During his address at VMworld 2008, VMware’s then-CEO Paul Maritz famously remarked that “the traditional operating system has all but disappeared” in the data center. The former Microsoft executive, who presently runs EMC cloud analytics spin-off Pivotal, was talking not so much about a particular platform (although he did point a finger towards Windows multiple times throughout his talk) as the old model of building and provisioning enterprise applications.

The simplicity afforded by virtualization has shifted the focus higher up the stack, Maritz argued, diverting the attention of developers away from the components below the hypervisor – including the OS – and thus rendering that part of IT infrastructure irrelevant from a business standpoint. Six years later, however, the market seems to be moving in the exact opposite direction, with VMware rival Red Hat leading the way.

Supposedly destined to fade into inconsequence, Linux is now seeping into all corners of the enterprise, from the orchestration layer through the network to the public cloud. In the second keynote presentation of last month’s Red Hat Summit, Paul Cormier, the head of the open source stalwart’s products and technologies organizations, even designated the platform as the cornerstone of the next-generation data center. And judging by the sheer pace of innovation in the surrounding ecosystem, he wasn’t too far off the mark.

The app is king

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“The app is king, you gotta remember that. It’s all about the application and it’s always been about the application: it’s all about running that application with consistency across the data center, and that’s where the operating system comes in,” Cormier told the audience.

Red Hat promises to deliver this level of stability through the open hybrid cloud, an architecture aimed at decoupling software from hardware that provides a single operating environment for physical and virtual machines as well as private and public clouds.  It’s a heterogeneous mixture of open source technologies based on the company’s flagship Linux distro, RHEL, and the open source KVM hypervisor.

Unlike proprietary alternatives such as VMware’s ESXi, which operate in a separate layer that sits on top of the hardware beneath the operating system, KVM is directly integrated into the kernel for simplified management and increased performance.  Cormier points out that delivering virtualization capabilities in this way, as a module, also has the benefit of allowing users to directly tap into all of the work that the open-source community puts into Linux.

To harness these advantages to the fullest at the application level, enterprise developers require middleware service like messaging, data caching and rules engines which, as he points out, have historically been controlled almost entirely by proprietary vendors. That’s where JBoss, the open automation and integration suite Red Hat picked up in 2006, comes into play. The company has adapted the portfolio for its open hybrid cloud vision with JBoss xPaaS Services for OpenShift, a family of cloud solutions that extends that core functionality across private and public deployments through a unified interface.

“This brought us from a proprietary vertical way to communicate between applications to a horizontal model that stretches across the data center,” Cormier notes. “And because this all plugs into and integrates with an open operating system, huge leaps were made in performance and security.”

The cloud-based middleware stack also stretches beyond Red Hat’s product portfolio with support for the Docker container engine for Linux, which provides a lightweight alternative to traditional virtualization that facilitates the creation of portable applications using only a fraction of the hardware resources required by a full-blown hypervisor.  The integration acts to cement the vendor’s value proposition of stability and performance, which is further complemented by OpenStack.

Red Hat has bundled the platform with RHEL in an integrated solution called the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, and actively contributes to the project in collaboration with other prominent vendors such as Cisco. The two firms see eye to eye on the importance of open source in the enterprise, but have different objectives moving forward.

Open source as a catalyst for the Internet of Everything

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While Red Hat is working towards making hybrid computing a reality for the traditional enterprise, the networking giant is busy trying to usher in the Internet of Everything, its umbrella term for the connected universe and the new technologies and business models created as a result of the explosion in edge devices. For the second portion of the three-part keynote, Cisco chief technology and strategy officer Padmasree Warrior takes to the stage to detail how her firm employs open source methodologies in its market strategy.

In the last few years, the vendor has been working on something called Application Centric Infrastructure, or ACI for short, a unique spin on software-defined networking meant to achieve the same level of abstraction as Red Hat’s hybrid cloud, decoupling management functionality from the underlying infrastructure. Likewise, the platform extends programmability across entire data center through integration with partner solutions such as RHEL.

“Open source is going to be the only way to leverage the movement to cloud, and it’s winning because people do not want to have vendor lock-in when it comes to the operating system. The platform and the operating system have to serve the function of bringing the infrastructure closer to the application, and that can only be done when we use open source methodologies and the power of the community,” Warrior summarizes. That degree of flexibility is becoming an absolute necessity for organizations, she  notes, as CIOs come under increased pressure to transform the IT organization from a cost center to a source of competitive advantage.

Open source meets hardware

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In the third and final part of the keynote, Intel vice president of software and services Doug Fisher steps up to the podium to share what’s in it for the company. As the world’s largest chip maker, it’s poised to become a major supplier of processing power to the Internet of Things.

“By 2020, there will be over 50 billion connected devices,” Fisher highlights. “What are those devices doing? They’re driving to the data center. And what’s that data being used for? Building services and capabilities that applications use on those devices to deliver more value.” That value is then driven back to the data center in the form of more data, he continues, as part of a feedback loop Intel refers to as the “Virtuous Cycle of Computing.”

The company is determined to take advantage of this trend. To that end, it had established itself among the top 10 code contributors to the Linux kernel – right up there with Red Hat – and has been building enterprise capabilities like FlexMigration directly into its server chips.  According to Fisher, the firm is developing processors with the software-defined data center in mind.

“Having software-defined infrastructure allows you to use standards-based building blocks like our Intel architecture, visualize those environments and then deploy them on demand,” he says.  “This requires an orchestration layer, a layer that digs deep into the hardware, allowing it take advantage of new capabilities that are continuing to evolve at the platform layer.” Red Hat and Cisco are working to deliver exactly that.

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