Virtual Red Hat
Last year,
Red Hat bought Qumranet, a virtualization outfit that owned the KVM hypervisor and a selection of desktop/thin client tools, for around about $100 million.
Now Red Hat is laying out its enterprise strategy in the form of a new line of Qumranet-based products, such as an updated server hypervisor, management tools (which is where the real action and money are) and desktop virtualization wares.
Red Hat, in my estimation, is going after the void it believes is left as Citrix puts muscle behind Hyper-V. That commitment leads some to assume that Citrix really doesn't care about its own hypervisor, Xen. But Citrix does care -- to an extent. It's happy to push Xen into open source-centric shops, and more than happy to sell Hyper-V right alongside Microsoft.
Incidentally, at first I thought "Qumranet" was just another meaningless high-tech company name, but I discovered that the Dead Sea scrolls were found in the Qumran Caves. Cool.
Posted by Doug Barney on 02/25/2009 at 1:16 PM