Red Hat takes enterprise virtualization a notch up

Red Hat, a leading distributor of the free Linux operating system, is now pushing virtualization to another level. Josep Garcia, director of Red Hat channel sales in the Asia Pacific, said Wednesday that the company has created a platform for "high-performing, scalable and secure virtualization environment for enterprise-class application." Virtualization is mainstream technology, but virtual machines still account for less than 20 percent of all data center servers, which is why Red Hat is getting some synergy in pushing for it. "The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization platform will enable organizations to run low-latency, high I/O throughput applications in a virtualized environment -- applications previously not considered suitable for virtualization because of the performance hit they took under existing, proprietary solutions," Garcia said in an interview. The company's virtualization solutions would enable organizations to scale their virtualization deployments to tens of thousands of virtual machines, "allowing them to run the largest and the most mission-critical production databases." Red Hat said the total cost of proprietary virtualization solutions, which run between $5,000 and $10,000 per host, "shouldn't be viewed as inherent problems with virtualization per se." Garcia said it has its line up of "financial, telecommunication and business-process outsourcing companies" to tap into for its virtualization solutions. With this endeavor, UR Solutions Inc. also announced Wednesday it would continue supporting the growing open-source market or the free use and dissemination of software in the country. Seeing that Linux and open-source solutions are "the next wave of mainstream technologies, URSI believes that tapping into this growing market will further its drive to use open source as a cost-effective and reliable alternative in conducting business," UR Solutions said in a statement. "The local market is beginning to grow in its need for both virtualization and Linux technology," said Patrick Reidenbach, general manager of UR Solutions. "The information technology has definitely shown a fast-growing reliance on the use of Linux across different architectures. Shifts continue to expand into commercially oriented workloads such as database and other general business processing," he said. This puts UR Solutions in a unique position to leverage it to its advantage, as a competitive solution at competitive price point.—Jesse Edep/VS, GMANews.TV