As it expands into virtualization, open source vendor upbeat on RP prospects

Red Hat, renowned for its open source solutions, is going head-long into the virtualization space and is hopeful that local companies would adopt what arguably is a double-barreled offering – open source-based virtualization.

The tech firm said the new product offering, to be distributed and supported locally by MSI-ECS Philippines starting in late 2009, has the potential to benefit local enterprises who need a robust but inexpensive solution for their IT systems.

Gery Messer, president for Asia Pacific and Japan at Red Hat, said in a recent press briefing that there’s still a lot of room for growth since only 25 percent of servers worldwide are virtualized.

The low rate of adoption for virtualization, according to Messer, can be attributed to many factors, chief among them is the high cost, which can run up to $10,000 per server.

“Buying these licenses is simply not affordable to many businesses,” said Messer, stressing that the subscription model that Red Hat espouses for its virtualization offerings is a better alternative.

With the subscription model, the Red Hat executive said firms can just pay for the service they use.

This, he said, allows IT expense to be treated as an opex (operating expense) rather than capex (capital expenditure).

The US-based tech firm first entered the virtualization market with the debut of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with virtualization technology integrated into the operating system. In 2008, the company acquired Qumramnet which provided the foundation with which it built its next set of virtualization offerings.

As part of its strategy to offer a complete set of virtualization solutions that allows the entire spectrum of enterprise workloads to run on one common infrastructure, Red Hat announced a portfolio of products composed of four components: Enterprise Linux, Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers, Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops, and Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor.

Earlier this year, Red Hat also signed reciprocal agreements with Microsoft to allow interoperability between their virtualization platforms.

MSI-ECS, which is also the local distributor of commercial virtualization software leader VMware, said it has assigned a separate marketing team to handle the Red Hat solutions.