As of this week's Red Hat Summit, Red Hat is all over this cloud computing/SaaS trend. And the attached podcast gives you a quick overview. More details will follow over the coming weeks.
Red Hat announced the beta availability of its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform as a solution within the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).
It also released all kinds of technology to help users build their own cloud including MRG high-performance messaging features we wrote about back in late 2007. This is a Red Hat implementation of the Advanced Message Queing Protocol with a lot of other bells and whistles.
Red Hat released Systems Management features and Virtual Infrastructure Management. The core systems management additions involve Red Hat open sourcing its own Satellite code base into a project called Spacewalk. So now spacewalk is to systems management as Fedora is to operating software as JBoss is to middleware. Multi-system management is critical for production deployment of virtualized systems.
There is the new Red Hat Security Infrastructure. Which leads to a fourth cloud-computing related initiative. 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. In a related move, it has acquired the company called Identyx. Its technology lets a Red Hat server get a unified view of systems resources including Windows Active Directory resources.
Of course, Red Hat is not only talking about cloud computing. Users can simply virtualize their data centers as part of refresh or simply run their data centers the old fashioned way. For those that "only want to virtualize," Red Hat is now offering an Embedded Linux Hypervisor -- a lightweight, embeddable hypervisor for hosting virtualized Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Windows environments.
