- Red Hat and Platform Computing will offer Red Hat HPC Solution
- The availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, with integrated virtualization
- The Fedora Project reporting installations of the new Fedora 8 surpassing 54,000
- The beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a Web service
- A Linux automation strategy designed to simplify the work of IT departments by allowing any application to run on any server at any time
Beneficial Price/Performance
Red Hat announced an agreement with Platform Computing, a leader in high performance computing (HPC) infrastructure software, to jointly offer a new product--the Red Hat HPC Solution. It fully integrates Platform's Open Cluster Stack1 with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The new offering provides users with an end-to-end solution with a range of tools necessary to deploy and manage an HPC cluster in a wide range of environments, from SMB to Enterprise, while offering competitive pricing and outstanding performance.
Businesses are increasingly utilizing HPC clusters to gain a competitive edge; the new Red Hat HPC Solution allows users to deploy their HPC applications in a more cost-effective manner, while providing tools in a single, easy-to-deploy package, the companies said. The Red Hat solution incorporates the operating system, device drivers, cluster installer, resource and application monitor, and job scheduler for every node in the cluster.
The integrated HPC software stack includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is designed to deliver maximum application performance using today's low-cost, industry-standard systems. The solution also incorporates the device drivers and interconnect support necessary for efficiently running a high-performance cluster, and also includes Platform's Lava-based job scheduler to rapidly schedule user workloads. All of the components, supported by Red Hat's global 24x7 enterprise-level services, are delivered in one product, reducing the complexity and time needed to set up and optimize an HPC cluster.
The Red Hat HPC Solution has completed certification on a range of hardware platforms and will be available at the end of 2007.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1
Red Hat announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, with integrated virtualization. This release provides the most compelling platform for customers and software developers ever, the company said, with industry-leading virtualization capabilities complementing Red Hat's newly announced Linux Automation strategy. It offers the industry's broadest deployment ecosystem, covering standalone systems, virtualized systems, appliances and web-scale "cloud" computing environments.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 virtualization delivers considerably broader server support than proprietary virtualization products, and up to twice the performance. This allows greater server consolidation and eliminates a key obstacle to deploying virtualization more widely.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux's deployment flexibility uniquely allows customers to deploy a single platform, virtual or physical, small or large, throughout their enterprise. By providing one platform that spans the broadest range of x86, x86-64, POWER, Itanium and mainframe servers, regardless of size, core count or capacity, customers can gain dramatic operational and cost efficiencies when compared to proprietary solutions. And fully integrated virtualization, included at no additional cost, amplifies these benefits. Notably, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 provides enhanced support for virtualization of Microsoft Windows guests, providing significant performance improvements for Windows XP, Windows Server 2000, 2003 and Windows 2008 beta guests.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 is immediately available to customers via Red Hat Network, Red Hat's management and automation platform. Red Hat Network provides customers a common platform for managing both physical and virtual servers, eliminating the need for organizations to acquire, manage and train their staff on new tools to manage virtual servers. Red Hat Network allows customers to provision, monitor and manage their servers throughout the entire lifecycle.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization includes the ability to perform live migration, allowing customers to seamlessly move running applications from one server to another, maximizing resource utilization in the face of changing business requirements. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform includes high-availability clustering, storage virtualization, and failover software to provide enhanced levels of application availability, for both physical and virtual servers.
Community Welcomes Fedora 8
The Fedora Project, a Red Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration, announced that installations of the latest version of its distribution, Fedora 8, have surpassed 54,000 since it became available November 8. Fedora 8 enhancements include the expanded ability for users to create custom spins or appliances, increased security features, a new look and feel, and numerous technical advances.
First established in Fedora 7, the ability to create custom spins or appliances that allow users to create a combination of specific software to meet individual requirements has been expanded in Fedora 8. Fedora 8 marks the debut of three new spins: Games, Developer, and Electronic Lab spins that offer prepared customization for users with a specific interest in gaming, development, and electronics applications respectively. The new Fedora spins exemplify the easy customization of the Fedora Project's newest distribution and demonstrate the freedom, ability, and desire of the community of developers to remix Fedora in the ways that are most useful to them.
