BOSTON - When calling the Red Hat competitor, most people would call Oracle, Novell, Microsoft or IBM. But who would have thought VMWare was regarded as the toughest rival Red Hat."VMware is our biggest competitor. When you start thinking about the enterprise-based software providers 'Cloud', then it leads to us both, Red Hat and VMware," said Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, as quoted by Mis Asia, Tuesday (29 / 6/2010).
Weighing VMware competition not because Red Hat sales reps have the same expertise with VMware to work with potential customers, but because both companies have the same vision to work on cloud computing technologies, although the approach in which they present to cloud services will be different.
Although acknowledged kinship with VMware, Whitehurst quickly describe what the deficiencies in the VMware approach.
"Technically, this is a vision that was fine. But commercially, I would worry about lock-ins that exist in that company and how the VMware technology problems in defining the composition of cloud," he said.
Whitehurst believes if cloud computing is very good if running on open source technology.
"Modular layered architecture built on open source," he said.
He noted, if the proprietary licensing model will make it difficult to build a cloud computing technology, precisely because of the license and lock-ins.
"Who also wants to hold a neighborhood with 50,000 servers rely on one vendor? If you buy ESX and three years later you get a renewal, what price you should have to pay to VMware?" Whitehurst said.
Unfortunately, VMware is not going to comment on the explanation presented by these Whitehurst.
Currently Red Hat Enterprise Linux is an operating system that is widely used by corporations. New Red Hat itself only introduced their own virtualization software, a commercial version of the software based on open source Kernel Virtual Machina (KVM). While VMware currently dominates the market for server virtualization software.
