Red Hat Bets Big On Cloud Target 99
eldavojohn writes "Red Hat's CEO prophetically saith 'The clouds will all run Linux' in a brief interview before the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo. Here's the skinny: Red Hat management tools take a back seat to grid computing goals, high switching costs are the trick to surviving slow periods, Microsoft's interoperability tools are vaporware, they're striving to catch up to VMWare, Ubuntu is not the competition, JBoss is growing twice as fast as RHEL and Amazon pays the fee while Google wears its own Red Hat for free."
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Referring to the two PCs in your basement as a "server room" is a bit extreme, but to each his own I suppose.
And no, it is not that Ubuntu is "bad", just that *presently* it isn't a contender: people who install servers typically prefer Debian, businesses that need support RHEL and SuSE (on which most applications are certified).
This "Ubuntu is winning everywhere!" kind of remind me the Gentoo frenzy some years ago. It's natural, but as all distribution
distro elitism is part of what sucks people in (Score:2, Funny)
reference
http://xkcd.com/456/ [xkcd.com]
Where's the money? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Where's the money? (Score:5, Informative)
You're obviously new here. Of course these shops will have their on in-house IT staff that know what's going on. But when the shit hits the fan, the staff want a backup plan, called RedHat Support. That's what paid support is for, and that's why Microsoft makes so much money selling Windows, even though we all know how much cheaper it is to run Linux/BSD.
The supporters can just shrug off and say "sorry" while they go to the bank, but the IT staff needs to say "even they fucked up".
While that is the cynic in my speaking, truth is, you need dedicated staff to run this kind of thing AND paid support. You can't have a fresh graduate do it and expect support to fill in the gaps in any realistic way.
Welcome to the IT world, where the beautiful promises of a technological tomorrow are backed by a lot of grunt work, voodoo, and incompetence.
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That's what paid support is for, and that's why Microsoft makes so much money selling Windows, even though we all know how much cheaper it is to run Linux/BSD.
I wonder how many end users actually wind up calling Microsoft tech support. I never hear a person say "No, don't worry about fixing my computer, I called Microsoft and it's all better now".
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It really does exist, for those people willing to pay the big bucks.
And sometimes you find they actually DO know what they are talking about, with their products at least. Once you get into the depths of the support structure you no longer see the 1st level 'by the book' call centers and discover that elusive developer.. who actually does have a clue.
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The best part is when the experts apologize (implicitly) for their shitty product.. coughcough MS N{asty,ewbie,etwork} Load Balancing
In that instance, the support engineer provided a great in-depth response. It went something like this -
Us: Hey we've this problem with using NLB with XXX
MS Guy: You know what, we've always had this problem with NLB and YYY. It's tragic, let me get into the details..
--- 3 page email later ---
Us: Um.. we're using XXX..
MS Guy: Oh.. we haven't really encountered that before, can'
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MS Guy: Oh.. we haven't really encountered that before, can't help..
With our level of support, we have never got that response and they are committed to find a solution, and do. We also don't communicate by email. We have a dedicated live contact for us to call 24/7. ( not that he's the expert, he's more of a point man to get the right people on the issue ).
We have even had them onsite for those really bad head-scratcher problems where a remote view just didn't cut it..
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Um.. so your contact doesn't know how to use email and only communicates with you by sending letters through the post?
You know it's kinda hard to talk about a complex situation on the phone without something written.. yes?? yes??? yes????
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I am not exactly new here, but your ways are strange to me. What is this "Microsoft Support" thing of which you speak?
an urban legend
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you do realize the AC id is '0' do you ?
also, he said: "--I'm new here.", I think the joke is on you.
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> But when the shit hits the fan, the staff want a backup plan
In my experience, it's management that demand this, insisting that having in-house support is not sufficient. They want someone to sue if things go really tits-up, and their customers sue THEM. (Whether they actually could is apparently not of importance)
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how do the expect to make revenue?