Fedora 8 offers both GNOME and KDE-based Live CDs and a general-purpose installable DVD for workstations and servers. It also includes improved Live USB support, making it possible to install, boot, and run the entire distribution off of a USB key without touching the computer's hard disk at all. This enhancement makes Fedora attractive to those who wish to experiment with Linux without exposing their data.
In addition, Fedora 8 incorporates a wide array of technical advances. This distribution becomes the first to enable PulseAudio, a sound server that acts as a proxy between all of a user's sound applications, by default. With PulseAudio, users can enjoy features such as different volumes for different applications, hot-plugging support for USB sound devices and support for audio over the network. Fedora 8 additionally includes improved graphical tools for firewall configuration, enhanced printer management and an update for Bluetooth integration. Network Manager, the easy-to-use wireless configuration tool written by Red Hat and adopted by many prominent Linux distributions, has also been updated.
As is customary with recent releases, Fedora 8 boasts an entirely new default look and feel on the desktop, all based on community artwork. The Fedora 8 theme of "infinity" includes a default background that changes shades, growing brighter or darker in accordance with the time of day.
For more information on Fedora 8, to download the distribution or to join in this community effort, visit http://fedoraproject.org.
Enterprise Linux on a Cloud
Red Hat announced the beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a Web service that provides resizeable computing capacity in the cloud. This collaboration makes all the capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including the Red Hat Network management service, technical support, and over 3,400 certified applications, available to customers on Amazon's network infrastructure and data centers.
The combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing, the company said, by allowing customers to pay only for the infrastructure software services and capacity that they actually use. Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2 enables customers to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, removing the need to over-buy software and hardware capacity as a set of resources to handle periodic spikes in demand.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with integrated virtualization, provides a seamless deployment solution bridging both on-premise and cloud computing. As part of this solution, Red Hat Network offers a common set of management and automation tools across on-premises deployments and the Amazon EC2 cloud computing environment. Red Hat will provide technical support and maintenance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2. This is the first commercially supported operating system available on Amazon EC2, the company said.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2 is available as a private beta today, with public beta availability planned during the fourth quarter. Base prices are $19 per month, per user and 21 cents, 53 cents, or 94 cents for every compute hour used on Amazon's EC2 service, depending on whether customers choose a small, large, or extra-large compute instance size, plus bandwidth and storage fees. For more nformation on the offering, visit www.redhat.com/solutions/cloud.
For more information about Red Hat, please visit www.redhat.com. For more news, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com.
Red Hat Appliance Platform
Red Hat announced plans to enable independent software vendors (ISVs) to deliver appliance-based solutions to their customers, broadening their market reach while minimizing their development and support costs. The Red Hat Appliance Operating System will allow applications that are certified on Red Hat Enterprise Linux to be deployed as software appliances on the broadest range of servers in the industry, including those running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, VMware ESX, and Microsoft Windows Viridian.
Red Hat's Linux Automation strategy, announced at the same time, delivers a standardized development, deployment, and management infrastructure for the entire Red Hat Enterprise Linux ecosystem.
The Red Hat Appliance Operating System (AOS) is built from the industry's leading open source operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with which it shares full ABI and API compatibility. It includes the Virtual Appliance Development Kit (vADK) that will allow ISVs to easily configure the operating system along with their middleware and applications to produce a complete system image. Thousands of existing software vendors will be able to leverage this new deployment model without extra development effort.
Red Hat says it reduces complexity for ISVs, allowing them to develop, test and certify a solution once. Deployment is then seamless across standalone servers, virtual machines, appliances and Web-scale "cloud" computing environments. ISVs significantly reduce their development costs by standardizing on a single operating system--"certify once, deploy anywhere."
