BOSTON, USA: Red Hat has 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.

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.

Red Hat has introduced:

* 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, 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 co-ordination 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.