Red Hat plotted a new course for its future Tuesday as
it declared plans to develop a full open-source architecture that
integrates platform, infrastructure and management technologies.
The plan is a new direction for the company, which until now has focused
primarily on delivering an enterprise-ready version of the Linux operating
system. Now Red Hat said it has listened to the community, technology
round-tables and customers, leading it to commit to developing a
standards-based open source infrastructure that focuses on management and
applications support across multiple hardware environments.
Red Hat stressed that the architecture will be modular, giving Independent
Software Vendors (ISVs), Independent Hardware Vendors (IHVs) and open
source communities an opportunity to participate and collaborate in the
creation of the architecture, while minimizing the potential for vendor
lock-in.
“Red Hat is making Open Source Architecture the guiding point for our
development roadmap and business focus, said Paul Cormier, executive vice
president of engineering at Red Hat. “We will work to ensure developers and
vendors have the resources needed to base their solutions on open source. A
hierarchy of common software components will enable technologies to be
layered modularly, resulting in great scalability and manageability
throughout an entire organization’s infrastructure. With an Open Source
Architecture model, the customer becomes the clear winner.”
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, slated for release in October, will form the
foundational layer of the new architecture, Red Hat said. The company said
it will be the unifying platform for the architecture, with support for
seven hardware architectures for both client and server deployments —
including numerous hardware platforms delivered by partner IBM . It will also offer support for Intel Itanium and AMD64
processors.
Red Hat Network will serve as the delivery mechanism. Red Hat Network is a
systems management platform for Linux, which allows administrators to
perform patch management, updates, monitoring and maintenance.
The second step in the roadmap will focus on additional parts of the
infrastructure, including a Web applications framework, J2EE implementation
and other development tools. The company is working with the ObjectWeb
consortium, Apache Software Foundation and the Eclipse IDE development
community as part of the effort.
The third phase will focus on integrated virtualization and management
capabilities in an effort to maximize system utilization while also
lowering total cost of ownership (TCO). Red Hat said System virtualization
will encompass storage, system provisioning, and application resource
management for on-demand, high-availability environments.
Red Hat said it will deliver subscription-based global services to round
out the offering. Red Hat Applications, including Portal Server and its
Content Management System, will also play a role.
