Will Red Hat Cloudware Come to Power-Based IBM i Clouds?

May 9, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Calling Red Hat a commercial Linux distributor, as I commonly do, is no longer a sufficient title for the Linux operating system giant. With the acquisition of JBoss and Qumranet, Red Hat has really become a systems software supplier, giving companies everything they need to build a software stack on X64, Power, or mainframe systems excepting a database. Starting later this year, that will also include cloud management tools as well as features to manage the deployment of applications.

At its Red Hat Summit last week, the company announced two new products: CloudForms and OpenShift. The former is a set of tools that weave together over 65 open source projects (or some tools that Red Hat has acquired that will become open source eventually) into a cohesive whole, while the latter plunks CloudForms onto Amazon‘s EC2 cloud to turn it into a platform-as-a-service cloud for running applications. The plan, according to Scott Crenshaw, , general manager of Red Hat’s cloud business unit, is to eventually provide an OpenShift PaaS service on top of IBM’s SmartCloud infrastructure cloud, which I told you all about here. IBM is initially offering its SmartCloud virtual compute utility service on its X64-based CloudBurst appliances.

With Red Hat talking so much about open source and openness last week, and telling everyone that we have to be careful because when we are picking our hypervisors and cloud platforms, we are “choosing the next Microsoft,” it would be nice to see Red Hat and IBM team up and create a Power-based version of CloudForms and therefore the OpenShift PaaS platform cloud that ran on IBM’s Power Systems, supported logical partitions, and the IBM i operating system. The high-end of the OpenShift PaaS cloud–the one with all the bells and whistles–is called OpenShift Power Edition. (That is in reference to “power users,” not IBM’s Power Systems.) This variant won’t ship until later this year. In the meantime, an entry OpenShift platform cloud that can host Ruby, Python, and PHP applications is available for free, compliments of Red Hat, here.

And if Red Hat and IBM don’t do this, guess what? CloudForms will eventually be open source and there is nothing in the world that can stop us from doing it together. The name is already correct, ironically.