There's no question that Red Hat, long the world market leader in open source-based enterprise Linux development, is doing what Cisco Systems, Oracle and a large number of other established IT companies have had to do.
And that would be to expand markets by shifting a big part of their strategy to cloud systems development, as soon as possible, and in a big way.
At its annual Red Hat Summit and JBoss World conference in Boston May 4, Red Hat announced new cloud-related agreements with a pair of old-school and longtime IT partners, Hewlett-Packard and BMC Software.
In the HP deal, Red Hat announced what it calls the Red Hat Cloud-HP Edition, which is a private cloud design and reference architecture for IAAS (infrastructure-as-a-service) clouds combining Red Hat Cloud solutions with HP's CloudSystem, Cloud Maps and associated services.
This will be just the ticket for Red Hat/HP shops in the process of refreshing their systems who want to add such an IAAS cloud for future development purposes.
Red Hat Cloud-HP Edition is based on Red Hat Cloud Foundations, which is a stack comprised of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, JBoss Enterprise Middleware and Red Hat Network Satellite.
From the HP side, the new offering includes elements of HP's Hybrid Delivery Cloud solutions, such as HP CloudSystem Matrix, a platform for private clouds that reduces the time it takes customers to provision complex infrastructure and applications.
In turn, CloudSystem Matrix features HP Cloud Maps, which can be imported directly into client cloud environments, enabling them to more rapidly build a catalog of cloud services for the business. HP Cloud Maps are available for Red Hat environments running Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware.
The HP Cloud Map for JBoss Enterprise Middleware includes a template to automate the infrastructure provisioning and deployment for JBoss Enterprise Middleware, which speeds application deployment and reduces risk by providing engineered, tested and proven configurations.
The Red Hat-HP package will be made available later this year.
Red Hat, BMC Team for New DLM
Red Hat didn't have a data lifecycle management product/service in its catalog, so BMC Software came to the rescue with its well-established platform.
BMC described its new Red Hat product as a tightly integrated turnkey DLM platform that will consist of its own Cloud Lifecycle Management solution running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager.
In addition, BMC said, the two companies intend to work together on integrations that would include the newly announced Red Hat CloudForms, based on the Deltacloud API.
The combined architecture is expected to be available later in 2011, BMC Chief Technology Officer Kia Behnia said.
