“Red Hat is a completely different company than it was five years ago,” insisted Brian Stevens, the company’s new chief technology officer. Stevens himself is a 14-year DEC veteran who lives in the Boston area. He’s been charged with shepherding open-source technologies (not just Linux) toward mission-critical readiness. At DEC, he was an architect for the company’s Tru64 Operating System. He also helped develop the X Window System, widely used as the graphical interface for Unix. Stevens stopped by the GCN offices and spoke with associate writer Joab Jackson.
Stevens: Our clients are looking for better TCO, but that is not going to come [from] the price of the OS. What they are really looking for is how quickly they can deploy their applications; how they can better utilize their systems. That next data center will cost $5 million, so [customers] want to avoid building that next data center. We’re working with them to see how they can harness their capacity and give them better utilization.
That is where the TCO will be fought—at the architectural level, around massive scalability. It will not be fought over the performance of a single system, or an individual feature. So that is why we are doing virtualization and stateless Linux.
Translation: “I am clueless and have no idea how RedHat Technology fits in corporate IT environments”
Translation: “I am clueless and have no idea how RedHat Technology fits in corporate IT environments”
You just don’t get it do you – fortunately I think MS just doesn’t get it too.
To make life a little easier I will translate as you don’t seem to understand the original:
“We (Red Hat) will run a lot more instances of our OS on your hardware than MS can. You will be able to expand your capacity and be able to save a lot of money at the same time if you go with us.”
Remember this one word Xen
Remember this one word Xen
Well, to be fair, RHEL actually needs this to be on par
with the operating systems and environments it is
competing with. RHEL is not at an advantage, it is
catching up.
FreeBSD 4.0 from March, 2000 came with jail. Solaris 10 came this year with their version of jail (zones).
I do not know any enteprise linux distributions with anything like this.
Neither solaris nor freebsd has anything like xen. Jail is not the same, but it can often be used for some of the same tasks.
IBM S/360 mainframes came with the same kind of technology as Xen in the 1960s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_360
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VM/CMS
You are right. RedHat is about 39 years after IBM. But mostly at the same level as the other Linux distributions, Solaris, Windows and others.
Neither solaris nor freebsd has anything like xen. Jail is not the same, but it can often be used for some of the same tasks.
Solaris will have Xen as well, see:
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/tpm?entry=hello_world_from_solaris…
Sun, IBM and even HP unix systems all support virtualization
in hardware. Xen is only really needed on X86 systems
, which currently don’t have much support for hardware virtualization, as an alternative to the proprietary and expensive vmware.
To my mind, the problem of utilization is much better
addressed by application containers (i.e. jails, zones)
than it is by hardware virtualization.
How about this translation: “Red Hat is not focused on crazy new whiz-bang expensive systems; Red Hat is about getting the most out of your current hardware/software investment”
“I look at Linux as yet another version of Unix, but open source is a path that does not foster differentiation.”
“The whole thing of companies trying to make their Linux different than others—and expecting to sustain that—is not a reality.”
And this said new CTO of RedHat ? Is this a good moment to be afraid ?
Edited 2005-12-13 00:09
Makes sense to me. Just look at what happens mostly when projects get forked. I mean, I guess I could imagine a scenario where there was more than one Linux kernel project each competing with the other, but I fine it unlikely given the nature of its license.
Tom Janowitz –
He is correct. Linux IS just another UNIX. One based on OpenSource instead of closed and segmenting sources.
Linux isn’t allowed to deviate as much because there is one group in charge or the ROOT and the core fundamentals of LINUX. Sure there is GNOME and KDE and different distributions. But they do all start from one ROOT and XWindows (for the most part.)
Well, for that matter, KDE and Gnome remain KDE and Gnome whatever distribution you use them on. Nobody’s gone off and done anything really radical with either of them (that I know of) and even if they did I’m sure they would periodically start basing their patches off the new versions. (Like they do with the Linux kernel- how many people run a straight, unpatched kernel? I have no idea, but most probably use patched versions)
Linux doesn’t fork because it doesn’t want to, not because it’s not allowed to.
“He is correct. Linux IS just another UNIX. One based on OpenSource instead of closed and segmenting sources.”
But then you can argue that even Windows NT/XP and consecutive are Unixes, just becouse they incorporate some BSD stuff. And “Unix” had rather broad meaning.
“Linux isn’t allowed to deviate as much because there is one group in charge or the ROOT and the core fundamentals of LINUX”
Those are basic internals. Why people should really care how is the TCP/IP stack being implemented if it works fast ? There is one ‘implementation’ of X server – so what ? Does it harm linux/BSD’s in some way ? Would it be good to have around a few dozen of incompatible with each other X servers ? And question : do you imply, that closed source projects are more prone to deviation, then open source ?
“Sure there is GNOME and KDE and different distributions. But they do all start from one ROOT and XWindows (for the most part.)”
Agreed. But i don’t consider differencies between KDE and Gnome minor and unimportant (not even for enterprises). There is only one linux kernel, becouse 1)it’s hard work to develop one (doesn’t have anything to do with open source) 2) apparently no one sees the need for forking (maybe becouse it does the job done ?)
“Makes sense to me. Just look at what happens mostly when projects get forked.”
Let’s see:
Emacs – Xemacs
XFree86 – Xorg
Debian – Ubuntu (i know it’s not accurate)
xmms – beep media player
blackbox – fluxbox
wine – cedega (they don’t give code back, but still to some extend it works)
Minix – Linux (well Linux based his work on this system, right ?)
Now what ‘bad’ happens, when project forks ? I know – the strongest survives. That’s evoulution, not a dead end.
“Red Hat is a completely different company than it was five years ago,”
Doesn’t say if that’s a good thing or not.
Why would anyone bother with Red Hat when you can get Solaris, with more enterprise functionality, a better price, more ISV support by a mile (vs. RHEL), and with a totally integrated web services stack (and ZFS and dTrace and containers and fault management and scalability and and and…)? Can someone please explain? Red Hat seems like a legacy OS nowadays…
Where can I get Solaris?
Novell is a good reason to choose RedHat. RedHat is a good reason to choose Novell. Mandriva, Debian and others also help.
Why? Several companies delivers simular products. This gives flexibility and secures the suply.
The best thing with Linux is the developed market with several paralell supliers of simular products and services. The custommers can shop all over with no major problem.
A open source product do not make a open source project. Linux is not a centralised model with a controlling center. It is a distributed model with several supliers. This makes the supply chain more trustworthy and safe.
I think this breaks down a bit when you decide that you
would actually like to use your computer and maybe run
some commercial applications (weird, I know).
When it comes to running *supported* commercial apps,
you may find that your choice of distribution isn’t as
wide as what you thought it was. Until all distributions
of linux are equivalent, and accepted by ISV’s as such,
this IS a problem.
But my ISV’s only support Red Hat – so Mandriva is nice and all, but they don’t help me…