Putting on the Red Hat

Red Hat held its Red Hat Summit 2007 this week in beautiful San Diego, California, and so came quite a few announcements of the development going on at the biggie in open source solutions.

Today (Saturday!) the Red Hatters released the Red Hat Exchange (RHX) into general availability. RHX extends Red Hat’s open source architecture into integrated business application solutions from open source partners built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss platform software.

At the RHX website, customers are promised access to application profiles, user ratings and reviews, free trials and online purchase options for all applications. RHX partners and solutions include those in content management; customer relationship management; enterprise resource planning; messaging and collaboration; business intelligence; databases; backup and recovery; and systems monitoring.

RHX partners upon launch include Alfresco, CentricCRM, Compiere, EnterpriseDB, Groundwork, Jaspersoft, Jive, MySQL, Pentaho, Scalix, SugarCRM, Zenoss, Zimbra and Zmanda.

At midweek came the news that Red Hat had teamed with IBM Corporation in launching an initiative to encourage “the dramatic growth” of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z mainframes.

In touting the combined effort, the big companies emphasized the security advantages of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and System z.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 becomes the first Linux operating system to ship with native support for the functionality necessary to meet the “Common Criteria for Trusted Operating Systems,” including all functionality to enable EAL 4+ certification under the protection profiles CAPP (Controlled Access Protection Profile), RBAC (Role Based Access Control), and LSPP (Labeled Security Protection Profile).

On Thursday, Red Hat announced that the company, together with Sybase Inc. would be releasing a Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) virtual appliance based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with integrated virtualization later this year.

Sybase chief marketing officer Dr. Raj Nathan was quoted as stating that “the pairing marks the first time an enterprise data management company has announced plans for a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 database appliance.”

The same day, Red Hat and Intel announced a joint program to deliver a Red Hat-branded software platform that supports desktop PCs with Intel vPro Processor technology, bringing “the power of hardware-assisted virtualization to business desktop computing.”

In collaboration with Intel, Red Hat plans to develop, productize and support the necessary software components, including the hypervisor, the Service OS and Software Development Kit.

Beta software is expected later this year and a general release is planned for an unspecified date in 2008.

The Search Enterprise Linux website covered the Red Hat Summit firsthand with a handful of reporters, and did quite an excellent job; well worth a look. Within said coverage is an interview with CTO Brian Stevens, who sheds some light on the suddenly oft-dropped term “virtualization” and the Intel project.

“Our first phase of virtual appliance work is centered around delivering management applications,” said Stevens. “Working with Intel, we want to build into their chip set the underpinnings you need to manage a secure platform via virtualization — to be able, for example, to have Windows as your primary operating system for an end user but to be able to run Linux OS in the background as your management gateway.”

Red Hat is said to be the world’s leading open source solutions provider and is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with 51 satellite offices around the world.