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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.

Red Hat’s customers using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 and 6 are getting a little more breathing room when it comes to updates. The company announced today that it is extending the support life cycle from seven to 10 years for RHEL 5 and 6. Customers using RHEL 6 will have support through 2020.

According to a FAQ from Red Hat, the move is in response to customer requests. Many of the customers adopting RHEL 5 were doing so mid-cycle, and were looking at dealing with upgrades sooner than what’s desirable. With the extension, RHEL 5 support will be carried through 2017.

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.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.0 has been in the works for some time. Today Red Hat took the wraps off the release. Red Hat boasts more than 1,000 new features with RHEV 3.0, including a new user portal for self-provisioning, local storage and converting the management application to a Java application that runs on JBoss. With RHEV 3.0, Red Hat is going straight after VMware for customers.

GlusterFS was introduced back in 2007, as an open source network-attached storage system that used Ethernet or InfiniBand RDMA to pool together multiple storage volumes into one colossal pool. It became a cloud storage system in 2009, meaning that it added the elasticity and self-service provisioning necessary to qualify for the official "cloud" moniker. And although it was designed for enterprises, that didn't stop some very clever coders from reworking it into a locally-mountable cloud storage store, now called HekaFS.

Last October, Red Hat acquired Gluster, the file system's parent, for $126 million in cash. Today, the New England-sounding name is no more, but the vision lives on under the unsurprising name Red Hat Software Appliance.

Red Hat has taken the lid off Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.2, Though it's a modest update, Red Hat has a laundry list of improvements to KVM and the kernel that will make it easier to set resource limits and improve performance for virtualized systems.

Last week I spoke to Tim Burke, VP of Linux engineering for Red Hat to get a look at what's coming in the release. Aside from the usual collection of security patches and bug fixes since 6.1, Burke says that 6.2 is emphasizing performance, scalability and manageability. Naturally, Red Hat is also including support for new hardware in this release as well.

Red Hat has just announced the availability of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.0 public beta. This release, open to all, brings an updated KVM hypervisor based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and scales to 128 logical CPUs and 2TB of memory for host machines.

With the latest beta, Red hat has updated its RHEV Manager application to a Java app running on JBoss. RHEV 3.0 now has a "power user portal" that allows users to provision VMs and define VM templates.

Eucalyptus was once "the" open source cloud computing project. It was the core of Ubuntu's cloud strategy, and more or less the only game in town. Unfortunately, it was not a particularly open project. While most of the code was available under an open source license, it wasn't developed in the open and failed to develop much of a community. Eucalyptus Systems is hoping Greg DeKoenigsberg can fix that.

For a total of 17 years, Karen Padir was an executive at Sun Microsystems, and was present for that company's astounding transition to open source technologies. She was an advocate for MySQL when Sun acquired that project, and then later when Oracle acquired Sun, promising the "Dolphin" faithful that good times still lay ahead. But then she left, to lead the marketing effort for MySQL's principal key competition in open source-derived databases, EnterpriseDB - the commercial provider of Postgres Plus.

Now, Padir is seeing another new and astonishing transition in her field: the open source development community's move towards less structured, higher capacity databases. So last week, EnterpriseDB started building a bridge to Hadoop, the cloud-oriented database born from Yahoo, launching a private beta program for the innocuously-entitled Postgres Plus Connector for Hadoop.