Red Hat also announced that a wide range of software solutions on Red Hat Exchange are available for trial and purchase as pre-configured software appliances. Customers can quickly and easily purchase and deploy an integrated solution consisting of third-party software, JBoss middleware, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with no installation or configuration complexity. The total time necessary to purchase, install, and use these solutions is just minutes, the company said.
The Red Hat Appliance Operating System is planned for availability in the first half of 2008. Independent Software Vendors interested in the participating in Red Hat's Appliance program may contact
Red Hat Linux Automation
Red Hat announced its strategy to solve key problems facing the IT industry by enabling increased operational choice, flexibility and efficiency. Increasing IT complexity and server capacity, coupled with application proliferation, requires new automation paradigms that allow CIOs to handle rapidly changing business needs, the company said. As a leading open source infrastructure company, Red Hat enables customers to automate and simplify their Linux infrastructure, with the intent of allowing any application to run on any server, at any time.
At the core of Red Hat's Linux Automation strategy is the broad ecosystem provided by Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This allows customers to extract the greatest return on their IT investment by allowing them to deploy applications in the way that meets their business needs most effectively, the company said. This includes stand-alone servers, virtual servers, on-demand "cloud" computing environments, and appliance-based solutions--all with a common set of development, deployment, management, and automation tools.
The intent is to let software partners gain access to this entire ecosystem with a single application certification--"certify once, deploy anywhere." Red Hat manages the complexity of these environments so that customers and ISVs can automate core functionality, deployment, and management processes consistently and efficiently across their entire infrastructure.
Red Hat's Linux Automation strategy covers all facets of the IT environment necessary to enable any application to be run anywhere, at any time. It creates an infrastructure which is built for automation, including virtualization, identity management, high availability, and performance capabilities. The strategy will deliver a rich set of automation, management, and orchestration tools--now available and under development--by Red Hat and its partners.
Customers can choose to deploy every Red Hat Enterprise Linux-certified application on the widest range of environments in the industry, including:
- Standalone server systems, scaling from the smallest single-processor systems to the largest servers (including 1,024 processor multi-core servers and mainframes).
- Virtual servers, which can provide improved service levels, operation flexibility and efficiency through features such as live migration, dynamic resource allocation, high availability, and clustering.
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 that provides new virtualization capabilities, including performance enhancements for Microsoft Windows-based guests.
- Red Hat Network with its seamless management and automation across physical and virtual servers.
- Cloud computing and software-as-a-service deployments that allow customers to seamlessly extend their computing resources outside the walls of their data centers into "the cloud" to provide an on-demand infrastructure that scales to meet business needs. Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) makes all the capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Linux available on Amazon's network.
- Software appliances allow ISVs to distribute their applications as complete pre-packaged solutions, with the operating system included. This can simplify deployment, management, and maintenance.
- Red Hat's Appliance Operating System and Appliance Development Kit enable and simplify a wide range of deployment options, including:
- Fully featured application stacks available from ISVs or through Red Hat Exchange.
- Lightweight portable media solutions--self-contained, pre-provisioned media, such as USB keys and live CDs.
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux applications can be executed on Microsoft Windows Viridian servers using the Red Hat Appliance Operating System, providing a new way for ISVs and customers to deploy more manageable applications.
About Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat, a leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, with more than 50 satellite offices spanning the globe. CIOs have ranked Red Hat first for value in Enterprise Software for three consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value study. Red Hat provides high-quality, low-cost technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management, and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite. Red Hat also offers support, training, and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.
About Platform Computing
Platform Computing is a pioneer and the global leader in high performance computing (HPC) infrastructure software. The company delivers integrated software solutions that enable organizations to improve time-to-results and reduce computing costs. Many of the world's largest companies rely on Platform for workload management and cluster and grid management. Platform has over 2,200 global customers and strategic relationships with Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Red Hat, and SAS, along with the industry's broadest support for HPC applications. Building on 15 years of market leadership, Platform continues to define the HPC market. Visit http://www.platform.com.
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