Cloud gains momentum: Red Hat & Amazon and VMware & Salesforce

Dr. Carlo Velten

• Red Hat took the next step in cloud computing. Starting with RHEL 5.5, customers who have licenses to the premium edition support for RHEL or RHEL Advanced Platform can deactivate those licenses on their physical servers running in their data centers and reactivate them on Amazon's EC2 cloud. Companies purchasing new premium 24x7 support contracts will be able to use the Cloud Access feature of RHEL 5.5 to turn those licenses on within EC2 as well. Enterprises with basic or standard support contracts cannot activate their licenses in the cloud. A minimum of 25 premium support subscriptions for either RHEL or RHEL Advanced Platform is required before RHEL 5.5 instances can be activated on EC2. A RHEL premium support contract is priced at $1,299 per year, while RHEL Advanced Platform costs $2,499. Red Hat states it will now put new versions and releases of RHEL out on EC2 concurrent with licenses for on-premises hardware. Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions will be available.
• VMware and Salesforce.com jointly announced java applications developed on VMware's SpringSource will run on a Force.com hosted platform called VMforce. Java developers will be able to deploy their applications to the cloud without needing to buy or provision their own software or servers. Key to the stack is the planned vCloud App Core that will orchestrate and manage VMware's vSphere and application runtime layer, including the Spring Java framework and tc Server. It will also connect Java applications to the Force.com's services and infrastructure. Java applications will be able to take advantage of Force.com services, such as dashboard for search, application analysis and reporting, mobility, orchestration, and connection to Force.com's underlying Oracle database and the ability to rapidly bring up more instances.