Red Hat announced three strategic initiatives targeting enterprise-wide adoption of next-generation virtualization. These initiatives will enable customers to deploy virtualization across their IT infrastructure by offering features and cost benefits that go beyond competitive solutions. With this portfolio growth, Red Hat solutions provide the market with comprehensive virtualization capabilities.

Unlike many virtualization solutions in the market today, Red Hat's technologies enable customers to deploy a virtualization infrastructure that is flexible enough to meet their individual business needs. At the same time, Red Hat's strict adherence to open interfaces offers customers the flexibility to choose components from multiple vendors. These technologies are developed by Red Hat in collaboration with its partners and customers using the open source development model, resulting in more functional, higher quality solutions. With this announcement, open source virtualization is well positioned to overtake existing virtualization technologies.

Demonstrating Red Hat's commitment to its Linux Automation strategy, these technologies allow customers to deploy x86-based virtualization solutions consistently across their IT infrastructure. Using one set of tools to manage both physical and virtual servers, this architecture enables customers to implement cloud, Software as a Service (SaaS), appliance and traditional IT infrastructures. By maximizing flexibility customers are able to reduce costs and complexity.

Today Red Hat introduces:

• Embedded Linux Hypervisor
• Virtual Infrastructure Management
• Security Infrastructure

“Red Hat is leading the drive to open source virtualization solutions that deliver what proprietary products can't: open standards, true multi-vendor support, and the ultimate in deployment and operational flexibility,” said Paul Cormier, President of Products and Technology at Red Hat. “Today's announcements are a key step in extending the benefits of virtualization to every IT deployment. We continue to see huge improvements in functionality, performance and time to market because of our close relationship with our open source partners. For example, Intel and IBM have worked with us for many years covering virtualization technologies that span from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 to today's KVM-based announcements. We see this as the beginning of open source solutions becoming dominant in the software virtualization market, as it has in others, such as Linux itself.”

"Customers are demanding advanced Virtualization solutions that are easy to deploy and manage," said Doug Fisher, corporate vice president and general manager, Intel's System Software Division. “Intel is providing the technology underpinnings to deliver these solutions through enhanced hardware assist for Virtualization. In addition, Intel and Red Hat have worked extensively with the open source community to drive innovative virtualization solutions to the industry. By combining the advancements in Intel(r) Virtualization Technology supported by the native KVM hypervisor, Red Hat's Virtualization infrastructure, and open source community innovations, we are able to offer our customers a solution with outstanding performance, scalability and agility."

"IBM works closely with Red Hat and the open source community to drive innovation within the Linux kernel,” said Daniel Frye, vice president, open systems development at IBM. "IBM has a heterogenous approach toward virtualization, with KVM one of several options. KVM leverages the core features of the Linux kernel, including paravirtualization interfaces contributed by IBM engineers. By combining Linux virtualization infrastructure with open management interfaces such as CIM and libvirt, we gain a solution that eliminates lock-in and breaks down the barriers to enterprise wide adoption of virtualization."

"Much as it has in the operating system and relational database markets, open source is poised to have a disruptive impact on the virtualization space, lowering costs for customers and offering alternatives to proprietary lock-in," said Stephen O'Grady, Principal Analyst with RedMonk. "By embracing and fueling development around technologies such as KVM, Red Hat aims to provide customers with high quality, open source virtualization options."