The 2010 RedHat Road Tour, kicks off September 15, 2010 in Atlanta! These free, half-day business seminars will be coming to a city near you this fall including Seattle, Vancouver, Chicago, Toronto, Dallas, and many more! Registration is filling up fast, so be sure to sign up for a seminar well in advance. Can’t make it to the Road Tour? Check out where else you can find RedHat this month.

Want easy, up-to-date information about RedHat events? Follow us on Twitter.

Global

Join RedHat September 14, for one of two live events, “Managing RedHat Enterprise Linux in an Increasingly Virtual World.” This is the final of four in the RedHat Enterprise Virtualization Webinar Series. To see event times and to register, click here.

Click here for a full list of RedHat Webinars.

Looking for information about RedHat Government Solutions? Click here.

Click here for a full calendar of Fedora events.

North America

**RedHat is coming to a city near you! Join us for a complimentary half-day seminar in your city focusing on cloud computing, virtualization, middleware and the future of IT at the 2010 RedHat Road Tour. We’ll feature real world examples, RedHat cloud experts and your peers all discussing the reality and the future of cloud computing. Check out our September dates below. A full list of tour dates is available here. Act fast, spots are filling up quickly!**

Atlanta, GA, September 15: Westin Buckhead Atlanta
Washington, DC, September 16: Hyatt Regency Crystal City
San Mateo, CA, September 29: San Mateo Marriott
San Diego, CA, September 30: Del Mar Marriott

RedHat exhibited at VMworld, August 30-September 2 in San Francisco, CA. Those stopping by the booth learned more about RedHat Enterprise Virtualization and had the opportunity to speak with RedHat experts. For more information, click here.

RedHat also attended the Air Force Information Technology Conference (AFITC) in Montgomery, AL, August 30–September 1. For more information, click here.

RedHat is a Gold sponsor of the CIO Summit being held in Dallas, TX on September 13. RedHat’s CIO, Lee Congdon, will be speaking as a part of an expert panel at the event, and RedHat will be highlighting various products on the exhibit floor. For more information and to register, click here.

RedHat is a Bronze Sponsor at the InSight 2010 Annual Conference, Sept. 14-17 in Denver, CO. The event will be held at the Colorado Convention Center. For more information and to register, click here.

RedHat is a Gold Sponsor at the 2010 High Performance Computing Financial Markets Show and Conference, held September 20 at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City. RedHat Technical Director, Cloud Engineering, Carl Trieloff, will present Session 9 on cloud computing. For more information and to register, click here.

JBoss, by RedHat, will be an Exhibitor at JavaOne, Sept. 19-23rd in San Francisco, CA. JBoss will be presenting in-booth sessions, demos and various giveaways at booth #5206. Jboss will also be hosting a party on Tuesday evening, Sept. 21. Stop by the booth for more details. For more information and to register, click here.

RedHat is a Silver sponsor of iTech Summit in Canada. RedHat will be located in booth #18 in both Calgary on September 28, and Vancouver on September 30. For more information and to register, click here.

For more information on North American events, click here.

EMEA

Each year, RedHat sponsors various Fedora Users and Developers conferences (FUDCon) around the world. This year’s conference in the EMEA region is being held in Zurich, Switzerland, Sept. 17-18, 2010. This conference is free of charge, and it’s an excellent opportunity for people who are interested in Fedora and free/open-source software to learn more and collaborate with people in the Fedora community. There will be formal presentations on a wide variety of topics, as well as less formal working sessions.
Please pre-register.

RedHat will host JBoss Forum 2010 in Germany, Sept. 21-22, 2010. For more information, click here.

Michael Tiemann, RedHat Vice President of Open Source Affairs, will be co-leading and reporting for the first-ever BRIC Think Tank at the Open World Forum. Senior government officials and representatives from Brazil, India and China will meet to discuss the strategic role that information technology and open source software will play as these countries look to march toward world economic prominence. This invitation-only session will be reported to the whole conference of the Open World Forum on Oct. 1, 2010. For more information, click here.

For more information on RedHat EMEA events, click here.

APJ

Join us for an in-depth look at RedHat Enterprise Virtualization at the RedHat Enterprise Virtualization Demonstration Webinar, Sept. 1, 2010. In this webinar we will be demonstrating advanced features such as templating, live migration, high availability and system scheduler. For more information, click here.

