Redhat and Intel Team Up for Linux Business

Red Hat and Intel announced today at LinuxWorld Boston that they would be entering a partnership to help customers "plan for, accelerate and optimize their deployments of Linux solutions." From the article: "'We're responding to what customers have told us they really need to support their advanced deployments of Linux and open source,' said Tim Yeaton, executive vice president of Enterprise Solutions at Red Hat. 'The programs Intel and Red Hat have selected are aimed at equipping customers with in-depth domain knowledge and providing hard core data to make complex architectural decisions.'"

Comments

If nothing else, this will be useful.

[khasim]

From TFA:

Reference Solutions and Certified Solution Stacks: The program will give customers access to information about previously tested or deployed solutions based on Red Hat and Intel technology.

I absolutely HATE having a vendor say "sure it will work" or "sure it does that". And when you buy it, you get to pay for a support call so tech support can tell you "no way, it's never been able to do that". Which is why I now demand that I speak to their other clients who have actually implemented whatever I'm looking for.

I know that the company I work for is not unique.

I know that someone else had probably already done what I want to do in the way I want to do it.

So let me find out how they did it and I'll buy your product.

interesting

[goldfita]

Redhat wanted to interview me for a virtualization development position a few days ago. This sounds like good news for anyone working with open source. But I wonder what Intel is getting out of it. Or are they anticipating future rewards when open source has more market share?

Re:interesting

[Johnny Mnemonic]

Long story made short. It is in Intel's best interest to see more competition in the software space as long as the software all runs on its chips.

This announcement coupled with the recent, exclusive, partnership with Apple makes me think that Intel REALLY wants to get out of bed with Microsoft and the "WinTel" alliance. So what does Microsoft do now? Make their stuff work better on AMD and promote them? Cripple their support on Intel and let the benchmarkers talk about it? Price leverage?

It's interesting that Intel is dancing with others than brung them, and they think they can get away with it. They must have calculated the repercussions MS would impose--but decided they had to support multiple OSes anyway.

Very interesting. The upside is that if it works, both OS X and RH will have Intel-only optimizations, and as those platforms grow, AMD will be marginalized. The downside would be a strong AMD-MS alliance, such that neither OS X nor RH grow and Intel is relegated to being the CPU for "other" OSes but AMD is the best choice for Windows.

One can only surmise that Intel is seeing the alternative OSes reaching critical mass and preparing to break out of their niche markets, and Intel wants to be the favorite when that happens. And there are smart people at Intel that wouldn't make that forecast lightly...

Again?

[Russ Steffen]

So they're pairing up again? I've still got some junk left over from the party Red Hat and Intel (and Dell that time) threw at LinuxWorld 2000 to announce some kind of partnership then.

Re:Something Wicked this way Comes

[NerveGas]

It does seem odd at first glance, but look at the current CPU market: AMD is taking significant market share from Intel, and the lucrative part at that. When AMD released the Opteron, they cought Intel with their pants - and shorts - down, and Intel is still trying to come up with a viable response. They've been grasping around for anything to try and get numbers back up.

So... being a good bedfellow of Intel, Microsoft kindly delayed the release of a 64-bit OS for quite some time, until Intel had a 64-bit chip ready as well. The thinking was that without a OS that used the 64-bitness, extra registers, and had a scheduler that understood the complexities of obtaining maximum performance out of a NUMA architecture, the Opteron would surely turn out to be a flop. Right?

Wrong. They forgot about Linux. Linux could already support 64 bits, and IBM had poured some VERY significant NUMA experience and technology into Linux. Linux completely carried the Opteron sales for at least the first year. It might have been two, but I don't recall off of the top of my head.

So... here's Intel right now, trying desperately to find a way to at least stop the bleeding on the high-end server market. It's not far-fetched to think that they said "Hey... Linux carried the Opteron, and has worked against us. It's helped AMD and IBM, maybe we should jump on that train, too."

Of course, that attributes much more intelligence to Intel's decision-makers than they have hitherto demonstrated, but it's possible.