Critical.
Authoritative.
Strategic.
Subscribe to CIO Magazine »

CTO: Red Hat unaffected by Oracle, Novell

Brian Stevens discusses RHEL5, the competition and the Fedora Project

Red Hat has scheduled a March release for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL5), the latest version of its open-source operating system, while it tries to fend off new competitive threats from Oracle and the Microsoft -Novell partnership.

Red Hat Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Brian Stevens discussed the RHEL5, the competition, the Fedora Project and other issues with IDG News Service.

Following is an edited transcript of the interview, conducted this week at the InfoWorld Virtualization Executive Forum in San Francisco:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL5) comes out in March. What are some of the features that will move virtualization forward and keep Red Hat competitive?

RHEL5 is a scalable, full native 64-bit platform. In the second quarter of 2005, there was a crossover point where more 64-bit x86 systems were sold than 32-bit systems. So there is this untapped (64-bit) capability within the IT shops as many systems are still running 32-bit applications on 64-bit systems. With RHEL5, we aim to help allow IT and independent software vendors (ISVs) to realize the power of 64-bit computing on these multicore architectures. There is a lot of untapped capability in performance there so we aim to help that.

As to virtualization, it comes as an integrated feature set for RHEL5.

How has the move by Oracle to undercut you on the price for their Linux support and the partnership between Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc. affected the direction you are taking Red Hat as CTO?

It hasn't really affected the day-to-day activities because Red Hat is focused on creating value for customers. We have developed really close relationships to understand where we need to drive technology to make a meaningful impact on their businesses. We focus on the fundamentals, not on something else. If you start to think about what is going to create revenue for the company versus what's going to create value for the customer you're thinking about it the wrong way. Our results for the last quarter show that we are largely unaffected.

We look at the vibrancy of the Fedora Project, our open source community. Fedora is Red Hat's vehicle for bringing advanced technology really quickly to end-users. The last release of Fedora has been out for about four months and we are averaging more than 100,000 downloads a week and 1.5 million downloads total. Compare that 100,000 a week to Oracle with their release of Oracle Linux. We reach in seven hours what they reached in their very first month of releasing that source code.

With the Novell-Microsoft deal we continue to believe interoperability is important. We didn't see anything new and meaningful in that interoperability agreement. With RHEL5 we're going to show rich compatibility between Windows and Linux. We already have that. We are absolutely open to and willing to work with Microsoft under an interoperability agreement but one that does not require our customers to pay an IP (intellectual property) tax on Linux.

What are your projects for the coming year besides RHEL5?

We'll continue an initiative we started last year around Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP). It's going to transform how you manage messaging systems in grid environments. We'll be bringing that to a bunch of (test) customers this year. AMQP is about allowing you to have data sources and data feeds that can scale across grid environments.

What else?

We're leading the work in Linux around predictability with a project called Real Time. It's not just about dropping latency, even though it does that. It's around how we get determinism. It's really critical that the workloads you're running, whether its multimedia playback or transactions, know that there is a sort of boundary on the completion of transactions. Real Time is basically a rearchitecture of how the Linux kernel does locking and scheduling. We've had a team working on this for the past year and a half and we will be working with customers under a proof of concept through the course of this year.

Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.

More about: Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat

Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
Users posting comments agree to the CIO comments policy.
Login or register to link comments to your user profile, or you may also post a comment without being logged in.
Related Whitepapers
Latest Stories
Community Comments
Latest Blog Posts
Whitepapers
  • Keeping up With Ever-Expanding Enterprise Data - 2010 IOUG Database Growth Survey
    A majority of respondents report having performance and budget issues due to exponential data growth. Those companies with the highest rates of data growth, in fact, are eight times more likely than slow-growth sites to be seeing significant increases in their storage budgets. New processes and tools are needed to help organizations take control of the massive volumes of information now moving through their systems. The IOUG survey looked at approaches being taken by organizations to manage their growing data stores, and what still needs to be done.
    Learn more »
  • How to Choose an SMB - Unified Communications as a Service (UCAAS) Solution
    The on-premise deployment of Unified Communications (UC) continues to be a source of considerable corporate angst especially for the Small to Medium Business (SMB) sector. IT research firm Gartner believes UCaaS will be adopted as an adjunct service by large enterprises and as a core service by SMBs before 2015. To help SMBs choose the best offering and develop a suitable roadmap Computerworld has prepared this special feature profiling the major offerings in the Australian market.
    Learn more »
  • 10 Mobile Security Requirements for the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) Enterprise
    An enterprise mobility strategy needs to include more than the provisioning and security services available through mobile application and MDM solutions. To meet the mobility and security requirements of mobile users, enterprises need to look at deploying a solution for mobile content management (MCM) that supports BYOD policies. Read this whitepaper to learn: Why provisioning for mobile users has become more complex; Ten requirements to consider when selecting a mobile content security solution.
    Learn more »
All whitepapers
rhs_login_lockGet exclusive access to Invitation only events CIO, reports & analysis.
Recent comments