Unlock the value of cloud computing at the RedHat Road Tour. Join us for a free, half-day business seminar as RedHat travels city-to-city for the 2010 RedHat Road Tour in Australia. For a full list of dates and locations, click here.

** Denotes a RedHat Featured Event

Recently RedHat released an update to JBoss Operations Network (JBoss ON), our integrated management platform for centralized systems management of JBoss Enterprise Middleware. JBoss ON provides JBoss-specific management information that can be used standalone or integrated with existing tools from other system management vendors. It enables customers to:

• Expose a cohesive view of middleware components despite complex environments,
• Improve operational efficiency and reliability through visibility into production availability and performance,
• Effectively configure and roll out new applications across complex environments through a single integrated tool.

JBoss ON management functions include discovery and inventory, configuration management, application deployment (and roll-back), availability management, performance management, and content management. This functionality is important in optimizing performance, maintaining visibility and auditing to maintain systems and share vital information and statistics through diverse teams.

All of these features help our customers more quickly and effectively manage their mission-critical JBoss Enterprise Middleware deployments, and now can help our customers manage their cloud deployments as well. Recently we asked IDC Research to formally poll our customers about their satisfaction with JBoss ON and we were not surprised by the positive feedback.

The study was primarily conducted in order to measure ROI and is based on standard IDC ROI methodology used to calculate average cost savings resulting from higher availability, including changes in downtime, improved IT efficiency, and increased user productivity resulting from using JBoss Operations Network.

Based on data from interviews with IT managers from organizations using JBoss Operations Network, IDC’s JBoss ON ROI analysis yielded an average 634% ROI — more than six times the initial investment — and an average payback period for the initial investment of 5.3 months for the IT organizations in the study. Further, IT managers also claimed improved end-user productivity, while downtime hours per month were reduced. Participants also identified other annual savings through improvements in IT efficiency, absolute software/hardware savings, and other indirect cost savings.

To learn more about JBoss ON and how it can reduce complexity and improve visibility, please go to this link to watch the webinar, visit the web page, and read the full IDC Research JBoss ON ROI study, please visit www.jboss.com.

Today, as part of a larger announcement around RedHat Cloud Foundations, we unveiled the first phase of our strategy to address a critical component of any cloud computing deployment—how will an enterprise build, deploy, integrate and manage mission critical business applications in the cloud? In an area that can get complex, RedHat’s answer is decidedly simple. Build any way, Deploy anywhere.

As RedHat expands further and deeper into unlocking the potential of cloud computing for our customers, our PaaS offering advances JBoss Open Choice, allowing customers to build on a variety of programming models, APIs and languages, e.g., Seam, Spring, GWT, or Ruby. The clear advantage of this approach is that it is standards based and developers can leverage a myriad of programming models in order to move existing applications from on-premise cloud deployments to public clouds more easily, building applications in a way that works better for the enterprise needs.

RedHat’s PaaS strategy is based on the concept of—build any way—deploy anywhere. Once an application is developed, all that is needed is a single cloud engine to deploy on a variety of different cloud computing models. Whether its on-premise, public or a hybrid cloud model, organizations should be able to leverage the same workload on RedHat Enterprise Linux, Amazon EC2, IBM Cloud, Rackspace, RedHat Enterprise Virtualization, Windows Hyper V and many other current environments and even those that emerge in the future. By enabling portable cloud services, RedHat PaaS can deliver greater flexibility, lower costs, and leverage existing investments. You can view a brief demo of what’s possible on our PaaS solutions page, http://www.redhat.com/paas.

RedHat PaaS services will offer powerful application and integration runtime services whose APIs can be used by application developers when they build applications. Each service can be run and scaled independently from the container, allowing developers and administrators to customize the application runtime environment for any given application and its workload. These services span application development and integration requirements including: application, data, transaction, presentation, messaging, integration, rules and business process services.

