linux release generally applies to major versions, so, for example, the standard life cycle of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 runs from October 2003, when it was released, to October 2010. For customers who purchase ELS, which is sold as an add-on to an existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription, the support life cycle can be extended to October 2013.
ELS offers benefit to customers who do not wish to upgrade to a newer version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, perhaps because their systems and applications are still running well and do not warrant upgrading, or maybe because of contractual requirements. An important use for ELS will be in virtualized environments. One way to enable an old, stable system to run on modern hardware is to virtualize it. The virtualization software supports the modern hardware and is able to host the old system. With ELS, the old system has an even longer supported life cycle while taking advantage of the latest hardware.
To learn more about ELS, visit here.
This is part of a series of blog posts and podcasts that discuss Red Hat’s work on and thinking about cloud computing. See also:
Cloud computing is in no small part about architecture. It’s about workload scheduling and movement, interfacing to a variety of resource types and providers, bringing in and managing images, providing application programming interfaces (APIs) at various levels, and enabling appropriate visibility into resource use and service levels. How these components connect and relate to each other–and the degree to which they can work in concert with or substitute components that third parties have developed–is (or should be) very much a discussion about architectures, rather than piece parts or monolithic stacks.
A few underlying principles have guided Red Hat as it has developed its cloud computing strategy.
The first should be especially unsurprising given Red Hat’s history. All the projects feeding into Red Hat’s cloud products are open source and, just as important, are actively engaged with communities of developers and users around the industry. For example, the Deltacloud API is now under the governance and licensing of an Incubator project within the Apache Foundation. Open source provides the innovation, economic and business models that run through all Red Hat products.
The second is closely related and that is interoperability. Red Hat is committed to delivering a cloud computing solution that is both comprehensive and based on an infrastructure with advanced multi-tenant security and high levels of scalability. At the same time, however, Red Hat is equally committed to doing this in an open source and interoperable way that lets users pick and choose among components from Red Hat, those from third parties, pieces bought new and pieces already in place.
This theme of evolutionary change isn’t limited to the question of which products will be bought from whom and when. Existing applications can be brought over to cloud environments or evolve incrementally–which is a good thing because applications are one of the longest-lived parts of any IT infrastructure. Red Hat’s approach to cloud computing is to support choice of operating and development environment. Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware make the cloud usable for new and existing enterprise-class applications, while LAMP, Ruby and Spring enable fast, lightweight application development. There’s no need to rewrite applications to take advantage of a cloud computing infrastructure.
With that background, let’s now take a look at some of the specific elements that make up Red Hat’s cloud architecture. Many of these elements have been or will be covered in greater detail in other blog postings and podcasts; this is intended as a high-level overview. (Note that this is an architectural discussion and shouldn’t be taken as a disclosure of roadmaps or future product structure.)
Cloud Engine and Deltacloud API. The Cloud Engine creates scalable private clouds, using a choice of virtualization platforms, that can be federated to public cloud providers under a unified management framework. The Cloud Engine handles tasks such as managing users, groups and permissions; resource management; and image placement/scheduling. This scheduling is handled by embedded Red Hat Enterprise MRG Grid code, a highly scalable job scheduler based on the open source Condor project. Both inbound and outbound communications with the engine are through the Deltacloud API, an open set of interfaces that were described in detail in an earlier post.
“Application Builder.” This function is about getting content into the cloud, whether by constructing a new image or by importing an existing one, and then managing the library of the resulting images. It’s explicitly designed to support multiple target clouds and to provide configuration management of settings such as public IP addresses, firewall rules, network settings and so forth. This aims to provide application portability across clouds and let developers write once and deploy anywhere, eliminating the potential for getting locked-in to a proprietary cloud platform.
Portal and tools. These provide self-service and administrative access for image deployment and configuration, setting policies such as quotas, provisioning users with appropriate access permissions, and providing access to real-time and historical data. In addition to a web-based graphical user interface, there are command line tools to support automated scripting.
Reporting. The Cloud Engine logs granular data about things like resource utilization, service levels, and quota/policy enforcement. This data can be used for purposes such as charging back for computing resource use or planning for capacity upgrades.
Cloud services. These can be called on by applications or tools running in a cloud environment to perform some task. In this way, they simplify development and operations by significantly reducing the need to re-implement commonly needed functions. For example, two types of storage services could be options, one with a REST web interface for large objects and the other an operational store that is more filesystem-like. Services enable private clouds and they also enable the portability of data and application features across different public cloud providers.
