This morning, on the final day of the annual Red Hat Summit in Boston, Mass., Red Hat Product Manager, Mike Ferris, shared the Beta testing program of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing platform. Red Hat launched the service in November of 2007, and has been beta testing it, gauging customer interest and getting feedback on what type of services are needed. Prior to the conference, I talked to Ferris about the program and why Red Hat has partnered with Amazon to offer this service to their customers.

“When we looked at where our customers were today and where they needed to go as well as the converging aspects of virtualization and automation, we recognized that we needed to provide this service,” shared Ferris. “We asked how could we help customers go and leverage these technologies? We saw the evolution of virtualization and the availability of companies like Amazon to be able to provide compute capacity on demand. So, we partnered with Amazon to build out an enterprise support cloud for Linux.”

Red Hat has integrated the virtualization technology into Red Hat Linux 5.1, which makes it easy for the customers deploy the technology. The advantage to the cloud computing model is that users can get capacity on demand, for much less cost than the traditional hardware acquisition model. This savings and use in high-demand situations is something that many industry experts agree will make cloud computing an important extension of the data center of the future.

Ferris explained that Red Hat’s offering is “the same technology but available at an hourly basis in the cloud. A lot of this has absolutely been enabled by virtualization. It eliminates the need to spend money on capital for infrastructure to handle peak loads. Customers can leverage external clouds with same technology and the same APIs.”

So far, the feedback has been positive. Competitively priced at between $0.21/hour to $0.94/hour, the price has been considered fair by the market.

“We’ve seen interest from our customers during this beta period,” said Ferris. “A lot of core customers are leveraging the cloud infrastructure to run additional simulations and engineering analysis. Studios are looking at this for being able to render movies and televisions shows. We also see small companies that are looking to leverage low-cost infrastructure and get it up and running in minutes. Customers can dynamically scale their environments and do other business activities that they otherwise couldn’t have. With tightening budgets and a strong focus on efficiency, customers are looking at both cloud and traditional solutions.”

Further demonstrating their commitment to the cloud, on Wednesday the company announced that the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform is also now available on Amazon EC2 in beta. For more information on the Red Hat Summit, see a summary of TechTarget’s week-long event coverage.

As a managed hosting company, Contegix by necessity has to contend with every major operating system. But to run its own business, Contegix is an open source shop. “We run Red Hat Enterprise Linux,” said CEO Matthew Porter, “and we use Hyperic as the core of our management and monitoring systems.”

From its St. Louis data center, Contegix uses Hyperic’s open source HQ management tool to monitor its own applications, and customers can use the system to get their own metrics, even if “they run any operating system on the planet,” Porter said.

Initially, Porter balked at the prospect of installing Hyperic because he didn’t want to put an agent on every machine. However, Porter also wanted the ability to do in-depth monitoring of applications, and not just take stock of the network. The other tools that did both application-performance and network monitoring were SNMP-based, Porter said. “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with SNMP, but our network engineers would have to become experts in it,” Porter said. “We made a financial decision to go with Hyperic and install agents because it was expensive to train our engineers.”

Some customers with servers that were three-to-four years old needed more RAM to run agents, and Contegix provided them with the memory they needed. Contegix now collects 25,000 metrics per minute via Hyperic and provides its managed services customers with the ability to set their own thresholds and parameters.

Sydney, Australia based-Ideas International Inc. has launched an open source-style website to compare and rate the functional capabilities of blade servers on Monday, April 7.

The IT research and analysis company’s new site for Collaborative Product Evaluation looks at medium-sized blade servers and will include enterprise-level blade server data by mid-summer, said Jim Burton, the vice president and senior analyst for entry-level servers and blades at Ideas International.

The site lets users compare various components of the servers that fall under the umbrellas of platform functionality, environmental footprint, virtualization functions, reliability, serviceability and manageability, and deployment considerations.

The information is based on the hardware specifications, interviews with end users, and performance data, Burton said.

“We establish the appropriate ratings, but it is an open source-style website, so users can affect these ratings too,” Burton said. Of course, Ideas International give the user feedback a credibility rating, so only statements supported by concrete data can actually bring a rating up or down, he said.

The site is pretty handy if you are on the market for blade servers, especially because the site allows you to make comparisons based on your priorities. If you need power efficiency, you can compare boxes based on that alone. Same goes for factors like “green-ness,” cost, networking and so forth, said Burton.

Ideas International also has evaluation sites for x86 virtual machine platforms and plans to create evaluation sites for Unix-based systems and Linux in the near future, so keep an eye out for those.

Ask Noah Broadwater why the nonprofit Sesame Workshop is migrating as many of its applications as possible to Linux, and you’ll get three compelling reasons. “Cost, cost and cost,” said Broadwater, the vice president of information services for the New York-based media organization.

Since 2000, Sesame Workshop has been running some variant of Linux, beginning with Debian at its web infrastructure co-location facility and, in 2003, switching to SUSE. Currently, the company is running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10.1 from Novell on 10 servers for some of its Web and back-end applications. In moving a subset of these applications that were running on three Sun Sparc machines to two Xen-based virtualized x86 machines running Linux, Broadwater estimates he has saved $60,000.

