IBM, Red Hat Team Up for Development, Test Cloud Works

Red Hat, whose CEO, Jim Whitehurst, delivered the opening keynote of this week's Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, revealed March 16 that IBM has selected Red Hat's Enterprise Virtualization platform for its new cloud computing service for development and test.

Last June, IBM launched three cloud system models: IBM Smart Business Test Cloud, a private cloud behind the client's firewall, with hardware, software and services supplied by IBM; Smart Business Development & Test and Smart Business Application Development & Test, which use Rational Software Delivery Services on IBM's existing global cloud system; and IBM CloudBurst, a preintegrated set of hardware, storage, virtualization and networking options, with a built-in service management system.

The underpinnings of these are Tivoli Provisioning Manager 7.1 and Tivoli Service Automation Manager, which automates the deployment and management of computing clouds.

Red Hat first announced plans to deliver Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization in February 2009 to provide an open-source enterprise virtualization layer.

In November 2009, Red Hat launched Enterprise Virtualization for Servers, which provides an alternative to the market-leading VMware ESX and Citrix XenServer.

By including the new Red Hat offering, IBM is making available another option for IT systems that didn't exist previously.

The services are available now, IBM said.

Cloud computing, or utility computing, serves up computing power, data storage or applications from one data center location over a grid to thousands or millions of users on a subscription basis. This general kind of cloud-examples include the services provided online by Amazon EC2, Google Apps and Salesforce.com-is known as a public cloud because any business or individual can subscribe.

Private cloud computing is a different take on the mainstream, "public cloud" version, in that smaller, cloudlike IT systems within a firewall offer similar services, but to a closed internal network. This network may include corporate or division offices, other companies that are also business partners, raw-material suppliers, resellers, production-chain entities and other organizations intimately connected with a corporate mothership.