The open-source software firm announced a new agreement with IBM through which the two companies will serve customers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM’s mainframes. The deal is a significant endorsement for Red Hat given that IBM has previously sided with Red Hat rival Novell for mainframe accounts, and indeed invested $50m in Novell when it acquired SUSE Linux to ensure that SuSE’s commitment to IBM’s processors continued.
However, Red Hat is not a newcomer to the mainframe. Its Enterprise Linux variant has been up and running on the mainframe since December 2003 as it made good on a commitment to get the operating system running across IBM’s server line. According to this week’s announcement, that commitment has resulted in increasing demand for Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the mainframe, encouraging Red Hat and IBM to formalize support for the combination.
According to the terms of the agreement, Red Hat and IBM engineers will work together with Red Hat’s community developers to enhance the performance of RHEL on IBM’s System Z hardware, while the two companies are also teaming up on technical support.
Red Hat has created a System z dedicated support team within its Global Service unit, and is also delivering new services offerings including configuration and architecture consulting.
Meanwhile, on the desktop side, Red Hat announced a new Global Desktop offering for emerging markets as well as plans for a new online desktop functionality and to support Intel’s vPro technology. The new Global Desktop offering is a cut-down version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 5 targeted for use on Intel’s Classmate, Affordable, Community, and Low-Cost PC lines.
Red Hat also announced that it is teaming up with Intel to deliver Red Hat Virtual Appliance OS, which will make use of Intel’s vPro processor technology to enable the creation of virtual desktop operating environments. The two companies are already working together on the technology, which will create secure desktop applications environments, and plan to deliver beta software later this year with general availability scheduled for 2008.
Also looking into the future, Red Hat outlined plans for what it is currently calling the Online Desktop reflecting the fact that many desktop applications are now collaborative and browser-based, rather than static desktop applications.
The company is planning to make use of the Mugshot social networking software it introduced in June 2006, as well as the Sugar user interface it created for the One Laptop Per Child project.
The company said it is looking to see how it can implement these services alongside traditional desktop applications and new online applications to take a fresh look at the desktop interface.
The first fruits of the Online Desktop project are expected to find their way into the Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Linux community project with Fedora 8, which will not start until after the release of Fedora 7 later this month.
