ReadWriteCloud

It could be the killer combination of server technologies: unified object storage with sharded, distributed big data. Imagine Hadoop clusters whose locales transcend both geographies and clouds, and whose contents can be addressed the same way as any other file. It could help bridge the current gap between big data clusters and regulated, relational databases. 

Red Hat is planning such a move, as part of its ongoing beta of what’s now called Red Hat Storage 2.0 (RHS 2). The company’s Tom Trainer, a veteran of the storage industry, spoke with ReadWriteWeb about this latest unreported revolution.

It's always interesting to see who really contributes to open source projects. That's doubly true when it comes to projects that are corporate-driven, because they provide a lot of insight into which companies are driving a project and have a stake in supporting it. Looking at the numbers for OpenStack's Essex release, it's clear that only a small subset of companies involved in OpenStack are driving development.

This morning's announcement that Citrix would be contributing CloudStack to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is a big win for Apache - and a minor loss for copyleft. With the change, only one open-source cloud infrastructure player (Eucalytpus) is hewing to the copyleft model.

OpenStack, OpenNebula, and soon CloudStack and OpenShift, are provided under the Apache license. If you've been watching open-source licensing trends, this may not come as a shock. The figures from Black Duck and other sources indicate that the GNU General Public License (GPL) family has been on the decline for some time.

Red Hat is getting set to take the wraps off the source code for OpenShift. The company announced today that it will release the OpenShift code at the Open Cloud Conference to take place in Sunnyvale, Calif., from April 30 through May 3. At the conference Red Hat will provide the code for its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering, and showing developers how to get it up and running on top of OpenStack.

OpenShift came from Red Hat's acquisition of Makara in late 2010. OpenShift itself was unveiled in May of last year as "a PaaS that would delight developers who build on open source."

Oracle announced certification of Oracle Database for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6 and Oracle Linux 6 yesterday. By itself, not a particularly remarkable announcement. Enterprise database certified to run on enterprise operating systems. Yawn. The real news is the last bullet point, which is yet another potshot at Red Hat's business model. "Effective immediately, Oracle will provide its Red Hat compatible Linux binaries, updates and errata for free."

Oracle Linux is a binary compatible distribution cloned from RHEL sources. Oracle has started to do a bit of value-add with its own Linux kernel and the addition of Ksplice, but it's basically just another RHEL clone.

Amazon Web Services, OpenStack, CloudStack, VMware... Developers have no shortage of IaaS offerings to support. And, lucky them, no shortage of different APIs to deal with, either. DeltaCloud, a top-level Apache project, is designed to help developers cut through the complexity and work with everything from EC2 to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager (RHEV-M).

DeltaCloud works with 11 different compute APIs (ranging from EC2 to vSphere) and five different storage APIs (including S3, Eucalyptus Walrus, and Google Storage). The 0.5 release also has experimental support for the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface (CIMI).

When open source started gaining in popularity, a lot of vendors started trying to co-opt the open source label without actually being open source. You don't see quite as much of that today, but now we're seeing vendors trying to affix the "open" label to cloud solutions that really aren't. Scott Crenshaw, vice president of Red Hat's cloud business unit, says the idea is "to lure customers in with open and then lock them in." Bad move, says Crenshaw, because the decisions companies make today about cloud will last into the next decade.

Red Hat has been involved with OpenStack development for some time. Unlike the bulk of companies involved, however, Red Hat has gone about its work quietly and without "officially" joining the effort. Red Hat still isn't saying exactly what it hopes to get from OpenStack contributions, but Brian Stevens did divulge a bit about the company's involvement.

Stevens is Red Hat's CTO and vice president of worldwide engineering. Right now, he says Red Hat has no "confirmed" product plans for OpenStack but the company is "just finding additive ways where we can get involved in the community and help move OpenStack forward."

One thing you don't quite get accustomed to in reporting developments in cloud technology is how even the virtual things become virtualized. Last December, Red Hat released a software storage appliance based on the GlusterFS software-based NAS system that Red Hat acquired in October. That product is a way to apply the same methodology that GlusterFS customers used to build network-attached storage pools completely from existing storage.

That product had been described as a "virtual storage appliance" - in fact, it was given that name in Red Hat graphs we used. Today, Red Hat announced the, um, virtual version of that, for use in pooling elastic storage from Amazon Elastic Block Storage.

Word is that Red Hat refused to sign on to OpenStack when it was announced, because it didn't like the governance model. Red Hat also has its own cloud management software projects. But the company that once dismissed OpenStack seems to be coming around. Look closely at the OpenStack community and you'll find quite a few Red Hat engineers, including some that have become core contributors to OpenStack projects.