Red Hat summit & JBoss World 2010 – first day

I am taking part to this year’s Red Hat summit & JBoss World in Boston, Massachusetts.

The first day started with a good keynote speech from Red Hat’s CEO, Jim Whitehurst, who talked about the shift that software companies will have to make in the future towards more modularity and more openness. He also mentioned how customers could get their money trapped in IT projects for several reasons: complexity, project failures, etc.  It was not a revolutionary speech, but rather a well executed introduction to Red Hat’s vision for the future.

Then came Paul Cormier, Red Hat’s VP for products and technologies who did the dirty job and first explained how Oracle wants to lock customers in their proprietary model with Solaris, Weblogic and the Oracle database.
Wait a second, isn’t that exactly what IBM is trying to do with AIX, Websphere and DB2 ? Of course yes, but IBM being the top sponsor of the event, Mr. Cormier preferred to target Oracle. Fair enough. Then Mr. Cormier tried to show us how Microsoft, VMware and Novell were offering closed proprietary solutions. Even though Red Hat remains a model in terms of a company making money out of open-source software, I do not buy what Mr. Cormier said about Novell and VMware. Novell remains a strong Linux vendor that is committed to open-source software and VMware, even though it is based on a proprietary and costly model, does an interesting job from a standards perspective: they have backed the OVF standard for virtual machines and have acquired SpringSource, a company selling free software.

Finally, a Cisco VP came to tell us how simple the world is with UCS. The more Cisco presentations I am hearing, the more I find their architecture complicated and their rip-and-replace-and-buy-new-switches approach brutal. But I have never seen their systems in action so far.

Following the keynote, I chose the 2 hours lab on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV). Even though the management interface is not as polished as VMware Vcenter (it lacks, for instance, the storage view) and even though storage online migration is not available, it will, in my humble opinion, cover the needs of 85% of the customers for a much lower price.

I then attended a session about achieving best I/O performance, both storage and networking, in a KVM virtualized environment., followed by a great presentation about how to setup a clustered environment with Red Hat 6. Even though RHEL6 is still in beta, the cluster management tool looks really promising.

Finally, I attended two sessions: one about SOA architectures in the cloud and RESTful applications with JBoss SOA platform which were fine.

To conclude the day, Red Hat organized an on-site party with a barbecue. It was interesting to see Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat’s CEO, be there and discuss very simply with the attendees.

All in all, it was a very interesting day and I am looking forward to seeing tomorrow’s presentations!