Benefits of specialization. As the bottom level of the "Cloud Infrastructure" Red Hat can service customers who actually own the clouds better (i.e. cheaper) than they can service themselves.
Sure, Amazon *could* retain an internal staff to manage the server bits, but it is easier from them to worry about their application software and share the cost of managing the clouds with Red Hat's other customers.
Of course, there eventually comes a point in time when it will be cheaper for Amazon to simply BUY Re
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Red Hat has a lot of things going for them... but 'cheap' isn't one of them.
In a grid computing situation like EC2, 99% of the work is going to be dealing with bad hardware- most of the time, that means having a guy with a screwdriver and a shopping cart full of hard drives on-site. Most of the more skilled work is going to involve dealing with your provisioning system, your networking system, and making sure your hardware matches up with your operating systems. Still, they are largely operational p
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If you RTFA, Red Hat is planning on getting it's revenue from selling support. I'm not sure I see this happening.
I'm pretty sure that's a good part of what they've been doing for a decade.
Wikipedia agrees [wikipedia.org]with me: Red Hat partly operates on a professional open-source business model based on open code, community development, professional quality assurance services, and subscription-based customer support.
Re:Where's the money? (Score:4, Informative)
If you RTFA, Red Hat is planning on getting it's revenue from selling support. I'm not sure I see this happening. If you're running a cloud service, you're going to have a LOT of machines and you're going to need enough custom support and custom software that you're probably going to have in-house support. If you have in-house support, you're probably not paying for the Red Hat support, so how do the expect to make revenue?
There are two kinds of support here:
Phone/web/email support, for problems and other issues. This is the traditional "help desk" or "support center" that you are probably thinking of.
Updates and system patches to keep your servers up-to-date with the latest software.
I work with lots of systems (over 1,100 servers ... about half of which run RHEL) and we need to run with both kinds of support. Sure, we probably have called Red Hat about half a dozen times in the last 5 years. But we need to have it there, should something go wrong. Am I wasting my money for that? No, because the times that we've needed to call support, we really needed it. You don't pay for support because you know you'll need it - you pay for support because you'll probably need it.
Yes, we have our own system support people, and most are RHCE. They can figure out most problems - but we still need to have RHEL there as a safety net.
I haven't RTFA'd, but I suspect Red Hat will offer some kind of volume discount if you have enough systems. Otherwise, it will likely be too expensive for some folks.
(Disclaimer: I work at a Big Ten university, and we don't actually run with "help desk" support on everything. Red Hat offers an "Academic" subscription to RHEL, so you still get patches and updates, but don't get phone support. We run with phone support where we need it - like to run third-party software, or in production - but for "dev" instances for our own development staff, we may choose to run "Academic" without phone support, at a much lower price per system. It works well for us.)
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I like your UID.
How can I get one of those babies?
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If the cloud runs Linux, than your access point to the cloud will likely run Linux as well. Thus, Red Hat gets support contracts with both the cloud's host, and with the cloud's clients. Probably they will make better profit off the cloud's clients.
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To add to other replies, Redhat offers something you have very little chance of getting with in house support, kernel developers on staff who can fix kernel related issue, create a patch and have it integrated in the next release. On top of that you are very unlikely to have staff with the skill levels of Redhat's people to track down and fix those killer bugs that you encounter when doing something as complex as cloud computing.
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Even if your staff had the programming chops to fix system related tool for your use, that does not mean they will be able to get their patches accepted upstream. A quick hack that works for me may be unacceptable for others. Unless your staff is embedded in a variety of open source projects (kernel, glibc, etc), you may have very little hope of getting upstream to take your issues seriously and now you have to maintain patches to the software everytime an update needs to happen. One of the benefits of b
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every large corp I've worked for paid big bucks for Linux support. some of those big corps have gotten a lot of value from that support, while others have gotten not much value at all, but nearly all feel the need to pay for it.
Usually it is the smaller shops (who have less in-house skill) who choose CentOS over RHEL.
