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Headlines From This Week on Enterprises and Open Source

It's only Tuesday, and this week is already bringing a flood of news relevant to open source and enterprises. There are quite a few open source-related headlines coming out of VMware's VMworld 2009 show in San Francisco, Red Hat Summit is underway in Chicago, with news on JBoss and more, and there are even some enterprise- and open source-related questions surrounding Apple's new Snow Leopard operating system. Here are the details.

JBoss ON 2.3. At Red Hat Summit, the company has announced the next major update to its JBoss management solution, JBoss Operations Network (ON). It's designed to let customers optimize their deployments, and make better use of Java tools. JBoss is actually growing faster than Red Hat's healthy Linux business.

Red Hat Catalyst Program. Red Hat has also announced the North American launch of its Red Hat Catalyst Program, aimed at "leveraging all of Red Hat's routes to market" through a collaborative marketing program that will include an interactive web portal for Red Hat and its partners. The portal will make sales and marketing tools available, and more.

Eucalyptus Systems and VMware. We've covered Eucalyptus Systems extensively. It's a well-funded startup focused on hybrid (public and private) cloud computing solutions built on the open source Eucalyptus platform. Today, the company has announced that it has joined the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program. The TAP program "helps technology vendors integrate their products with VMware virtualization software and deliver timely, joint solutions to mutual customers." This partnership strikes me as a good move on VMware's part, as it faces many threats to its proprietary virtualization offerings from open source competitors.

Cloudera and VMware. Cloudera, which provides commercial support for and its own distribution of Hadoop,  has announced a Hadoop distribution for use on VMWare's vCloud infrastructure. The company has already tweaked its Hadoop distro for Amazon's on-demand infrastructure service, the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and is spreading out.

Citrix's Xen Cloud Platform. Speaking of open source cloud computing solutions, Citrix has launched its new Xen Cloud Platform, which is linked to Xen.org, the open source virtualization project Citrix has sponsored since it acquired Xensource in 2007. The Xen Cloud Platform is an open source cloud infrastructure. As ZDNet notes: "Prior to this release, Xen.org had been content to manage and maintain the core Xen hypervisor and let its partners all build solutions around it."

Snow Leopard Scratches Virtualization. Jason Perlow has a good piece of analysis up on how Apple's new Snow Leopard operating system "completely blows it virtually." He writes: "Built-in hypervisor-based virtualization and paravirtualizized kernels are now de rigueur with every major x86-based enterprise OS on the planet, including on Linux, on all major UNIX OSes, and even on Windows Server. But on Mac OS X Snow Leopard, it’s nowhere to be found."

I agree, and Perlow is right that Apple may have trouble competing in datacenters and enterprises in general without a firm virtualization strategy. I would add to his comments that in addition to the built-in hypervisors in many operating systems, there are now many free, open source choices that are just as good as proprietary solutions. This is exactly how Apple ends up not being taken seriously in the enterprise OS arena.  
 

• Citrix
• VMWare
• Apple
• Red Hat
• Xen
• jboss
• Snow Leopard

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