Enterprise open source Toolkit

Red Hat chief: 'The clouds will all run Linux'

Tags:
Red Hat,
Mission Critical,
Next Generation,
Chief Executive

Stephen Shankland CNET News

Published: 31 Jul 2008 14:37 BST

…you're not there. That leadership in where the kernel is going is very important to most customers. It's much smaller websites that decide not to pay.

Do the smaller customers pay when they get bigger?
We see very little 'fee to free'. We see quite a bit of 'free to fee', when customers get bigger, wake up and say: "We probably need that support and certifications."

There's a lot of movement toward building large-scale web infrastructure. Your product plays more to one server running the database here [and] one server running the app server there. What do you think about getting higher into the stack for enabling a very large, co-ordinated, distributed infrastructure?
Like the Amazon EC2 cloud running on RHEL?

But what about the management — not just providing 1,000 individual operating systems?
Most of the things we're doing now are all building blocks around effectively running grids or clouds. Whether those happen internally or externally, I don't know, but that's clearly the next-generation infrastructure.

So, with our virtualisation strategy, which we call Linux Automation, we basically say applications certified once run anywhere — on bare metal, a virtual instance, or on the EC2 cloud, or any other cloud running RHEL.

If you look at the products we have coming out this year — Red Hat MRG for messaging and grid — it's all about the grid. We created a whole new business unit around management, [and] IPA to start putting together the security. We worked with one large customer who live-migrated things from their own datacentre to the cloud and back.

If someone wants to move something from inside their firewall to outside, they need to feel confident it will run. If you're running it on Joe Bob's Cloud Linux, does it feel like it's certified? There is clear value to having a consistent Linux that's certified across those platforms.

So we built the infrastructure to do that. It doesn't surprise me Amazon went with us. Anybody can run almost anything that runs on the datacentre on it, it's certified, and they can call and get tech support.

What about management tools, though?
We can live-migrate the things [moving running applications from one server to another]. A lot of the tools are there. We're working on it, though.

I welcome Ubuntu everywhere. Let them get desktops all over the place. I think that's good for Linux and good for the ecosystem

Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat

But you can automate it — if I need 18 more instances on the cloud, I can turn them on, then turn them back off?
Absolutely. Our user interfaces are not as good as VMware's, but we have pretty extraordinary functionality that we haven't touted as much as we should. [Amazon has] the single largest instance of virtualisation out there. It's all our virtualisation. They're moving workloads around all the time.

One of the interesting dynamics in the open-source world is the constant back and forth with Microsoft. Sometimes they're disparaging and sometimes they're embracing. How's the current state of affairs with Redmond right now?
The good news is: I'm the new guy, so there's no personal baggage there. Clearly they're our single largest competitor, so we battle on a lot of things and have a lot of different opinions of things.

Have you seen any benefits from their interoperability announcements that came out of antitrust actions?
My understanding is that most of it is still vapourware. It's things they will do. Some of the interoperability things — they said they'd promise not to enforce [intellectual property rights] or you can use these APIs [application programming interfaces] as long as you're not selling — they're trying to relegate open source to a very narrow hobbyist niche. That's a bit problematic. But, that said, we welcome a little regulatory oversight there and also welcome good, hard competition.

Speaking of competition, how about Canonical? They're funding Ubuntu development aggressively. Do you see them in customer bids?
I haven't heard of them in any customer bid. There are a couple issues there. They're primarily a desktop provider. We're primarily a server provider. Those are pretty different skill sets. I welcome Ubuntu everywhere. Let them get desktops all over the place. I think that's good for Linux and good for the ecosystem.

It's just they have a single set of bits. They don't have a dual model with community and enterprise bits. I don't see how anybody's going to feel really comfortable, without…