Saturday 13 March 2010
Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the call for papers is now open for the sixth annual Red Hat Summit and JBoss World. These premier open source events will take place June 22-25, 2010 in Boston at the Seaport World Trade Center.
Red Hat Summit and JBoss World bring together customers, developers, engineers, partners and members of the community in a global open source knowledge exchange. A comprehensive agenda engages attendees to learn the latest in open source advancements with Red Hat and JBoss products and technologies.
Submissions are being accepted for the Red Hat Summit in the following categories:
Submissions are being accepted for JBoss World in the following categories:
In addition, there will be one joint Red Hat Summit and JBoss World category:
To submit a proposal for consideration, please visit http://www.redhat.com/promo/summit/2010/callforpapers. The deadline to submit is Jan. 22, 2010. Attendee registration will be open in early 2010.
For more information on Red Hat Summit and JBoss World please visit www.redhat.com/summit. Follow Red Hat Summit 2010 on twitter at http://twitter.com/RedHatSummit.
For more information about Red Hat, visit www.redhat.com, For more news, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com.
About Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider and a component of the S&P 500, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 65 offices spanning the globe. CIOs ranked Red Hat as one of the top vendors delivering value in Enterprise Software for six consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value survey. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with virtualization, applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.
Forward-Looking Statements
Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to delays or reductions in information technology spending, the integration of acquisitions and the ability to market successfully acquired technologies and products; the ability of the Company to effectively compete; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; the ability to deliver and stimulate demand for new products and technological innovations on a timely basis; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company’s growth and international operations; fluctuations in exchange rates; adverse results in litigation; and changes in and a dependence on key personnel, as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions “Risk Factors” and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations”. In addition to these factors, actual future performance, outcomes, and results may differ materially because of more general factors including (without limitation) general industry and market conditions and growth rates, economic conditions, and governmental and public policy changes. The forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company’s views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release.
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LINUX is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. RED HAT and JBOSS ® are registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. and its subsidiaries in the US and other countries.
Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that it will present the second online Open Source Cloud Computing Forum on Wednesday, February 10, 2010, hosted by Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens.
The virtual Open Source Cloud Computing Forum was established by Red Hat to foster the discussion around open source technologies as the foundation for today’s public and private cloud computing initiatives. Building on the success of the first Open Source Cloud Computing Forum, hosted by Red Hat in July 2009, the second online event will feature technically focused presentations from across the industry that will explore today’s challenges to cloud adoption and how open source technologies can help break down these barriers and drive interoperable enterprise cloud deployments.
“Open Source technology provides the foundation for many of today’s cloud computing deployments, and will be an important driver for the future of the cloud,” said Brian Stevens, CTO and vice president, Engineering at Red Hat. “Open source software by its nature provides a robust and interoperable foundation for today’s clouds by enabling an open, democratic debate about specifications through the openness of its source code. With the high levels of customer interest around cloud computing and the importance of open source technology as part of this evolving computing paradigm, we see great value in bringing together our partners, community members and fellow technology leaders to discuss open source in the cloud.”
For more information on the second Open Source Cloud Computing Forum, to submit a presentation proposal for the event or to register to attend, visit http://www.redhat.com/cloudcomputingforum/.
For more news about Red Hat, visit www.redhat.com. For more news, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com.
About Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions and a component of the S&P 500, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 65 offices spanning the globe. CIOs ranked Red Hat as one of the top vendors delivering value in Enterprise Software for six consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value survey. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with virtualization, applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.
Forward-Looking Statements
Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to delays or reductions in information technology spending, the integration of acquisitions and the ability to market successfully acquired technologies and products; the ability of the Company to effectively compete; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; the ability to deliver and stimulate demand for new products and technological innovations on a timely basis; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company’s growth and international operations; fluctuations in exchange rates; adverse results in litigation; and changes in and a dependence on key personnel, as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions “Risk Factors” and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations”. In addition to these factors, actual future performance, outcomes, and results may differ materially because of more general factors including (without limitation) general industry and market conditions and growth rates, economic conditions, and governmental and public policy changes. The forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company’s views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release.
LINUX is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. RED HAT and JBOSS are registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. and its subsidiaries in the US and other countries.