Red Hat’s approach to cloud architecture embodies openness and modularity. This preserves customer choice in that it offers them the ability to mix and match new cloud technologies from Red Hat with existing investments, public cloud providers and products from other vendors. It’s an effective approach to leverage open source innovation because it allows and encourages small chunks of function to be added incrementally through open interfaces. In this way, it’s a lot like Linux.
For more on cloud computing from Red Hat, visit here.
Recently, Accenture released the results of their open source study, which revealed that more than two-thirds of organizations anticipate increased investment in open source solutions in 2010 and more than a third are expecting to migrate mission-critical software to open source solutions in the next twelve months.
This year at the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World, Accenture served as the conference Visionary Sponsor and delivered a keynote highlighting why they are focusing attention on open source solutions now. One reason is that Accenture estimates that systems integration services around open source represents a $6.5 billion dollar market with growth outpacing that of traditional service businesses. Further, Accenture’s survey results revealed that 78% of enterprises have already deployed open source solutions and are planning on increasing their commitment.
As open source solutions enjoy increasingly mainstream adoption, leaders like Accenture will help usher in the next wave of open source technology adoption. We seem to be moving beyond the innovators and early adopter phase and are increasingly seeing the early majority emerge.
Through our strengthened partnerships with Accenture, and other leading Global System Integrators, Red Hat is committed to supporting this adoption trend. Specific to Accenture, this top-tier SI has invested in the establishment of an Innovation Center for Open Source, which leverages Red Hat solutions, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Further, Red Hat has worked with Accenture to create the Accenture SOA Reference Architecture, Accenture Foundation Platform for Java, Accenture Mobility Operated Services, and the Accenture Public Service Platform. All of these platforms, processes and methods are in place to help enterprises embark on IT projects that meet the ever-changing demands of business while decreasing maintenance cost and increasing performance and flexibility.
To watch Accenture’s Chief Technology Architect, Paul Daugherty give his keynote address at the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World, please visit; http://www.redhat.com/promo/summit/2010/highlights/. Stay tuned for additional information on Red Hat’s growing ecosystem of partners.
We’re excited to announce that Red Hat has entered into an agreement with atsec information security to certify Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 under Common Criteria at Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 4+, which will include certifying the KVM hypervisor on both Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. The Common Criteria EALs represent the depth and rigor of the evaluation, giving consumers the confidence that products certified at a specific level meet the package of security assurance requirements associated with that level and comply with internationally recognized security standards.
Common Criteria certifications aren’t new to Red Hat, either. To date, we’ve successfully achieved Common Criteria certification 13 different times on four different platforms, earning Red Hat Enterprise Linux a place at the top of the list of the industry’s most certified operating systems. By pursuing this new certification, we’re adding to our leadership in this area and giving customers in security-sensitive environments, such as government agencies and financial services organizations, added confidence that our solutions meet their strict security requirements.
This certification also marks as an important milestone for Red Hat as a virtualization industry leader. By pursuing certification at EAL 4+, Red Hat is giving government customers all of the benefits of virtualization with the confidence that their virtualization solution is rock solid and meets the industry’s security standards. Providers can safely host many tenants on the same machine, knowing that their virtual guests will be separated from each other using technology developed by the National Security Agency (NSA). By taking advantage of the combined power of SELinux and KVM, we were able to quickly pursue this certification – another example of the feature velocity afforded by the open source process.
For more background on all of the certifications and accreditations we’ve earned to date, visit http://www.redhat.com/solutions/government/certifications/.
August is shaping up to be a busy month for Red Hat events around the world. Here, you will find some of the highlighted events where you can find Red Hat this month. Don’t forget to sign up for more information for the 2010 Red Hat Road Tour, which kicks off in September! The free, half-day business seminars are coming to a city near you!
Want easy, up-to-date information about Red Hat events? Follow us on Twitter.
Global
Calling all Red Hat Certified Engineers! Red Hat will host its first virtual RHCE Loopback, August 31. Please join us for this multi-presentation meet-up. For more information, click here.
Join Red Hat for the “Gain IT Efficiency with Better Systems Lifecycle Management from Red Hat” webinar, August 3 at 2:00 p.m. ET. The fourth in a series of four sessions, Chris Wells, senior product marketing manager for RHN Satellite, and Erik Jacobs, Red Hat solutions architect, will address key questions regarding systems lifecycle management. For more information and to register, click here.
Red Hat is sponsoring the InformationWeek Government Webcast, “Oracle on Red Hat: Secrets to Unmatched Scalability and Performance Revealed,” on August 12 at 2:00 p.m. ET. For more information and to register, click here.
Click here for a full list of Red Hat Webinars.