Management and provisioning services are key to deliver the full value of cloud computing, and the RedHat Cloud Engine provides a comprehensive set of management and provisioning services specifically for cloud deployments. JBoss Developer Studio, JBoss Operations Network, and a browser interface are tools that enable developers and administrators to create and manage their IaaS and PaaS resources. These services are designed to enable developers and administrators to;

• efficiently manage the organization’s cloud resources and environment,
• control RedHat PaaS access,
• stand up applications,
• easily redeploy from one systems infrastructure to another,
• scale an application’s systems infrastructure and middleware up or down to respond to business needs and runtime conditions, and
• monitor and manage applications, wherever they are running.

Enterprises, cloud service providers and ISVs can get started today by building and deploying integrated applications with JBoss Enterprise Middleware utilizing RedHat Consulting Services. Delivered by RedHat’s middleware consulting practice, the engagement will provide strategic recommendations and on-site technical expertise to set up middleware as a service in any cloud environment. Each RedHat cloud engagement is deliverables-based, actively engaging in-house teams and leaving them with the tools and expertise needed to successfully maintain and enhance their new cloud environments.

This announcement marks the beginning of a robust and rich set of solutions that aims to fundamentally change the way our customers deploy mission critical applications. Stay tuned for technical deep dives and strategy briefings as we continue to outline RedHat’s PaaS strategy. For a replay of the press conference, visit here. To read the full PaaS press announcement visit, here.

The interfaces through which we communicate with public clouds haven’t coalesced into a single set of options and perhaps never will, claims of “de facto standards” notwithstanding. That’s partly because large cloud providers have a certain vested interest in making it difficult for users to leave once they’ve checked in.

However, clouds also target different feature sets and different types of users, which is reflected in different application programming interfaces (API), pricing models, hardware and software infrastructure, and points of differentiation. RedHat sees this first hand with our discussions with cloud service providers around the world. Our experience isn’t unique. Approaches to and needs for storage, messaging, high availability, latency and so forth differ widely.

Furthermore, cloud computing is still developing rapidly. As an industry, we’re still at a stage where there’s a great deal of experimentation going on. The sweet spots for public cloud use cases are still being discovered.

One implication is that there is a need for a broad-based mechanism for cloud users to provide feedback to public cloud providers.

The issue isn’t so much large enterprises which, by dint of their size, will often have a direct path of communication into a public cloud provider. Rather it’s the small organizations and developers—who are driving a great deal of innovation in the cloud computing space—that often lack a good way to get their feature requests, including API feature requests, heard.

That’s the thinking behind a new Web site, APIwanted.org. It lets users make API suggestions for a given cloud provider and vote for or comment on suggestions that have already been made. In this way, the site systematically brings together the “long tail” of cloud developers. For example, if a lot of small development shops were looking for a specific form of persistent storage, this site offers a mechanism to bring that collective desire to the attention of cloud providers.

In addition to providing an aggregation point, APIwanted.org also offers a forum for collaborative brainstorming. (APIwanted.org is based on IdeaTorrent, which describes itself as “open innovation software.”) This is the same sort of model that works so well with open source software and we expect it to provide some great thinking from the user community around public cloud APIs as well.

RedHat engineers first became interested in creating this site after getting involved with cloud APIs through the Deltacloud project. There’s no explicit connection between this site and Deltacloud, now an incubator project under the Apache Foundation. However, both this site and Deltacloud reflect RedHat’s firm belief that cloud APIs should evolve in an open and community-based way rather than being the proprietary creation of individual vendors.

So, if you’re a cloud developer (or even if you’re not), check out the site and start building a community to help shape the future of the public cloud.

The Deltacloud project came about to fill the hole created by the lack of open, community-driven standards for moving computing and data among private clouds and the wide range of public cloud providers. This hole creates friction, slows down adoption of cloud, and raises the true cost of cloud for users and vendors alike. Imagine you are an IDE vendor wanting to enable launching of cloud instances from within the IDE – a feature that users would certainly applaud, but whose implementation forces you to make a choice immediately: do you shoulder the cost of adapting to as many vendor-specific cloud APIs or do you reign in cost by guessing which clouds will gain the largest share of the cloud market (and, best case, excluding yourself from a chunk of the market)?

There’s been activity in standards bodies, most notably the DMTF, in which RedHat is a participant. But, in fast developing areas of technology—which cloud computing surely is— while the standards process is busy completing its work, we expect projects like Deltacloud to fit the immediate customer need for interoperability.