I'm not qualified to say why, but like everyone else, I'll hazard a guess- I think this has more to do with risk tolerance than with skill.
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Follow the money. The money people pay Red Hat covers a lot more than support. It covers all of the engineers doing QA. It covers the engineers who make Red Hat a leading contributor to many OSS projects, including the Linux kernel. It covers all the work done with hardware and software vendors to ensure compatibility. It covers the work Red Hat does in providing indemnification and legal coverage to its customers and to everyone. It covers some of the costs of the Fedora project. It covers a lot of
Ultimate Pronouncement (Score:4, Interesting)
I actually use, and like Linux, but I hate marketing speak.
Good typing... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Good typing... (Score:5, Funny)
"The could" is in a way a more appropriate term. Could computing - I like it.
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"The could" is in a way a more appropriate term. Could computing - I like it.
Inteviewer: "Do you see could computing opening up doors to video analysis?" ... see, that's the beauty of 'could computing.'" ... now, was benefit does this have over a low level distributed system or a Beowulf cluster?" ... maybe."
Whitehurst: *shrugs* "I don't know, it could
Inteviewer: "Right, I'm familiar with the name
Whitehurst: "It certainly could have more benefits. Then again, it's possible that it could not. See, could computing could open up your wildest imaginations
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Prior Art (Score:2)
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I thought it was a very clever pun.
Becasue there isn't a real definitions for 'the cloud', but there are a lot of people saying 'it could be this' or ' it could be that'
Re:Good typing... (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know how people who know what the internet is and where the name came from can stand it.
(As you can tell by my sig this is a pet annoyance)
The height of irresponsibility (Score:5, Interesting)
Cloud computing and web centric computing is the height of all irresponsibility within the IT field. Network centric computing utterly depends on security and that means encryption. Defeating encryption depends on solving combinatorially difficult problems and it is still theoretically possible that this may well prove to be the case. At any given point in time, we may well wake up in a world where someone has proven P=NP and within a few short weeks from that point we would see utilities to easily forge SSL certificates, code signing, PGP, AES and pretty much every crypto system and identity assurance system out there. The resulting calamity would be so immense, that, it begs to wonder, why are we pushing technologies when we do not know if they will actually work?
Re:The height of irresponsibility (Score:4, Informative)
The bigger fear is quantum computers, with a proven algorithm to factor numbers in polynomial time (Shor's Algorithm). In fact, some research quantum computers have factored very small numbers (ex: 15) already.
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To be pedantic, number factoring isn't NP-complete
Yes it is. In 2002 the AKS primality test [wikipedia.org] was discoverd proving that testing for primality is P. As a result factorization is NP because we can check if a given factorization is correct in polynomial time.
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...that testing for primality is P. As a result factorization is NP because we can check if a given factorization is correct in polynomial time.
Factorization is in NP irrespective of whether primality testing is in P or not. You can check whether a given factorization is correct or not by simply multiplying the claimed factors. The result you cite proves that factorization is in coNP (the complement of NP).
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Ummm.. when you are discussing whether a problem is in NP and/or in coNP you normally have a decision problem in mind. So the problem here is not "What are the prime factors of n?" but rather "Does n have a non-trivial factor less than m?"
By repeatedly asking this question you can eventually get the prime factors of any number.
Of course you can make the decision problem "Does n have a prime factor less than m?" in which case you would indeed need the AKS result, but I believe the former variant is more comm
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If P==NP, factorization is P as well (Score:2)
I wouldn't worry too much about quantum computers yet. You need several order of magnitude more qubits than what can currently be implemented (barely double-digit), and you need much longer coherence times (perhaps in the order of tens of milliseconds).
Doese FACTOR P=NP Does it matter? (Score:2)
We can expand the inverse of any polynomial problem into SAT if we want to. I mean, I've done this and am working on a program to do this for own education and experimentation. So, in the worst case, even if FACTOR is not NP-Complete, by virtue of saying that FACTOR is cast to an SAT problem, you can still get the benefit of using a speedy solution to SAT to factor factor.