Looking for information about Red Hat Government Solutions? Click here.
Click here for a full calendar of Fedora events.
North America
Red Hat is a gold sponsor of the 2010 TASSCC Annual Conference, August 1-4, in Dallas, TX. Please be sure to stop by the Red Hat booth to learn more about our latest offerings for the public sector. For more information, click here.
Red Hat is sponsoring SHARE (IBM System z mainframe event), August 2-4 in Boston, MA. Be sure to visit us at booth 325, and attend the two speaking sessions by Brad Hinson, Red Hat System z solution architect, August 2 at 11:00 a.m., “Current and Future State of Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” and August 5 at 1:30 p.m., “Read-Only Root File System & Other Resource Sharing Techniques.” For more information and to register, click here.
David Egts, principal architect, will present at the Military Open Source Software (Mil-OSS) Working Group in Washington, D.C. August 2-5, 2010. For more information, click here.
Red Hat senior product marketing manager Andy Cathrow will provide a pre-game presentation August 3, 2010 to an audience outlining the latest updates, features, and benefits of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2, prior to the Atlanta Braves Game. Following the presentation, Red Hat customers will be able to network with one another, as well as experts from the Red Hat team, while watching the Atlanta Braves take on the visiting New York Mets. For more information, click here.
Red Hat will be at booth number 1523 at Army LandWarNet 2010 in Tampa, FL, August 3-5, 2010. Speakers include GEN Keith B. Alexander, USA, Director, National Security Agency and LTG Jeffrey A. Sorenson, USA, Director, CIO/G-6, United States Army. For more information and to register, click here.
Red Hat is a gold sponsor of Sybase TechWave Symposium 2010, August 9-11 in Washington, D.C. For more information, click here.
Join Red Hat and Intel for lunch on August 12, 2010 at The Tower Club in Vienna, VA to learn how Red Hat and Intel can help you move from a RISC/UNIX environment to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For more information and to register, click here.
Red Hat and Prosys, a Red Hat Advanced Business Partner, are gold sponsors of the CIO Executive Leadership Roundtable, August 20. Designed exclusively for CIOs, CTOs, and Senior IT leaders from the greater Atlanta area, Red Hat CIO Lee Congdon will participate in a CIO panel on Business Transformation Leadership. The event agenda may be accessed here.
Red Hat will be at booth number 204 at the Air Force Information Technology Conference (AFITC) in Montgomery, AL, August 30 – September 1, 2010. For more information, click here.
For more information on North American events, click here.
EMEA
The Fedora Project will be exhibiting at FrOSCon, August 21-22, 2010, Germany’s third largest free software event, which features technical talks on subjects such as KVM virtualization, Python, and GNOME, and meeting space for open source projects. A large team of Fedora Ambassadors will be present at FrOSCon to give out information about Fedora as well as free gear and Fedora software for attendees. For more information, click here.
For more information on Red Hat EMEA events, click here.
APAC
Max McLaren, Red Hat general manager of ANZ will deliver a keynote address at SPLASH in Sydney, Australia on August 10, 2010. SPLASH is a conference for Australian technology companies with an interest in building or integrating open source software. For more information, click here.
Red Hat will be presenting our vision for cloud computing and the fundamental differences between an open source and proprietary cloud solution at the IDC Cloud Computing Conference, August 24 in Auckland, New Zealand. For more information, click here.
Join Red Hat at IDC’s Cloud Computing Conference, August 26 in Sydney, Australia. Frank Feldman, director of business & technology solutions, Red Hat Asia Pacific/Japan will present “Cloud Foundations: Darwin is Right!” For more information on Red Hat’s APAC events, click here.
Latin America
The Red Hat Virtualization Tour & JBoss Roadshow will be held in seven cities throughout Brazil, August 3, 4, 5, 10, and 12. The events will be held in Brasilia, Belo Horizonte, Fortaleza, Curitiba, and Porto Alegre, respectively. For more information, click here.
Michael Tiemann, vice president of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat, will be presenting his synthesis of open source principles with the teachings of Deming, Darwin, and the US Department of Defense so that information technology initiatives can improve rather than impair organizational capabilities. The presentation will take place August 19, 2010 at the School of Finance and Administration, Brazil. Tiemann has developed a specific theory as to how and why open source software can achieve higher quality than traditional proprietary software, and from this basis of quality, can achieve many other benefits as well: greater rates of innovation, interoperability, security, and lower rates of application and investment abandonment. For more information, click here.
For more information on Red Hat’s events in Latin America, click here.
Interested in speaking to Red Hat at or about one of these events? Email press@redhat.com