The draft NIST definition, perhaps the best we have at this point, states that “Cloud computing is a pay-per-use model for enabling available, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. One of the key value propositions for cloud computing is the transfer of expense from the capital (CAPEX) to the operational (OPEX) column. Private clouds can still deliver some of the other benefits of cloud computing, especially for the largest organizations. Private and hybrid clouds can also serve as a gateway, allowing enterprise IT to become familiar and comfortable with cloud computing paradigms in a controlled environment.
This might seem foolish to the average person, or even the travel departments of medium-sized businesses, but the substantial expense might be offset by the convenience or increased productivity of private aviation. Cloud computing is similar: The average individual or organization will probably derive maximum benefit from sharing a public cloud infrastructure, but this should not preclude certain special cases where a private cloud will be called for.
The answer is yes. The cloud approach is both mature and functionally deep enough to drive a significant level of IT success for today’s new generation of supply chain experts. The supply chain world is experiencing a major structural shift as more companies rely on a community of partners worldwide to carry out the complex dance of designing, manufacturing, and distributing products. Today, the majority of supply chain activity already takes place in a virtual, “cloud-like” environment—outside the four walls of one company, across a global web of trading partners. This new approach, called Community Supply Chain Management, demands a new technology model and cloud computing is a natural fit. When it comes to business applications, the emerging “as a service” delivery model—e.g. Software as a Service, or SaaS—might be considered a cloud application. However, unless it is massively scalable and available to many users simultaneously, it is just a variation on license models and not necessarily a true cloud application.
Compared to traditional software, SaaS-based CRM and ERP vendors have been successful in delivering significantly better performance, security, and reliability—all at a lower cost—for optimal levels of customized, secure processes. This has paved the way for a move into mission-critical, multi-company SCM. And unlike the original SaaS model in which a vendor runs an application on its own servers rather than on a company’s private services, the cloud provides access to thousands, or even millions of supply chain community members—anywhere, at any time, through an intuitive front end. It requires little to no IT expertise and those leveraging the cloud model need not worry about software installation or maintenance.
While certain applications do rely on the storage of such data as customer records, emails and documents within the cloud, there is an entire class of applications that reap the benefits of cloud computing without any risk to confidential data. Take Internet security, for example, and web filtering specifically. Anyone using a recent Firefox browser has likely seen the red “attack page” warning before going to a web site. This safety mechanism comes to the browser through the power of cloud computing. Google does some basic security checks when it visits websites and publishes its findings for Firefox users and alongside search results.
In the real world, however, running every file that gets downloaded and then monitoring and mining data on everything it does is impractical–the memory and processing requirements are just too high. The same is true of websites; a thorough, automated evaluation of a website is a very slow process. Any vendor offering an appliance or desktop application performing this function would soon learn that end users won’t tolerate the required delays and would opt instead to turn off the feature.
When you move the in-depth scanning techniques into the cloud–with its theoretically limitless computing capabilities–and add in efficiencies gained by scanning a website or file only once, regardless of the number of users visiting it, that is the real power of the cloud. Traditional tradeoffs between security and performance can be re-evaluated as virtual supercomputers are applied to security problems and millions of users gain the benefit of a single in-depth scan.
In-memory data grids store information that applications need in memory across a pool of servers, instead of reading it off disks, resulting in major performance gains. The Coherence product is one of the more mature in a space occupied by offerings from IBM as well as smaller companies like GigaSpaces and a number of open-source projects. Microsoft is also developing a system dubbed “Velocity.” o date, such systems have breathed rarefied air, mostly supporting large-scale Web sites and high-throughput transactional systems, such as stock trading applications. The in-memory data grid market in total generated less than US$100 million in revenue during 2008, according to Gartner, which prefers the term “distributed caching platforms.
But some observers believe that in-memory approaches to data management could eventually gain serious traction in cloud-computing deployments. The technologies would help applications that weren’t originally designed for elastically scalable infrastructure systems like Amazon Web Services to run more effectively, albeit “via some re-engineering,” Gartner analyst Massimo Pezzini said in a recent report. Beyond vendor trepidation, other factors stand in the way of broader customer adoption, such as the complexity of deploying and managing the systems and limited support from systems integrators and ISVs, according to Pezzini.
