Together, the combined solution offers customers benefits that are not available with competing proprietary solutions, including:

* Support for AMD’s Rapid Virtualization Indexing technology;
* Support for virtual guests configured with more than four CPUs; and
* Fully virtualized performance that approaches the performance of non-virtualized environments.

Red Hat has worked with HP and AMD to deliver affordable operational flexibility on all workloads, including high-end applications and databases, by allowing for more efficient use of hardware resources.

In addition to providing a highly scalable, power-efficient processor, Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors include support for an advanced virtualization feature called Rapid Virtualization Indexing, which improves the efficiency of virtual guest operating systems’ memory management. HP is the first hardware vendor to offer systems equipped with these processors. Utilizing “on-die” silicon resources rather than software, AMD Virtualization™ technology with Rapid Virtualization Indexing can greatly reduce hypervisor cycles and the performance penalty that is commonly associated with virtualization.

“Red Hat and AMD have worked very closely with the open source community to ensure that full support for Rapid Virtualization Indexing is available with the first Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor-based systems to be offered by a leading hardware OEM,” said Earl Stahl, vice president, Software Development at AMD. “We’ve been able to ensure that customers can reap the benefits of this new virtualization technology right away. We have been delighted with the excellent performance that Red Hat Enterprise Linux has achieved. Red Hat, AMD and HP customers now have available one of the fastest and most scalable virtualization platforms on the market today.”

These features, in combination with Red Hat’s new para-virtualized device drivers, offer significant performance gains that allow an easier and more effective transition to virtualized environments than offered by competing virtualization products. In OLTP (online transaction processing) testing, measured in transactions per minute, Red Hat Enterprise Linux showed that a 16-CPU fully virtualized guest using the new Rapid Virtualization Indexing feature and para-virtualized drivers enjoyed a 21-fold performance gain and reached 77 percent of the performance of a non-virtualized environment on one of the industry’s most difficult database OLTP workloads.

“Customers have embraced virtualization but have been unable to realize the benefits throughout their entire infrastructure,” said Scott Crenshaw, vice president, Platform Business Unit at Red Hat. “Customers have been reluctant to virtualize key enterprise applications due to concerns over scalability and performance, relegating the current generation of virtualization solutions to consolidation of QA and to development systems. Using Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors on HP ProLiant servers, customers are able to leverage the benefits of virtualization without paying the performance penalty associated with traditional solutions.”

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is optimized to support today’s large SMP systems, for both host and virtual-guest operating environments. Performance tests show excellent scalability to match the 16-core capabilities of the new HP systems. Red Hat’s customers are able to dynamically configure each guest, adding and removing CPU cores, and allowing guests to use all the available resources of these large SMP systems.

“Customers can achieve lower energy costs while reducing server sprawl and the time needed to complete common data center tasks when using HP Insight software alongside the HP ProLiant DL585 – an ideal virtualization platform,” said Scott Farrand, vice president, Industry Standard Server Software, HP. “The ongoing, open collaboration between HP and Red Hat has greatly contributed to the performance and scalability enhancements of HP systems such as the DL585.”

See also:

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This increased demand is exemplified by the People’s Insurance Company of China Group (PICC), The Dairy Farm Company Ltd. (Dairy Farm) and Dawning Information Industry Co. Ltd. (Dawning), which have agreed to receive Microsoft certificates for three-year support subscriptions for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell(R).

“It’s very encouraging to see that our business and technical collaboration continues to resonate with customers around the globe,” said Ron Hovsepian, president and CEO of Novell. “Both Novell and Microsoft are committed to furthering this alliance, and we couldn’t be happier with the results to date. PICC, Dairy Farm and Dawning exemplify the benefits our strengthened alliance provides for the international IT community.”

“We recognize that our customers want to use Microsoft products in heterogeneous environments, and therefore we are pleased to offer this option to meet customer needs in one of the leading global markets,” said Ya-Qin Zang, Microsoft corporate vice president and chairman of Microsoft China. “We are very pleased with the initial response in the Chinese market to our joint offerings for IP peace of mind and technology interoperability in such areas as virtualization and high-performance computing.”

Expanded Investment

Microsoft and Novell’s collaboration in China will focus on joint marketing and training efforts that tap into two emerging areas of interoperability demand: high-performance computing (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server running in a dual-boot configuration) and virtualization (cross-platform virtualization solutions featuring Microsoft Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 with Xen technology). This will include hosting round-table discussions with local chief information officers in Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing, running a virtualization customer pilot, and conducting technology workshops to assist the conversion from unsupported Linux to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

In addition, Novell and Microsoft’s collaboration will focus on efforts to convert unsupported Linux users to SUSE Linux Enterprise support, in China and elsewhere, which builds upon a growing global trend of large, multinational companies increasing their demand for subscribed and supported Linux. This is due at least partly to the growing recognition among customers of the true costs and risk associated with running an unsupported IT environment, including the need for patches and bug fixes, supporting forked code, and retaining IT staff.

Demand in China

Companies in China are recognizing the challenges of deploying and managing heterogeneous IT environments and the opportunities to simplify with solutions such as the dual-boot operating system configuration from Microsoft and Novell.

“We are very pleased with the original approach by Microsoft and Novell to address our concerns about deploying and managing a complex high-performance computing infrastructure across two platforms. It is essential for our future competitiveness and success that we can simplify with such solutions and look forward to further utilizing the standards-based systems management technologies being developed by both companies,” said Nie Hua, vice president of Dawning. “We fully understand the concerns surrounding intellectual property rights and feel reassured that these issues have been addressed by our vendors.”

“The Microsoft-Novell collaboration helps to solve interoperability problems and creates a more harmonious IT ecosystem. We are confident that Microsoft and Novell would be able to provide the right level of support when we go ahead,” said Colin Rice, IT director of the Dairy Farm. Dairy Farm is a leading pan-Asian retailer, including 7-Eleven in Hong Kong, Macau, Southern China and Singapore, and other well-known local brands.

The Microsoft-Novell Agreement

As part of the five-year Microsoft-Novell agreement, announced Nov. 2, 2006, Microsoft can make subscription certificates available for customers to redeem SUSE Linux Enterprise Server support services directly from Novell. Since the announcement, Novell has invoiced more than $141 million in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server subscriptions from the Microsoft and Novell collaboration agreement.

A recently released study by IDC, “Worldwide Linux Operating Environments 2008-2012 Forecast: Taking Linux to the Next Level,”(1) reported that SUSE Linux Enterprise-paid server operating environment (SOE) subscriptions increased by 38.6 percent from 2006 to 2007 and that Novell’s share of the paid SOE market increased from 26.1 percent in 2006 to 29 percent in 2007. IDC stated in the report, “That surge, thanks to the company’s alliance and interoperability efforts with Microsoft, led to a highly successful year for Novell in 2007.” Novell’s 2006-2007 growth was the highest of any paid or unpaid SOE distribution tracked by this study.

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