Red Hat Advances Open Virtualization to Drive for Market Leadership

Company defines the next phase of open source infrastructure solutions required for enterprise-wide adoption of virtualization

RALEIGH, N.C. -

Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced three strategic initiatives targeting enterprise-wide adoption of next-generation virtualization. These initiatives will enable customers to deploy virtualization across their IT infrastructure by offering features and cost benefits that go beyond competitive solutions. With this portfolio growth, Red Hat solutions provide the market with comprehensive virtualization capabilities.

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Unlike many virtualization solutions in the market today, Red Hat's technologies enable customers to deploy a virtualization infrastructure that is flexible enough to meet their individual business needs. At the same time, Red Hat's strict adherence to open interfaces offers customers the flexibility to choose components from multiple vendors. These technologies are developed by Red Hat in collaboration with its partners and customers using the open source development model, resulting in more functional, higher quality solutions. With this announcement, open source virtualization is well positioned to overtake existing virtualization technologies.

Demonstrating Red Hat's commitment to its Linux Automation strategy, these technologies allow customers to deploy x86-based virtualization solutions consistently across their IT infrastructure. Using one set of tools to manage both physical and virtual servers, this architecture enables customers to implement cloud, Software as a Service (SaaS), appliance and traditional IT infrastructures. By maximizing flexibility customers are able to reduce costs and complexity.

Today Red Hat introduces:

Embedded Linux Hypervisor — a lightweight, embeddable hypervisor for hosting virtualized Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft® Windows® environments. This hypervisor delivers virtualization with all the advantages of Linux - superior security, high performance and a wide range of hardware support - all in a small footprint that is easily embedded into servers and desktop computers. Red Hat is announcing beta availability of this hypervisor at www.ovirt.org. The hypervisor is based on the KVM project (kvm.qumranet.com), which has been integrated into the Linux kernel since 2006. It supports live migration of virtual machines from system to system in real time and high availability features. KVM technology has rapidly emerged as the next-generation virtualization technology, following on from the highly successful Xen implementation.

Virtual Infrastructure Management — easy-to-use, multi-system management is critical for production deployment of virtualized systems. Red Hat's close collaboration with its customers over the past two years has resulted in successful deployments ranging from test and development to on-demand grid, supporting some of the world's largest cloud deployments. The accumulation of this expertise has resulted in the industry's first open source virtual infrastructure management solution, which will enable enterprise IT to build and manage internal clouds. This coordination of test and development, grid, and production applications onto a unified internal cloud will be transformational in driving out operational and capital costs, while enabling IT to provide a higher level of service to their lines of business. Red Hat is announcing beta availability of these management technologies at www.oVirt.org.

Security Infrastructure — virtualization in production environments presents significant security concerns for enterprise IT. The dynamic and shared aspects of virtual systems requires identity, policy and audit capability integrated into the infrastructure layer, so that critical resources - such as compute cycles, data storage and network access - are controlled and audited according to business application policies. Across the industry, the lack of a comprehensive virtualization security infrastructure has hampered consolidation of applications onto a shared infrastructure. To address this gap, Red Hat has announced the www.freeIPA.org project to advance and deliver integrated security technologies such that virtualization can be used ubiquitously across the enterprise.

Red Hat is leading the drive to open source virtualization solutions that deliver what proprietary products can't: open standards, true multi-vendor support, and the ultimate in deployment and operational flexibility, said Paul Cormier, President of Products and Technology at Red Hat. Today's announcements are a key step in extending the benefits of virtualization to every IT deployment. We continue to see huge improvements in functionality, performance and time to market because of our close relationship with our open source partners. For example, Intel and IBM have worked with us for many years covering virtualization technologies that span from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 to today's KVM-based announcements. We see this as the beginning of open source solutions becoming dominant in the software virtualization market, as it has in others, such as Linux itself.

Customers are demanding advanced Virtualization solutions that are easy to deploy and manage, said Doug Fisher, corporate vice president and general manager, Intel's System Software Division. Intel is providing the technology underpinnings to deliver these solutions through enhanced hardware assist for Virtualization. In addition, Intel and Red Hat have worked extensively with the open source community to drive innovative virtualization solutions to the industry. By combining the advancements in Intel(r) Virtualization Technology supported by the native KVM hypervisor, Red Hat's Virtualization infrastructure, and open source community innovations, we are able to offer our customers a solution with outstanding performance, scalability and agility.

IBM works closely with Red Hat and the open source community to drive innovation within the Linux kernel, said Daniel Frye, vice president, open systems development at IBM. IBM has a heterogenous approach toward virtualization, with KVM one of several options. KVM leverages the core features of the Linux kernel, including paravirtualization interfaces contributed by IBM engineers. By combining Linux virtualization infrastructure with open management interfaces such as CIM and libvirt, we gain a solution that eliminates lock-in and breaks down the barriers to enterprise wide adoption of virtualization.

Much as it has in the operating system and relational database markets, open source is poised to have a disruptive impact on the virtualization space, lowering costs for customers and offering alternatives to proprietary lock-in, said Stephen O'Grady, Principal Analyst with RedMonk. By embracing and fueling development around technologies such as KVM, Red Hat aims to provide customers with high quality, open source virtualization options.

According to a recent survey by Network Management and NetQoS polling over 100 IT professionals at the Interop conference, 51 percent of organizations use virtualization, and this is expected to rise to 83 percent within two years.

For more news about Red Hat, visit www.redhat.com. For more news, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com. For information on the technologies mentioned in this announcement, visit www.ovirt.org.

About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat, the world's leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 50 satellite offices spanning the globe. CIOs have ranked Red Hat first for value in Enterprise Software for four consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value study. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to the integration of acquisitions; the ability of the Company to effectively compete; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company's growth and international operations; adverse results in litigation; and changes in and a dependence on key personnel, as well as other factors contained in our most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission's Web site at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions "Risk Factors" and "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations". In addition to these factors, actual future performance, outcomes, and results may differ materially because of more general factors including (without limitation) general industry and market conditions and growth rates, economic conditions, and governmental and public policy changes. The forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company's views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company's views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release.

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  • About Red Hat
  • Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to reliable and high-performing cloud, Linux, middleware, storage and virtualization technologies. Red Hat also offers award-winning support, training, and consulting services. As the connective hub in a global network of enterprises, partners, and open source communities, Red Hat helps create relevant, innovative technologies that liberate resources for growth and prepare customers for the future of IT. Learn more at http://www.redhat.com.



  • Forward-Looking Statements
  • Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to delays or reductions in information technology spending; the effects of industry consolidation; the ability of the Company to compete effectively; the integration of acquisitions and the ability to market successfully acquired technologies and products; uncertainty and adverse results in litigation and related settlements; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; the ability to deliver and stimulate demand for new products and technological innovations on a timely basis; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company’s growth and international operations; fluctuations in exchange rates; and changes in and a dependence on key personnel, as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions "Risk Factors" and "Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations". In addition to these factors, actual future performance, outcomes, and results may differ materially because of more general factors including (without limitation) general industry and market conditions and growth rates, economic and political conditions, governmental and public policy changes and the impact of natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods. The forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company’s views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of this press release.