There are also any number of application programming interfaces (APIs) being promoted by public cloud vendors and others. This is neither unexpected nor even inherently undesirable. After all, different clouds have different purposes and goals. One might expose lots of options; another might choose to keep things simple. One might concentrate on providing customers with tight controls over service levels; another might just focus on cost. Furthermore, regulations in a specific industry can mandate interfaces that relate to audit and compliance that aren’t needed by a more mainstream audience.

Some of these APIs are understandably popular, but as the CNET Blog Network’s James Urquhart notes:

There are plenty of reasons to desire a consistent, standard cloud computing API. However, there are also many reasons why it is just premature to declare a single winner–or any winner, for that matter. As good at the AWS EC2 and S3 APIs are for their respective contexts, they are just popular APIs, and not yet anything that can be declared a de facto standard for the entire cloud community.

Deltacloud takes a third approach. For starters, it’s open source–as are a number of other interoperability frameworks. But Deltacloud goes beyond that in important ways. Significantly, RedHat contributed it to the Apache Software Foundation last May where it’s now an Incubator project. This moved it under an upstream community and governance model that isn’t under the control of any one vendor. Deltacloud is the only major cloud framework that isn’t tied in some way to a single company’s proprietary code, APIs, or other intellectual property.

Deltacloud’s technical specifics are discussed in more depth in this earlier post. What sets it apart from similar efforts is that it’s the only one that is conceived as a web service. This has several advantages:

• The API can either be offered directly by the cloud provider, or by individual users running their own server;
• Client libraries can easily be written in any number of computer languages, and are already available for popular ones;
• The core API logic resides on the API server, enabling consistent behavior across all client libraries; and
• Support for new clouds can be added to the API without changes to clients.

Drivers for Amazon EC2, GoGrid, OpenNebula, Rackspace, RedHat Enterprise Virtualization Management, RimuHosting, Terremark, and vCloud are all either written or in-process–as is a Microsoft Azure cloud storage driver.

Deltacloud is not about creating a new API to replace ones that are already out there, but to facilitate interoperability and portability among the many disparate clouds that will exist.

Being hosted at Apache incubator, the project now benefits from the Apache governance model, which is based on individual contributions, not corporations.

In addition to individual contributors, the approach is resonating widely. There is a range of interested parties in the Deltacloud project. Many of these parties are at various stages of support and participation. Some include:

• Cisco
• Condor, University of Wisconsin
• Dell
• Gogrid
• Goldman Sachs
• HP
• IBM
• Ingres, read more information in the Ingres blog
• Intel
• Nimsoft
• Opsource
• Symantec

The interest is due to the fact that Deltacloud embraces cloud diversity rather than shunning it under a “de facto API” banner, while simultaneously enabling the portability and interoperability needed to realize the full promise of cloud computing. Open source, under an Apache model, enables a true community-driven solution – unique, and needed, in the cloud computing landscape.

Innovation in the Deltacloud project has been instrumental in the progress of RedHat Cloud Foundations, announced in June 2010.

To interact, participate or find more information on the Deltacloud project, you can go to:
http://incubator.apache.org/deltacloud/.

Following the interest generated from the Open Your World forum held in May, opensource.com will present a series of webinars this fall. Topics will span openness and transparency across all five opensource.com channels: business, education, government, law and life. The webinar series kicks off on Wednesday, September 1 at 1:00 p.m. ET with a discussion on the open innovation revolution with Stefan Lindegaard.

Stefan is a thought leader and open innovation expert and recently published the book The Open Innovation Revolution. There are many commonalities between the open source way and the key concepts of open innovation. During the webinar, Stefan will

• Explain what open innovation is, and why more and more companies are adopting it;
• Share some essential elements that innovation leaders and intraprenuers need to put in place for open innovation initiatives to thrive;
• Highlight the people-related roadblocks that can impede open innovation and ways to overcome them; and
• Discuss some of the common themes between open innovation and open source and share ideas for how the two communities might learn from each other.

To register for the webinar, click here.

Have ideas for a future opensource.com webinar? Contact the opensource.com team here with your suggestions.

Today, the RedHat team is excited to launch Extended Life Cycle Support (ELS) for RedHat Enterprise Linux. This is an optional subscription offering that provides support for RedHat Enterprise Linux for longer than its standard seven-year life cycle.

