Linux: Red Hat Launches an Open-Source Exchange

Red Hat plans to launch a service later this year that sells partners’ open-source software.  This is another step that should help Red Hat move beyond its core business of packaging and supporting the Linux Operating System.  The Red Hat Exchange will be an online community for selling third-party open source software and it will also provide a social network where users can interact and collaborate.  Open Source vendors that have signed up for the Exchange program include MySQL, SugarCRM, Alfresco and Zimbra.

Red Hat’s strategy is based on 100% Open Source compared to competitors like IBM, Oracle and Novell that have hybrid strategies that include both their own proprietary software and Open Source.  100% Open Source is a real differentiator for Red Hat.

Red Hat is also announcing the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. One key feature of the new OS release is its modular capability.  Standard RHEL5 with all features weighs in at 1.82G bytes of disk space.  By comparison, Microsoft’s Vista needs 6G bytes.  Both are huge and as the size of the Operating System grows, so do their complexity.  For some niche uses, the target environments may only use one or a few applications and some applications may have disk space limitations.  In these cases, features found in the full-blown RHEL5 Operating System can be left out. 

Modularity.  To counter the criticism that Operating Systems have become too bloated, RHEL5 provides a modular load feature that lets customers pick and chose only the OS features that they want to include in their deployment.

Virutalization.  RHEL5 also includes a virtualization feature that allows one copy of the OS to run up to four virtual servers on the same machine.  The RHEL 5 Advanced Platform allows an unlimited number of virtual servers to be run.  This capability is based on Xen Virtualization.  Virtualization could dramatically increase server utilization rates from 10 percent to almost 80 percent.

Security.  RHEL 5 also has better data protection with Multi-Level Security capabilities built into the kernel.  It is possible to create an access control policy that allows information to be classified as top secret, secret, confidential and unclassified.  The upcoming RHEL version 5.1 should also include file-level data encryption capabilities.