The version that is now available to the public includes access with 3GB of free storage space (which isn’t much), 30 free applications (such as Office, Mail, Music, Video, IM, Sharing, Games, Collaboration, and Development tools), 20 free widgets, free backup to provide secure storage. Further, it doesn’t require installation and can be run through Internet Explorer or Firefox. That means Safari, Chrome, and Opera lovers will just have to wait a bit longer. No word yet on whether it can be accessed from Firefox Mobile. According to the site, even getting it running with Firefox is still being worked on. Also, no word of basic specs that are needed to run such a application. It seems to be working on my MacBook, but loading a bit sluggishly.
This may be a great little program for college students, casual computer users, or kids. As far as uses for professional reasons go, I’m not too sure how to guage it’s usefulness yet. In fact, it seems almost like Xcerion is taking something like an iPhone OS or Android, adding in storage and making it available on computers. It seems very intriguing so far and it surely is pushing the development of cloud computing as we know it.
Hyperic Inc., the leading provider of web application performance monitoring software for the datacenter and the cloud, today announced Hyperic HQ 4.0, the next major evolution of its award-winning systems monitoring and management application. The new release addresses the growing needs of businesses embracing Amazon cloud services to create affordable and scalable IT deployment strategies. With today’s release, Hyperic HQ is the first software that enables the modern enterprise to monitor its Amazon Web Services securely alongside internal infrastructure. It is also the first enterprise-class monitoring and management software offered for deployment and payment directly though Amazon Web Services.
The new Hyperic HQ 4.0 release starts by streamlining the process of adding new software resources into management. After auto-discovery registers the new resources into inventory, a new process of server cloning allows all configuration profiles for log data collection, security and services checks to be immediately applied. Coupled with global alert templates for resource types, the entire system of monitoring and rules for warning of performance problems can be incorporated in under a minute.
In addition, the release also addresses additional areas of concern for virtualized and cloud-based deployment including security, application management and capacity planning. A new server communication protocol allows agents monitoring external resources to always initiate communication with the HQ Server in order to meet to security protocols and operate across firewalls. Despite the uni-directional communication, the agent still maintains a full range of capabilities including the ability to update and run diagnostics remotely, and issue corrective control actions such as a service restart or running garbage collection to free memory.
The reason it is difficult to run multiple applications on a single instance of a general purpose operating system is because each application has unique needs which conflict or compete with the unique needs of other applications. Virtualization technology, such as that provided by VMware or Citrix with XenServer, breaks the bond of the application to a physical server by placing a layer of software, called a hypervisor, on the physical hardware beneath the operating system instances that support each application. The applications are “isolated” from one another inside virtual machines, and this isolation eliminates the conflicts.
Amazon embraces this virtualization model by using Xen to enable their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. I can tell you that there are lots of folks asking lots of questions about how to enable Windows applications in the “cloud.” I do not believe the answer is “Windows for EC2″ plus “Windows for GoGrid” plus “Windows for Rackspace” plus “Windows for [insert your data-center cloud name here].” If Microsoft does not find a way to turn the licensing ship and embrace JeOS, the market. irtualization enables the separation of the application from the infrastructure upon which it runs - making possible a level of business agility and dynamicism previously unthinkable. Imagine being able to run your applications on-demand in any data-center around the world that exposes the hypervisor (any hypervisor) as the runtime environment.
Virtualization is not an end point, but an enabler of a more flexible and efficient compute environment - ok get that too. Ultimately virtualization must enable IT to contribute to better business results. What about other parts of the IT infrastructure beyond servers, clients and applications? Are we evolving to having islands of virtual clients and servers connected via a static network infrastructure? See this post in Archimedius for more on this theme. Not to be left behind in the dust of server virtualization, network interconnects are also marching toward being enabled in dynamic virtual environments. Case in point is HP’s recent introduction of its Virtual Connect Flex-10 technology, a new component in HP’s Virtual Connect architecture. Flex-10 enables you to add 4x more NICs to each server blade without more hardware. In addition to supporting oodles of connections and NICS, Flex-10 provides the ability to dynamically adjust bandwidth for each network connection on the fly. With HP Flex-10 technology, you choose how many NICs are on each server and can adjust the bandwidth of each NIC in increments of 100 Mb.