In fact, is it not the case that the reigning factoring champ actually uses a big matrix to solve at the end? If that is the case, the
I'm not sure what your point is ... (Score:2)
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My point is that, you can transform FACTOR into SAT. If you have a good algorithm to solve SAT in polynomial time, then FACTOR could benefit from it. So, it doesn't matter entirely if FACTOR is NP-Complete, in the sense that, if you prove P=NP, then, FACTOR can take advantage of it.
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At any given point in time, we may well wake up in a world where someone has proven P=NP
Do you also take out dragon raid insurance policies? Dragons haven't been proven not to exist, and it would be the height of irresponsibility not to protect your home against so grave a menace as a dragon if it should turn out to be real.
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I know this is slashdot but that is the single most ridiculous analogy I have ever seen in my life. Are you implying in any way that the possibility of P turning out to be same as NP or factorization being in P after all is the same as possibility of dragons existing?
While dragons are not proven to not exist, one can make reasonably good plausibility arguments about their non-existence depending on what characteristics your dragon has, whereas these big questions have no plausibility arguments for settling
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Ok, lets take this a step further: lets say that the NP-co
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First off, looking back at my post I realize that I sounded too harsh. Apologies for the tone. Coming back to the discussion,
Do you care to lay odds on placing the NP-complete problems in the set of P in the near future?
No, I don't. Because I have no reasonable basis to be inclined one way or the other about it. By the way, my belief is that P!=NP, but that does not make this belief as valid as my belief that fire-breathing dragons do not exist. Both beliefs are qualitatively different. Also, if opinion polls are all that matter, you would be surprised how many great researchers like Bollobas [wikipedia.org] think t
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Network centric computing utterly depends on security and that means encryption.
This is not necessarily true. Many cloud computing uses are purely within an enterprise. Imagine a company the size of IBM; they have huge computing needs for both R&D and operations. Cloud computing says instead of each business unit buying and running the servers that they need, there will be a centralized pool of computing resources. Business units just reserve an appropriate server and start using it. When they no longer need that application, the resource is released back into the cloud for so
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So you want perfect unbreakable encryption - sure it's called a one time pad and has worked and been used for years
Problem - getting the one time pad to the person who wants to decrypt the message and making sure no-one else has it
This is what quantum cryptography is trying to do ...
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Does that qualify as irony? (Score:2)
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Isn't cloud computing "(condensed) vaporware" by definition?
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Isn't cloud computing "(condensed) vaporware" by definition?
*removes hat* *bows* You sir and/or madam are chock full of win today.
Simple, because they are not building it (Score:2)
Red Hat calls MS' interoperability tools as vaporware, then says that cloud computing will run on Linux.
That's not irony because those two statements mean very different things.
Saying that MS interoperability tools do not work well, is giving one reason why Windows probably will not fare well as a choice of server for cloud computing.
Saying that Cloud Computing will be run on Linux is making the general observation that overall, there are a lot of factors (primarily cost) why anyone wanting to build a cloud
Shhh! (Score:1, Interesting)
Nobody tell him about Joyent's massive OpenSolaris farm!
This post reads like a poem (Score:1)
Cloud Computing and OSS Strategy (Score:4, Informative)
The article claims that Red Hat's new CEO, Jim Whitehurst, is the former COO at Delta Airlines, so a sky-related term like "Cloud Computing" is appropriate.
Further down in the article they clarify the confusion in the article summary. Amazon pays big bucks to Red Hat for support so they don't have to worry about the massive infrastructure of servers (clouds) that run their online sales business. Similarly, Google uses Red Hat to deploy a percentage of their search business, but they don't pay for it because they maintain it all in-house.
Ubuntu isn't competition because that organization isn't selling support. Jim quite astutely points out that Red Hat is not a software company (because the bits are free). Red Hat is a support company who has the capability to manage, maintenance, fix, and upgrade mission critical software for its customers. Ergo, Ubunutu doesn't compete with them, but Suse/Novell does.
