Monday 15 March 2010
Red Hat Targets Cloud Computing
Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today delivered on its JBoss Open Choice strategy and announced availability of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5.0. This core middleware product represents next generation Java application platforms and will be integral to Red Hat’s cloud foundation.
JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5.0 supports developer choice and aims to provide a consistent foundation to support the wide variety of Java programming and component models, including Plain Old Java Objects, Java EE, Spring Framework, OSGi, Google Web Toolkit and a variety of Rich Internet Application frameworks and dynamic languages. Additionally, the platform spans the growing number of operating models, from traditional on-premise lightweight Java applications, to newer internal and external cloud-based deployments. Customers are expected to benefit from easier application development and deployment, developer choice in programming models, protection against programming model changes and an easier transition to newer application deployment models.
“JBoss Enterprise Middleware allows us to be extremely flexible with our architecture. We can deploy on a range of options to suit our needs which is unlike any other IT vendor we have considered,” said Tim Dion, CIO, Sensei Inc., a developer of innovative mobile and Web-based solutions that motivate and empower consumers to take charge of their well-being(www.sensei.com). “With the addition of cloud enabled platforms Red Hat is anticipating our technology needs for the future which will help us make a seamless transition into cloud computing environments. Healthcare innovation, and the role mobile technology is playing in particular, is transforming individuals and organizations. Cloud computing environments like JBoss help bring these innovations to the masses.”
Recent IDC research predicts spending on IT cloud services to grow almost threefold, reaching $42 billion by 2012 and capturing 25% of IT spending growth in 2012 and nearly a third of growth the following year*. Further IDC indicates that successful suppliers will need to address both the biggest challenges of cloud services, and the biggest traditional IT user issues.**
“Not only have we delivered on our JBoss Open Choice strategy by releasing JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5.0, but we are contributing to the future of Java application platforms from traditional to cloud-based environments,” said Craig Muzilla, vice president, middleware, Red Hat. “Ultimately, we aim to give customers the flexibility to choose the right programming and deployment models to stay ahead of their competition.”
Red Hat’s middleware portfolio is designed to help customers take advantage of cloud computing. As a core component of Red Hat’s cloud computing foundation, customers should be able to combine JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux with integrated virtualization technologies that provide customers with a fully virtualized, standards-based enterprise open source cloud computing service platform, supporting both on-premise and off-premise cloud deployments.
JBoss Enterprise Application Platform is the first commercially available Java EE application server available in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). This new release is expected to also be made available on Amazon EC2, as well as other environments that achieve Red Hat’s Premier Cloud Provider Certification.
JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5.0 is designed to leverage a second generation service-based Microcontainer architecture to provide a consistent and modular series of enterprise deployment features for clustering, caching, transactions, web services, security and more, regardless of the selected programming model or deployment style. This unique JBoss Microcontainer architecture makes it possible for JBoss solutions to support many different programming models. It also makes it possible to separate enterprise services to be more configurable, which enables easier development and deployment. The new release also features an advanced administrative console that makes configuring traditional and cloud-based application grids simpler and easier.
Features of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5.0 include:
– Second-generation service-based architecture: The core JBoss Microcontainer provides improved class-loading, performance, life-cycle management and flexibility across a wide variety of programming and component models including; Java EE, POJOs, OSGi, Spring Framework and more in both traditional on-premise and cloud operating environments. The Microcontainer also provides the ability to separate enterprise services from the core runtime engine, making it more configurable.
– Improved management and configuration: An embedded version of the JBoss Operations Network administrative console provides a comprehensive interface to manage and configure applications, control application server operations and provide insight into performance metrics for both on and off premise applications.
– Java EE Support: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform supports the full Java EE 5 standard, as well as providing support for several upcoming Java EE 6 standards, including the Java EE Web Profile concept.
– Major component upgrades: Upgrades include enterprise versions of the JBoss Application Server, Hibernate, Seam, JBoss Cache and JBoss Web Services that provide performance enhancements for scalability, high availability and intelligent load balancing across a variety of deployment environments. The new release also features support for distributed transactions and comprehensive web services stack support.
Operational management is available in the latest JBoss Operations Network (ON) release, JBoss ON 2.3. This release provides comprehensive management support including configuring application clusters in traditional and cloud-based deployments as well as availability and performance management across a variety of operating environments.
Developer tooling is available with JBoss Developer Studio, an Eclipse-based integrated development environment that provides a comprehensive set of tools developers need to quickly build rich, highly interactive applications and services using technologies like Seam, Java EE, Spring, Hibernate, AJAX, RichFaces and more.
JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5.0 is available today to select customers through the first customer ship (FCS) program. Learn more about the new JBoss platform during the live JBoss World keynote, or recorded versions available at www.jbossworld.com.
*IDC Press Release, IDC Finds Cloud Computing Entering Period of Accelerating Adoption and Poised to Capture IT Spending Growth Over the Next Five Years, Doc #prUS21480708, 20 Oct 2008
**IDC eXchange, IT Cloud Services User Survey, pt.3: What Users Want From Cloud Services Providers, Doc #213, 3 Oct 2008.
About Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider, 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 five 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 applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.
There are several kinds of Cloud Computing service offerings. Here are the most common ones. Common Services. Some products offer Internet-based services—such as storage, middleware, collaboration, and database capabilities—directly to users.
SaaS. Software-as-a-service products provide a complete, turnkey application—including complex programs such as those for CRM or enterprise-resource management—via the Internet.
PaaS. Platform-as-a-service products offer a full or partial development environment that users can access and utilize online, even in collaboration with others.
IaaS. Infrastructure-as-a-service products deliver a full computer infrastructure via the Internet.
DaaS. Desktop-as-a-service which utilize virtualization of desktop systems serving thin clients.
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.
Red Hat was the first supported operating system and JBoss the first supported middleware on AWS. Anyway, Red Hat has thought up this shiny new program to certify “industry leaders in cloud computing” on Red Hat solutions. Premier Cloud Provider Partners are supposed to collaborate with Red Hat on technical support, security updates, hardware certification, sales and marketing, and business models.
Red Hat says customer interest in cloud computing, both in building virtualized internal infrastructure systems and extending their applications to the cloud, is increasing and that they’re asking to transfer and use Red Hat subscriptions on premise and/or in cloud environments.
Senior Oracle executives are understood to be working on a holistic corporate story that encompasses Oracle’s assets in databases, applications, and middleware. t’s understood these include putting Oracle’s Siebel and PeopleSoft applications into the cloud. At a lower level, people in Oracle’s product units are working individually on projects that would make more of Oracle’s applications and middleware available for use in cloud computing. The growing pace of activity comes after chief executive Larry Ellison last year professed confusion over cloud computing - and a willingness to exploit this latest trend in IT.
Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g features WebLogic Suite 11g with support for Oracle’s grid technology. That includes GridLink for Oracle’s Real Application Clusters, enterprise-wide messaging using the WebLogic Server Java Message Service, and ActiveCache to scale web session and persistence state in Oracle’s Coherence. Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g features re-usable components that can be plugged into portals and there’s a pre-built social-networking platform, while Oracle Identity Management 11g has been updated to provide deeper integration with other Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle said. The Oracle SOA Suite 11g is designed to simplify development of event-based applications, features an integrated business rules engine, and has been certified with Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel CRM, PeopleSoft Enterprise, and JD Edwards Enterprise One.
