RALEIGH – Hey, you, independent software vendor or IT guru, Red Hat wants you to get on its “cloud.”
With apologies to the Stones and “get off of my cloud,” The Skinny was a bit overwhelmed by the not one, not two but FOUR press releases Red Hat (NYSE: ) issued simultaneously on Tuesday.
The news blitz was the opening barrage in the Hatters to drive up sales for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and a new update of its flagship product plus virtualization offerings. The world’s top Linux distributor also is moving rapidly to capitalize on growing demand for virtualization, which is the capability to run multiple operating systems on one server – a big money saver.
By teaming with Amazon, Red Hat is offering RHEL through an on-demand computing and storage service (Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2) for as low as $19 a month plus hourly charges as low as 21 cents. The Amazon product is known as a “cloud.”
Here’s how the Hatters described the Amazon offering on one of its blogs:
“Wondering what “in the cloud” means? “Cloud”-based web services allow customers to very easily scale up and down their compute power as the demands on a business fluctuate. It’s the use of networked infrastructure software and capacity to provide resources to users in an on-demand environment, offering a set of typically virtualized computers that can grant users the ability to start and stop servers or use compute cycles only when needed, often paying only for the use of those services. Sounds flexible and convenient. And now you can take advantage of it through Red Hat.”
An open source/Linux blogger at ZDnet likes what he sees in the Red Hat offering.
“My take on these announcements is that Red Hat wants to take its Linux distribution clout far beyond the market for dedicated servers and blades [servers] at individual enterprises, and become the de facto industry standard for how hosting organizations, telecommunications providers, entertainment providers, and on-demand ISVs deploy all their applications over the next 10 years,” Dana Gardner wrote.
While some financial analysts and competitors downplayed Red Hat’s offering, Gardner sees big opportunities for the Hatters.
“Red Hat is banking on the trends around virtualization, clustering and utility computing, multi-core hardware/parallelism, and the increasingly advantageous on-demand subscription economic models to become the low-cost, high-performance enough foundational supplier,” he said.
Another techie insider blog, Open Sources at InfoWorld, also embraced the Red Hat/Amazon partnership.
“This is a good move by both companies since it helps position Red Hat as an innovator and it shows that Amazon’s EC2 service lets you use the #1 Linux, thereby reducing possible compatibility or skills issues,” the bloggers wrote.