This shouldn't be anything new to the Slashdot audience, but since it made it to the mainpage I figure it is worth clarifying.
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Yes I'm not sure why Ubuntu scored a mention. Novell would be a better match; not sure how well SUSE Linux Enterprise sells, but they're definitely trying to make inroads on the RHEL market space.
Summary's summary (Score:2)
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[...]
is the Chief Executive Officer at Red Hat. Before that he was a Chief Operating Officer of Delta Air Lines, Inc. In that position he was responsible for Operations, Customer Service, Network and Revenue Management, Corporate Strategy and Marketing.
Mr. Whitehurst had most recently served as Senior Vice President and Chief Network and Planning Officer. Prior to joining Delta Air Lines in 2002, he served as Vice President and Director of The Boston Consulting Group and held various leadership roles in their Chicago, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Atlanta offices.
A native of Columbus, Georgia, he graduated from Rice University in Houston, Texas, with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Economics. He also attended Erlangen Nuremberg University in Erlangen, Germany, holds a general course degree from the London School of Economics and an MBA from Harvard Business School. [...]
Trivia
Jim Whitehurst runs four Linux distributions. They are Fedora, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, and Damn Small Linux.
[...]
Perhaps you're speaking out of turn?
Notes on Linux for Clouds (Score:2, Funny)
- The latest version is Sneaky Stratus but Crafty Cumulus is now in beta.
- An open-source version of Rainbows exists but Microsoft owns the license to the visible light portion of the spectrum and is currently seeking an injunction in federal courts.
- The lightweight version is usually recommended. The full-featured version (Nimbostratus Ultimate) may overload your cloud, resulting in fog.
Translation please... (Score:2)
(That must relate to his former experience at Delta Airlines... but I just honestly don't get what he's trying to say. What "value" do airlines "create" and not "extract"?)
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Value: Get your ass someplace fast.
Extract: Extracting monetary profit from society.
It's wrong, the airlines can make a profit, but we are in a standoff.
Once the people with the deepest pockets are the only ones left, prices will go up; which is what needs to happen. They cast for a ticket doesn't cover their Total cost.
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Right, and they certainly did in the past... Why then will he say (twice) that they "never" figured it out, "never" captured any money??
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Other businesses make tons of money because they have an easy way to move people around the world that is relatively cheap to the revenue they can earn. That's the value that airlines create (much of the revenue would be their without air travel). But since the airline biz is fairly competitive most of the time and actually cutthroat
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Didn't we, just yesterday, slam Microsoft for even floating an idea of this type?
Why are we not doing the same to Red Hat?
Are you even reading this forum? I'd say we are slamming Red Hat pretty hard right now. I'm visiting the Red Hat campus tomorrow. I'll be sure to bring up some of these topics with Red Hat engineers.
It will be intersting to compare this (Score:2)
Cloud Todays buzzwords. (Score:2)
So a bunch of people are going to spend a lot of money in Cloud technology to realize it doesn't work the way they expect it to. Then it will go out of date.
Yes it has it advantages however it isn't the solution to all problems espectially as most programmers are not properly trained in parallel processing programming. Most people will go on the assumptions that if you have 100 cores working on a problem it will be solved 100 times faster. That isn't always the case. There is often bottlenecks where code ca
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most programmers are not properly trained in parallel processing programming
In my working experience the following has been true:
Most system administrators have a hard time understanding JBoss at all ...
Most programmers are not well trained at all ...
If it requires proper training to administrate a cloud computing platform or proper training to write software for a cloud ... then cloud computing is DOOMED.
prophetically saith... (Score:1)
Not news. (Score:1)
This would be news if the CEO of MS said it. Coming from the CEO of RedHat, it is not even worth mentioning.
From the article (Score:2)
[...]But, that said, we welcome a little regulatory oversight there and also welcome good, hard competition.
CEO of the year.