New IBM Cloud Built on Red Hat

Today, IBM is introducing their new enterprise cloud, and they are building that cloud on top of Red Hat offerings, including Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.  This is yet another example of the growing number of public clouds built on and certified with Red Hat (Amazon EC2 was the pioneer in our Certified Cloud provider program).

Here's a quote from the press release:

Our decade-long partnership with Red Hat has always been focused on customer value and innovation.  Today, we are extending this partnership to include cloud computing – broadening our reach and answering the strong customer demand for cloud computing services," said Maria Azua, vice president of Cloud Computing Enablement at IBM.  "Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is an optimal hypervisor technology for the infrastructure offerings on the IBM cloud."

Virtualization is one of the foundational technologies of cloud computing, so it's great to see that when it came to building its own cloud, IBM chose Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as the optimal solution amongst all the available possibilities in the market.

Deutsche Börse Customer Case Study for MRG

Today, Red Hat published an announcement and a case study on how Deutsche Börse, the German Stock Exchange, is using Red Hat Enterprise MRG for their new risk management system as well as their upcoming trading platform:

"We decided to implement Red Hat Enterprise MRG Messaging with AMQP because we wanted to make it as easy as possible for our client banks to access the relevant risk data. Using the open standard AMQP helps us to avoid complex and time-consuming development of customized adaptors," said Gerhard Lessmann, member of the executive board at Deutsche Börse Systems.

Furthermore,

“In addition to the risk management system, we are in the process of building an entirely new trading platform for Deutsche Börse Group, based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise MRG,” said Gerhard Lessmann, DBS. “In this context it was a logical decision to work with Red Hat also for our risk management project. We always work to keep our IT operations focused on their core tasks and to minimise support workload on the team. Having Red Hat support readily available as a single point of contact is an excellent way to achieve just that.”

As a leading exchange, Deutsche Börse, has extremely high requirements for their software infrastructure.  So, we're glad to have such a positive endorsement from them.  We're also happy to be working with Deutsche Börse on the AMQP specification itself as part of the AMQP working group.

You can read the full case study here.

Open Source Energy Savings with Condor

Forbes has an article today on Open Source Energy Savings using Condor.  In addition to highlighting how Condor can help with saving energy in a data center, the article features Red Hat  and our work around Condor with Red Hat Enterprise MRG a couple times:

Two years ago Red Hat  worked out a partnership deal with the university to make Condor open source using the Apache Foundation license.

and

Paul Cormier, president of products and technologies at Red Hat, is working on combining a large collection of open source projects into a cloud provisioning and management suite. "The move to cloud computing as the next generation architecture has only been possible by integrating many of these open source projects, such as Condor," says Cormier. "It is only natural that the software for creating and managing these virtual environments come from the world of open source as well."

The energy savings policies you can implement with Condor are nice, but we see these features as truly beneficial for most enterprises as part of a cloud solution.  For example, we have added virtualization support to Condor, which can further improve power management in a cloud deployment.  Let's say you had two servers each running at 50% capacity with one virtual machine job on each of them.  You could have a Condor job which moved one of the virtual machine jobs to the other server, consolidating all work on one machine.   Then, you could have a Condor job turn off the other machine.