Red Hat to Give Customers Changes in Real Time

Asked by eWEEK what new technologies will form the basis of RHEL 6, the next version, and beyond, Stevens said the company, headquartered in Raleigh, N.C., has ramped up its team working on scalable message queuing, which is not part of RHEL 5, and is creating a community of developers under the Apache umbrella, known as Qpid as well as a specification working group, AMQP.

"We are going to be bringing that, under subscription, to a small number of customers over the next quarter, starting with a lot of financial service firms who will be using it for market data management and the like," Stevens said.

"But, once we make that broadly available, we expect to build policy-based management on top of the framework. So its not just around critical market data, but around how you build an agile data center that is event-driven in a scalable fashion and away from the legacy systems management monitoring products of the past," he said.

As such, Red Hat is going to "plumb into this messaging model for next-generation data center management, which will be a big theme over the next release," Stevens said.

Red Hat accuses Novell of being "irresponsible" about Xen. Read more here.

There will also be a continuation of the virtualization technology, the first phase of which is found in RHEL 5, as well as delivering on policy-based management and trying to automate that data center and grid.

Red Hat is also looking at the integration of high-availability capabilities with these virtualization capabilities, so as to obviate the need for things like Oracle RACs (Real Application Clusters), which Stevens said are "insanely priced" and of limited value.

"When you start to look at frameworks of high availability, of RHEL 5 integrated with Xen, with online migration and high availability for any database type, and combined with multicore, the scale you hit is just insane, and there is no reason to go for horizontal scaling any longer. So there will be work done on all that," Stevens said.

In addition, Red Hat will be expanding on the notion of a database container, and taking RHEL 5 and creating database containers that let IT administrators do all the things they could previously do only with expensive RAC environments with PostGRES, Sybase, Ingres and others, he said.

To read more about why some experts believe that Linux virtualization is crying out for management tools, click here.

Stevens also gave his views on why competitor Oracle—which is challenging Red Hat with Oracle Linux—has not embraced virtualization, while considering the threat posed to Oracles RAC business now that database containers coan be built using virtualization.

"Virtualization was disruptive to Oracles business, and they knew it, and now it has arrived. Any database can now be put into a virtual machine, fully managed, with both automatic and manual resource assignment, with memory and CPU being able to be added and removed on the fly," he said.

"So, what we are talking about is a common infrastructure, a common platform for applications that all need these services. So now, all of a sudden, we can bring high availability and all of these capabilities, not just to an Oracle RAC environment, but to any database. So we have totally leveled the playing field between databases through the notion of this database container," Stevens said.

Oracle continues to eat the database market. Click here to read more.

This, said Stevens, means that RAC, with a 50 percent uplift per CPU, is now obviated.

"The scalability is not needed and it never really worked because of all the multicore advancements, and the high availability is now inferior technology as IT professionals do not want to invest in a high-availability strategy per application. Im looking forward to what the future brings," he said.

Check out eWEEK.coms for the latest open-source news, reviews and analysis.