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Red Hat Bets Big On Cloud Target
eldavojohn writes "Red Hat's CEO prophetically saith 'The clouds will all run Linux' in a brief interview before the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo. Here's the skinny: Red Hat management tools take a back seat to grid computing goals, high switching costs are the trick to surviving slow periods, Microsoft's interoperability tools are vaporware, they're striving to catch up to VMWare, Ubuntu is not the competition, JBoss is growing twice as fast as RHEL and Amazon pays the fee while Google wears its own Red Hat for free."
You're obviously new here. Of course these shops will have their on in-house IT staff that know what's going on. But when the shit hits the fan, the staff want a backup plan, called RedHat Support. That's what paid support is for, and that's why Microsoft makes so much money selling Windows, even though we all know how much cheaper it is to run Linux/BSD.
The supporters can just shrug off and say "sorry" while they go to the bank, but the IT staff needs to say "even they fucked up".
While that is the cynic in my speaking, truth is, you need dedicated staff to run this kind of thing AND paid support. You can't have a fresh graduate do it and expect support to fill in the gaps in any realistic way.
Welcome to the IT world, where the beautiful promises of a technological tomorrow are backed by a lot of grunt work, voodoo, and incompetence.
To be pedantic, number factoring isn't NP-complete and an algorithm to solve an NP-complete problem won't necessarily lead to one for integer factorization.
The bigger fear is quantum computers, with a proven algorithm to factor numbers in polynomial time (Shor's Algorithm). In fact, some research quantum computers have factored very small numbers (ex: 15) already.
Well, a bunch of Wiki editors agreed on a definition.
The article claims that Red Hat's new CEO, Jim Whitehurst, is the former COO at Delta Airlines, so a sky-related term like "Cloud Computing" is appropriate.
Further down in the article they clarify the confusion in the article summary. Amazon pays big bucks to Red Hat for support so they don't have to worry about the massive infrastructure of servers (clouds) that run their online sales business. Similarly, Google uses Red Hat to deploy a percentage of their search business, but they don't pay for it because they maintain it all in-house.
Ubuntu isn't competition because that organization isn't selling support. Jim quite astutely points out that Red Hat is not a software company (because the bits are free). Red Hat is a support company who has the capability to manage, maintenance, fix, and upgrade mission critical software for its customers. Ergo, Ubunutu doesn't compete with them, but Suse/Novell does.
This shouldn't be anything new to the Slashdot audience, but since it made it to the mainpage I figure it is worth clarifying.
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
To be pedantic, number factoring isn't NP-complete
Yes it is. In 2002 the AKS primality test was discoverd proving that testing for primality is P. As a result factorization is NP because we can check if a given factorization is correct in polynomial time.
If you RTFA, Red Hat is planning on getting it's revenue from selling support. I'm not sure I see this happening.
I'm pretty sure that's a good part of what they've been doing for a decade.
Wikipedia agrees with me: Red Hat partly operates on a professional open-source business model based on open code, community development, professional quality assurance services, and subscription-based customer support.
If you RTFA, Red Hat is planning on getting it's revenue from selling support. I'm not sure I see this happening. If you're running a cloud service, you're going to have a LOT of machines and you're going to need enough custom support and custom software that you're probably going to have in-house support. If you have in-house support, you're probably not paying for the Red Hat support, so how do the expect to make revenue?
There are two kinds of support here:
Phone/web/email support, for problems and other issues. This is the traditional "help desk" or "support center" that you are probably thinking of.
Updates and system patches to keep your servers up-to-date with the latest software.
I work with lots of systems (over 1,100 servers ... about half of which run RHEL) and we need to run with both kinds of support. Sure, we probably have called Red Hat about half a dozen times in the last 5 years. But we need to have it there, should something go wrong. Am I wasting my money for that? No, because the times that we've needed to call support, we really needed it. You don't pay for support because you know you'll need it - you pay for support because you'll probably need it.
Yes, we have our own system support people, and most are RHCE. They can figure out most problems - but we still need to have RHEL there as a safety net.
I haven't RTFA'd, but I suspect Red Hat will offer some kind of volume discount if you have enough systems. Otherwise, it will likely be too expensive for some folks.
(Disclaimer: I work at a Big Ten university, and we don't actually run with "help desk" support on everything. Red Hat offers an "Academic" subscription to RHEL, so you still get patches and updates, but don't get phone support. We run with phone support where we need it - like to run third-party software, or in production - but for "dev" instances for our own development staff, we may choose to run "Academic" without phone support, at a much lower price per system. It works well for us.)
It really does exist, for those people willing to pay the big bucks.
And sometimes you find they actually DO know what they are talking about, with their products at least. Once you get into the depths of the support structure you no longer see the 1st level 'by the book' call centers and discover that elusive developer.. who actually does have a clue.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Ummm.. when you are discussing whether a problem is in NP and/or in coNP you normally have a decision problem in mind. So the problem here is not "What are the prime factors of n?" but rather "Does n have a non-trivial factor less than m?"
By repeatedly asking this question you can eventually get the prime factors of any number.
Of course you can make the decision problem "Does n have a prime factor less than m?" in which case you would indeed need the AKS result, but I believe the former variant is more common since talking about primality of factors (like in the latter variant) only complicates the issue without changing the complexity of factorization (the usual "give me prime factors of n").
Follow the money. The money people pay Red Hat covers a lot more than support. It covers all of the engineers doing QA. It covers the engineers who make Red Hat a leading contributor to many OSS projects, including the Linux kernel. It covers all the work done with hardware and software vendors to ensure compatibility. It covers the work Red Hat does in providing indemnification and legal coverage to its customers and to everyone. It covers some of the costs of the Fedora project. It covers a lot of documentation and translation work.
We all know the OSS only works if there is a community. Unfortunately many consumers of Linux cannot join a community. Their employer may forbid it, or they may not have the time or the skills, or they may not have the desire. But if people pay Red Hat for subscriptions, and it is a lot cheaper than any proprietary system, they are still helping to keep the commons from suffering economic tradgedy.
Red Hat made a choice way back. They could either purchase rights to all sorts of software to add logical volumes and multi-pathing, and virtualization and Windows interoperability and networking and and and then pass on those costs to their customers in up front license fees, or they could use the money to invest in expanding the OSS communities around the typical components in a distro, and recoup by charging for subscriptions. Frankly, I am glad they went the subscription route.
Everyone misspells "cloud", the correct spelling is "internet".. Just because people draw a cloud on diagrams to symbolize the internet doesn't mean we should call it "the cloud".
I don't know how people who know what the internet is and where the name came from can stand it.
(As you can tell by my sig this is a pet annoyance)
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);