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Red Hat acquires Qumranet

Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the acquisition of Qumranet, Inc. The acquisition includes Qumranet’s virtualization solutions, including its KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) platform and SolidICE offering, a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), which together present a comprehensive virtualization platform for enterprise customers.

In addition, Qumranet’s talented team of professionals that develop, test and support Qumranet solutions, and its leaders of the open source community KVM project, will join Red Hat.

This acquisition advances Red Hat’s efforts to transform the virtualization market and drive comprehensive virtualization technology and management solutions into every system, from servers to desktops, on both Linux and Windows. Red Hat can now deliver what virtualization-only vendors cannot: a comprehensive solution integrated with the operating system, which can drive down IT costs while simultaneously enhancing the flexibility and responsiveness of IT infrastructure.

This acquisition adds to Red Hat’s differentiated and comprehensive solutions portfolio for the virtual enterprise, enhancing the opportunities for customers to improve the productivity and reduce the cost of IT infrastructure. Red Hat’s solution components include:

• The industry’s leading open source operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with built-in virtualization.
• An embedded hypervisor which supports all major operating systems
• A consistent management platform for both virtual and physical systems, uniting servers, desktops, storage and networks
• A defining cloud and grid management solution
• Advanced, high-speed inter-application messaging
• High availability clustering solutions
• Integrated security infrastructure

The fact that Qumarnet has been acquired by Red Hat isn’t really all that surprising when one considers Red Hat’s previous statements about focusing heavily on KVM. It also tends to support the view that Red Hat, while remaining a partner with Citrix and the Xen community as a whole, wanted to control its own destiny a bit more closely.

With the addition of Qumranet’s technology, Red Hat will find itself in a position few other suppliers are in. They’ll have a powerful operating system, development environments, database software, virtualization technology of several types and access to a dynamic open source community. Only Oracle and Sun have a similar portfolio.

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Today, Novell has announced the availability of its second service pack (SP2) for SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 containing enhancements in virtualization, management, hardware enablement and interoperability.

Important Update:

• Virtualization. With Service Pack 2, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 becomes the first and only Xen-based virtualization solution with full support from Microsoft for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2003 guests, and the live migration of those guests across physical machines. In addition to the latest version of the leading open source hypervisor, Xen 3.2, SLES 10 SP2 ships with an updated version of virt-manager. This virtual machine management tool provides a summary of all live domains, along with detailed graphical views of virtual machine utilization and performance over time. These virtualization enhancements offer enterprises increased flexibility, and enable them to more quickly and easily manage both their physical and virtual systems.
• Systems Management. SLES 10 SP2 includes updates to the YaST management toolset, including first-boot enhancements and support for the Internet Storage Name Service (iSNS) protocol. It also includes updates to the YaST2 network and storage modules to support new bridge devices, FICON devices for mainframes, and VLANs, as well as support the online resizing of ext3 partitions.
• High Availability. SLES 10 SP2 includes the latest open source failover subsystem technology, Heartbeat 2.1.3, and adds a resource agent for iSCSI initiator, as well as hooks to SAP resource agents. It also includes updated tools for creating and managing file systems using OCFS2, offering improved support for simultaneous write access, and also offers new capabilities for managing XFS and ReiserFS file systems.
• Network Management. Included in SLES 10 SP2 is NetworkManager 0.7.0, for setting up and configuring active network connections. The product also includes support for IPv6, the next generation network layer for packet-switched internetworks.

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