Red Hat Brings more Innovation to Mainstream

[admin]

Many were on the lookout for a database acquisition from Red Hat, most likely a NoSQL one. *In an interview with InternetNews.com last August, CEO Jim Whitehurst had made it clear they were not interested in a traditional, “me too” RDBMS technology.

Of course, Red Hat could have launched their own Hadoop distribution. But with Cloudera and Hortonworks already out there, the Hadoop market is getting a bit crowded.

Therefore, the acquisition of Gluster does not come as a surprise. *With Gluster, Red Hat invests in a lesser known technology but one that clearly complements their middleware stack, previously focused primarily on application development and deployment.

This acquisition brings a couple comments:

• Red Hat reinforces an already prevalent open source enterprise IT stack. Open source has taken a lion’s share in enterprise IT, Red Hat is a key player in this field and their having a broader product portfolio will make open source deployments stronger.
• Open source is clearly taking the lead when it comes to Big Data management. Hadoop, the leading Big Data solution, is before all an open source project. *Red Hat getting into Big Data will make this even more true. Especially in light of recent announcements by another “red” company, who is thinking primarily of Big Data as a way to bring more data into their RDBMS appliances.
• Open source is also the foundation on which Cloud infrastructure is being deployed, and Gluster is bringing another brick to this foundation. Red Hat is making is clear that they view Gluster’s scaling out capabilities as key to seamlessly support hybrid environments. *This is aligned with Talend’s view that Cloud is before all about hybrid architectures: combination of on-premises, private clouds and public clouds.

One of Red Hat’s claims to fame has been to bring innovation to the mainstream, thanks to a well-executed go to market model.* Gluster clearly fits this bill. We will be looking forward to seeing this technology take off under Red Hat’s wing, and of course to leveraging it as we already leverage a large number of data management technologies – conventional or not.

Yves




More from the Talend blog ...