With Extended Life Cycle Support customers can receive limited software maintenance and technical support services for an additional three years, extending the life cycle of RedHat Enterprise Linux to a full ten years. The seven-year life cycle of a RedHat Enterprise Linux release generally applies to major versions, so, for example, the standard life cycle of RedHat Enterprise Linux 3 runs from October 2003, when it was released, to October 2010. For customers who purchase ELS, which is sold as an add-on to an existing RedHat Enterprise Linux subscription, the support life cycle can be extended to October 2013.

ELS offers benefit to customers who do not wish to upgrade to a newer version of RedHat Enterprise Linux, perhaps because their systems and applications are still running well and do not warrant upgrading, or maybe because of contractual requirements. An important use for ELS will be in virtualized environments. One way to enable an old, stable system to run on modern hardware is to virtualize it. The virtualization software supports the modern hardware and is able to host the old system. With ELS, the old system has an even longer supported life cycle while taking advantage of the latest hardware.

To learn more about ELS, visit here.

Recently, Accenture released the results of their open source study, which revealed that more than two-thirds of organizations anticipate increased investment in open source solutions in 2010 and more than a third are expecting to migrate mission-critical software to open source solutions in the next twelve months.

This year at the RedHat Summit and JBoss World, Accenture served as the conference Visionary Sponsor and delivered a keynote highlighting why they are focusing attention on open source solutions now. One reason is that Accenture estimates that systems integration services around open source represents a $6.5 billion dollar market with growth outpacing that of traditional service businesses. Further, Accenture’s survey results revealed that 78% of enterprises have already deployed open source solutions and are planning on increasing their commitment.

As open source solutions enjoy increasingly mainstream adoption, leaders like Accenture will help usher in the next wave of open source technology adoption. We seem to be moving beyond the innovators and early adopter phase and are increasingly seeing the early majority emerge.

Through our strengthened partnerships with Accenture, and other leading Global System Integrators, RedHat is committed to supporting this adoption trend. Specific to Accenture, this top-tier SI has invested in the establishment of an Innovation Center for Open Source, which leverages RedHat solutions, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Further, RedHat has worked with Accenture to create the Accenture SOA Reference Architecture, Accenture Foundation Platform for Java, Accenture Mobility Operated Services, and the Accenture Public Service Platform. All of these platforms, processes and methods are in place to help enterprises embark on IT projects that meet the ever-changing demands of business while decreasing maintenance cost and increasing performance and flexibility.

To watch Accenture’s Chief Technology Architect, Paul Daugherty give his keynote address at the RedHat Summit and JBoss World, please visit; http://www.redhat.com/promo/summit/2010/highlights/. Stay tuned for additional information on RedHat’s growing ecosystem of partners.

This is part of a series of blog posts and podcasts that discuss RedHat’s work on and thinking about cloud computing. See also:

• Talking to many clouds with the Deltacloud API

Cloud computing is in no small part about architecture. It’s about workload scheduling and movement, interfacing to a variety of resource types and providers, bringing in and managing images, providing application programming interfaces (APIs) at various levels, and enabling appropriate visibility into resource use and service levels. How these components connect and relate to each other–and the degree to which they can work in concert with or substitute components that third parties have developed–is (or should be) very much a discussion about architectures, rather than piece parts or monolithic stacks.

A few underlying principles have guided RedHat as it has developed its cloud computing strategy.

The first should be especially unsurprising given RedHat’s history. All the projects feeding into RedHat’s cloud products are open source and, just as important, are actively engaged with communities of developers and users around the industry. For example, the Deltacloud API is now under the governance and licensing of an Incubator project within the Apache Foundation. Open source provides the innovation, economic and business models that run through all RedHat products.

The second is closely related and that is interoperability. RedHat is committed to delivering a cloud computing solution that is both comprehensive and based on an infrastructure with advanced multi-tenant security and high levels of scalability. At the same time, however, RedHat is equally committed to doing this in an open source and interoperable way that lets users pick and choose among components from RedHat, those from third parties, pieces bought new and pieces already in place.