Broadwater aims to use Linux to propel more savings in the future. Within three years - once Sesame Workshop completes an overhaul of its enterprise resource management (ERP) system - Broadwater hopes to retire the Sun Sparc machines running Solaris that hosts the organization’s ERP. “If we can eliminate the 20 Solaris servers that cost $24,000 each, and replace them with fewer, virtualized Linux servers that cost $6,000 each, that’s quite a bit of money,” Broadwater said.

While cost is certainly the predominant factor for migrating to Linux, it’s not the only one. Broadwater says that any one of his four-person engineering staff is capable of administering Linux servers, enabling him to get the most out of personnel resources. The same can’t be said in terms of administering the Solaris, Windows or NetWare servers running at Sesame Workshop. In addition, Linux will run on the same x86-based hardware, enabling Broadwater to simplify the spare parts inventory he will need to keep on hand.

While Broadwater is a true fan of Linux, Sesame Workshop’s IT is still very much a mixed shop. Currently, the organization has 20 Solaris boxes, 10 Linux boxes (which are virtualized and provide the processing equivalent of 30 servers), 10 Windows boxes and a handful of NetWare servers that Broadwater is migrating to Linux.

With an ERP upgrade on the horizon, Broadwater is basing his decision on the ability to migrate to Linux. For this reason, ERP systems from Oracle and SAP are the leading candidates. “Wherever we can migrate to Linux, we are migrating,” Broadwater said. Choosing applications that facilitate such a migration is central to Sesame Workshop’s IT strategy.

This blog post was written by Mark Schlack, vice president of editorial, TechTarget.

What kind of network works best for high-density virtual machine (VM) farms? Can you run OLTP databases on VMs? If you put your email server on a VM, what should you beware of?

It’s hard to find answers to those kinds of questions, and answers often start with “It depends.” But the questions are important, indeed critical, for some shops as they scale up. For that reason, we are launching an e-zine this week called Virtual Data Center.

If you’re looking for a deeper dive into some of the thornier questions about virtualization and the new data center being built around it, this is for you. Take the first issue: It features an article by a veteran integrator of Oracle and VMware that makes the case for putting production databases on virtual machines. The article gets into what you need to do to make that work. Similarly, a second article gets into creating a storage architecture for VM farms.

Our goal is to create, magazine-style articles that can go further than tips or blog posts in analyzing these issues. It’s free and will appear six times a year. Each issue will address an application area and a technology issue. The authors will be experts, frequently with direct hands-on experience.

We’ll also follow up articles with blog posts and survey research that’s part of each article. You can take our survey on virtual databases here as well as our survey on storage in virtual environments.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Hewlett-Packard Co. is pressuring Sun Microsystems Sparc users to abandon their aging platforms and move onto commodity HP ProLiant and Integrity servers, a strategy that has generated HP an estimated $1.5 billion in server revenue since 2004.

As part of that strategy, HP announced a new distribution agreement with Transitive Corp. today under which HP and its channel partners will be certified resellers of Transitive’s QuickTransit virtualization software. The software lets users migrate their applications from Sparc-based servers to other servers without making any code changes to applications.

HP first partnered with Transitive back in February 2007.

Transitive is currently offering QuickTransit for Solaris/Sparc-to-Linux/Itanium on HP Integrity servers. This allows users to migrate enterprise applications from SPARC-based hardware to HP Integrity servers running either Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Novell SUSE Linux.

Perhaps not since the infamous George B. Seldon Patent Case has a technology-related legal matter had such an impact on the future of an industry. I’m of course referring to the recent federal judge ruling that Novell Inc. owns copyrights covering the Unix operating system, negating The SCO Group Inc.’s central argument in its case against IBM Corp. IBM had contributed Unix source code to the Linux community, something SCO had claimed was a misappropriated use of its intellectual property.

Hyperbole aside, this has the potential to have a significant impact on the marketing and development of Linux. In the infamous patent case alluded to above, Seldon developed a gas-powered automobile engine based on the previous standard in design, the Brayton engine. He also attempted to patent the idea of using it for automobiles specifically. Additionally, Seldon filed a series of amendments to his patent application to prolong the process, meanwhile opting not to build the actual product - rather, his goal was to own the rights to collect royalties when others used his engine. This strategy actually worked for many years. But, in the end it was Henry Ford who was able to wrangle Seldon’s right to royalties away via a semantic argument of what basing a gas powered engine on a Brayton engine actually means. Thus, the industry was broken free of Seldon’s proprietary bonds.

Is something similar going on in the realm of Unix versus Linux? Is it a stretch to position the Linux community as the gas engine tinkers of the the early 1900’s, fighting for autonomy from proprietary corporations? Not really. In fact, this is what seems to happen in a lot of technological, as well as cultural, developments: something interesting emerges, i.e. an operating system or a car, either out of need or technological curiosity. This works well for a while and picks up steam. Lastly, it is appropriated, commodified and distributed by a corporate entity. This happens frequently with everything from music (punk rock, jazz, hip hop, etc.) to media (gonzo journalism, blogs, video, etc.) to technology.

My opinion, and I’ve seen similar analysis, is that like the products of the automobile industry, the Linux OS industry will become the new mainstream. It doesn’t take a crystal ball to make that call. But it is interesting to put it alongside other technological developments and see patterns, incongruities and other cultural evidences that give way to the old adage: the more things change, the more they stay the same.