Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Hi Folks:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, RHEL 5, is due out at the
end of this month. There should not be too much new
code to relearn (or at least I hope).

Tony

**

By Stephen Shankland, CNET News.com
Published on ZDNet News

Red Hat plans to ship the next version of its premium
Linux product on February 28, debuting major
virtualization technology but missing an earlier
deadline by about two months.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 had been scheduled to ship
by the end of 2006. However, the company began giving
itself scheduling wiggle room in September, when Red
Hat released the first RHEL 5 beta. A second beta
arrived in November.

Now Red Hat is being more definitive. "I'm sure we
will ship a gold (version) on February 28," Chief
Executive Matthew Szulik, referring to the final
version, said in an interview after the company
reported its quarterly financial results.

The delay isn't a major problem for Red Hat, said
Pund-IT analyst Charles King.

"Making certain that RHEL 5 is thoroughly locked,
loaded and debugged before sending it out the door
(is) more important in the end than meeting a
deadline," he said. And because Red Hat sells software
subscriptions, all existing customers get free
upgrades, so the company doesn't consider the new
version a "revenue event," he added.

One major feature arriving in RHEL 5 is Xen,
virtualization software that lets a single computer
run multiple operating systems simultaneously. The
technology's initial advantage is to let
administrators load up a server more efficiently, but
virtualization in the longer run also holds promise
for reliability and flexibility because virtual
machines can be moved from one computer to another
while running.

Virtualization has been a feature on higher-end
servers for years and has arrived on mainstream x86
machines chiefly through software from EMC's VMware
subsidiary. Xen lacks VMware's market power, but the
open-source software is being incorporated as a
standard feature of corporate versions of Linux and
the x86 version of Sun Microsystems' Solaris.

Microsoft is working on another virtualization
competitor, code-named Viridian. It's due to ship
within 180 days of "Longhorn Server," the server
cousin to Windows Vista.

Reworking an operating system's foundation, as
"hypervisors" such as Xen require, is necessarily
complicated, however, and Red Hat Chief Technology
Officer Brian Stevens said maturing and incorporating
Xen is the major factor on which RHEL 5 depends.

RHEL 5 is based on version 2.6.18 of the Linux
kernel--the core of the operating system--compared to
2.6.9 for the current RHEL 4. The software includes
new security features to protect against some attacks,
plus a "technology preview" of Red Hat's Stateless
Linux software to let desktop machines pull data and
settings from central servers.

Red Hat's chief competitor, Novell, began shipping Xen
in its Suse Linux Enterprise Server months ago, but so
far, the company hasn't threatened Red Hat's
commercial Linux dominance. A newer threat--Oracle,
which announced in October that it will release a free
RHEL clone and sell its own support for the
software--so far hasn't been a problem.

"Clearly, the doomsday scenario that some investors
feared regarding the entrance of Oracle into the
enterprise Linux arena and the ramifications of the
Novell-Microsoft partnership did not materialize in
the quarter," W.R. Hambrecht analyst Robert Stimson
said in a note last week.

Red Hat's billings increased 50 percent, compared with
the year-earlier quarter, to $133 million, well above
analysts' average expectations of $120 million to $125
million, Stimson said.

One challenge Red Hat faces is integration of JBoss,
open-source software from a company of the same name
that Red Hat acquired in June. Red Hat reiterated
earlier guidance that JBoss would produce $22 million
to $27 million in revenue by the end of February,
prompting Merrill Lynch analyst Kash Rangan to say in
a note that JBoss is "tracking well."

Among Red Hat sales worth at least $1 million in the
quarter, two-thirds involved JBoss software, Szulik
said. "When we acquired (JBoss, it) was an
unprofitable venture. It is still unprofitable, but
it's improving," he said. Red Hat expanded JBoss sales
into Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, and the
acquisition presents an opportunity to boost revenue
from subscription renewals, he said.
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Received on Thu Feb 22 16:08:33 2007