Red Hat: The Integrated Stack Is Critical

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Open source philosophy

Thadani explained that Red Hat is starting to see a new wave of customers that have never used Linux previously, but are interested in exploring alternatives to VMware, because they are afraid of missing out on the benefits of virtualisation.

“When VMware really started being put into production about three or four years ago, it started on the Windows side of the house, because Windows servers are typically less utilised, and they’re typically less critical in nature than the Linux servers,” said Thadani. “So the Windows administrators were the ones that got the VMware certifications and started rolling VMware out in production.

“It’s taken two or three years for the CIO to really understand the value of virtualisation,” he added. “It’s not just about server consolidation, but it’s also about the flexibility and the agility that you get when you virtualise. So now they’re looking over the Linux guys and saying, you’ve got to do the same thing.”

Thadani believes that, while those people working “on the Linux side of the house” are keen to deploy virtualisation, they are not keen to do it on expensive proprietary virtualisation software.

“They’ve learnt the lesson of being locked into proprietary hardware, and they’ve seen the benefits of moving to something that’s open, that’s based on commodity stuff,” said Thandani. “So they’re saying we want to do this but we want to do it with RHEV, because Red Hat is the vendor that saved us from the proprietary Unix world.”

While RHEV is being deployed predominantly by Linux teams, Red Hat is also certified by Microsoft to run Windows VMs on the RHEV infrastructure. Thadani said that some customers that started off with RHEV on the Linux side are now starting to throw some Windows workloads on to it as well.

“One of the things about RHEV is that someone who knows their way around VMware can probably pick up how to use RHEV in 10-15 minutes,” he said. “In our model, the management is very similar to VMware and the underlying infrastructure – the hypervisor itself – it’s based on Linux. So it’s the best of both worlds.”

Moving into the cloud

eWEEK Europe asked whether Red Hat, as a company that works closely with enterprise Linux teams, is seeing companies putting their mission-critical applications in the cloud.

“People aren’t ready to put mission-critical applications on the public cloud, but I think virtualisation inside of the enterprise – the private cloud – is mature enough, and people have enough confidence in the technology and the concept in general that they are getting ready to put mission critical workloads there,” said Thadani.

Red Hat has customers such as Dreamworks and Qualcomm that are already running a lot of their infrastructure on RHEV, he said. By moving from running Unix on a proprietary infrastructure to Linux on a virtualised infrastructure, Red Hat says companies are experiencing better performance and more flexibility at a lower cost.

“It’s really a confluence of a lot of different factors driving demand,” said Thadani.

Meanwhile, it is not just private clouds that can be built using Red Hat enterprise virtualisation. Companies such as IBM and Japanese service provider NTT operate public clouds for their enterprise customers that are built on RHEV KVM. Red Hat also operates a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud for its customers called OpenShift.

“We believe that we’re really one of the modern software companies that’s sitting with the entire stack that makes sense for service providers, for enterprises, for new-age developers. All of that is covered. And we do all of this in an open source map,” said Thadani.