In November 2006, Red Hat rolled out its Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) strategy by redefining SOA to be Simple, Open and Affordable.We highlighted four customer challenges that Red Hat takes on with low-cost, high-value SOA solutions. These challenges included:

1. Development complexity,
2. Low IT resource utilization,
3. Business process friction, and
4. Inadequate user experiences.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware Platforms and Frameworks take on these challenges on our customers’ behalf enabling them to build simple, open and affordable SOAs to improve business execution and results.

Today, with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 announcement, we expand on the solutions to the second challenge – improving low IT resource utilization. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5′s advanced virtualization features are ideal for securely and reliably dealing with the widely variable workloads that an SOA may present to the underlying operating system and hardware resources. SOA deployments open up IT assets to a much wider range of users including customers, partners and employees in such a manner that the demands upon the systems are unpredictable and may come in sharp spikes. Rather than deploy a battery of unused hardware "just-in-case" a new promotion is more popular than anticipated or you release major news, deploy your SOA services and business process middleware on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 taking advantage of its virtualization capabilities. JBoss Enterprise Middleware is tuned in conjunction with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 for just these types of scenarios. The Red Hat Application Stack will be updated in the future to include Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, making it a perfect solution for SOA services development and deployment.

How does Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 virtualization optimize SOA deployments? Three areas come to mind:

1. Abstraction isolates the operating system and the SOA services and processes from the underlying hardware. It is easy to build a SOA service andrndeploy as many copies as are needed for workload management, availability and security reasons.
2. Isolation provided by virtualization allows SOA services and processes to be hosted in individual containers. Each container can be run on a system without any concern about it taking the system down, exploiting other containers from a security point-of-view or causing other SOA services, processes and applications to fail.
3. Flexibility enabled by live migration, coupled with virtualization allows IT to move running instances of SOA services and processes around without any noticeable user disruption. IT can load balance, offload, and move SOA services and processes away from failing systems.

We are excited about Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and JBoss Enterprise Middleware’s capabilities to improve customers’ SOA experiences Simply Openly, and Affordably.

To learn more about SOA, visit here.