This theme of evolutionary change isn’t limited to the question of which products will be bought from whom and when. Existing applications can be brought over to cloud environments or evolve incrementally–which is a good thing because applications are one of the longest-lived parts of any IT infrastructure. RedHat’s approach to cloud computing is to support choice of operating and development environment. RedHat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware make the cloud usable for new and existing enterprise-class applications, while LAMP, Ruby and Spring enable fast, lightweight application development. There’s no need to rewrite applications to take advantage of a cloud computing infrastructure.

With that background, let’s now take a look at some of the specific elements that make up RedHat’s cloud architecture. Many of these elements have been or will be covered in greater detail in other blog postings and podcasts; this is intended as a high-level overview. (Note that this is an architectural discussion and shouldn’t be taken as a disclosure of roadmaps or future product structure.)

Cloud Engine and Deltacloud API. The Cloud Engine creates scalable private clouds, using a choice of virtualization platforms, that can be federated to public cloud providers under a unified management framework. The Cloud Engine handles tasks such as managing users, groups and permissions; resource management; and image placement/scheduling. This scheduling is handled by embedded RedHat Enterprise MRG Grid code, a highly scalable job scheduler based on the open source Condor project. Both inbound and outbound communications with the engine are through the Deltacloud API, an open set of interfaces that were described in detail in an earlier post.

“Application Builder.” This function is about getting content into the cloud, whether by constructing a new image or by importing an existing one, and then managing the library of the resulting images. It’s explicitly designed to support multiple target clouds and to provide configuration management of settings such as public IP addresses, firewall rules, network settings and so forth. This aims to provide application portability across clouds and let developers write once and deploy anywhere, eliminating the potential for getting locked-in to a proprietary cloud platform.

Portal and tools. These provide self-service and administrative access for image deployment and configuration, setting policies such as quotas, provisioning users with appropriate access permissions, and providing access to real-time and historical data. In addition to a web-based graphical user interface, there are command line tools to support automated scripting.

Reporting. The Cloud Engine logs granular data about things like resource utilization, service levels, and quota/policy enforcement. This data can be used for purposes such as charging back for computing resource use or planning for capacity upgrades.

Cloud services. These can be called on by applications or tools running in a cloud environment to perform some task. In this way, they simplify development and operations by significantly reducing the need to re-implement commonly needed functions. For example, two types of storage services could be options, one with a REST web interface for large objects and the other an operational store that is more filesystem-like. Services enable private clouds and they also enable the portability of data and application features across different public cloud providers.

RedHat’s approach to cloud architecture embodies openness and modularity. This preserves customer choice in that it offers them the ability to mix and match new cloud technologies from RedHat with existing investments, public cloud providers and products from other vendors. It’s an effective approach to leverage open source innovation because it allows and encourages small chunks of function to be added incrementally through open interfaces. In this way, it’s a lot like Linux.

For more on cloud computing from RedHat, visit here.

We’re excited to announce that RedHat has entered into an agreement with atsec information security to certify RedHat Enterprise Linux 6 under Common Criteria at Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 4+, which will include certifying the KVM hypervisor on both RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 and RedHat Enterprise Linux 6. The Common Criteria EALs represent the depth and rigor of the evaluation, giving consumers the confidence that products certified at a specific level meet the package of security assurance requirements associated with that level and comply with internationally recognized security standards.

Common Criteria certifications aren’t new to RedHat, either. To date, we’ve successfully achieved Common Criteria certification 13 different times on four different platforms, earning RedHat Enterprise Linux a place at the top of the list of the industry’s most certified operating systems. By pursuing this new certification, we’re adding to our leadership in this area and giving customers in security-sensitive environments, such as government agencies and financial services organizations, added confidence that our solutions meet their strict security requirements.

This certification also marks as an important milestone for RedHat as a virtualization industry leader. By pursuing certification at EAL 4+, RedHat is giving government customers all of the benefits of virtualization with the confidence that their virtualization solution is rock solid and meets the industry’s security standards. Providers can safely host many tenants on the same machine, knowing that their virtual guests will be separated from each other using technology developed by the National Security Agency (NSA). By taking advantage of the combined power of SELinux and KVM, we were able to quickly pursue this certification – another example of the feature velocity afforded by the open source process.

For more background on all of the certifications and accreditations we’ve earned to date, visit http://www.redhat.com/solutions/government/certifications/.