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Red Hat's new CTO Brian Stevens outlined why the technology will provide the next disruptive episode in the march of Open Source.

He said that the fundamental issues of cost are still the headline priority for customers. 'How do we carve out IT costs?' he said, and his answer is through virtualisation and stateless Linux.

He said many of Red Hat's top grade customers are reaching the upper limits of how much computing power they can physically cram into their premises, yet are painfully aware that they are often only using half of those resources. Consequently, the next move is an expensive one: build another data centre somewhere else.

Stevens said Red Hat's virtualisation technologies will address 'how we get you to avoid building that next data centre.'

Within Red Hat there is now an 'emerging technologies' team working on special projects such as this, said Stevens. Working with the Xen community, Red Hat plans to deliver a virtualisation product by the end of next year that will massively improve operational efficiencies with an IT network.

Integrated with Red Hat's existing storage virtualisation offerings, this next version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux will mean computing tasks can be discretely assigned the necessary resources, freeing up the rest of the network. The technology will also include ideas such as priority processing, to guarantee resources to the most important jobs and services.

Red Hat pricing will allow customers to pay a flat fee, with the freedom to run as many virtual instances of the platform as they like.

As well as increasing the computing power available, virtualisation should also help to cut down work for sysadmins. Stevens said that the cost incentive of Linux has been a great driver for buying lots of budget servers, all doing different jobs, but with that comes its own problems. 'Nothing is scaling in terms of sysadmins to boxes. Agility hasn't

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increased,' he said. With virtualisation, each instance of a server or application can be created equally, easing the strain on sysadmins. 'Let's not make them look the same, let's make them be the same as far as possible,' he said.

This virtualisation can be extended even to the client devices through 'stateless' Linux. With this, the user runs their environment from the network. The device used to make that connection is less important, as all the information about the user, the applications and resources needed comes from the network.

Of course Red Hat isn't the only company beavering away at virtualisation. IBM is heavily involved with its on-demand computing initiative, as is Sun with its storage solutions and the Sun Ray thin client range. Sun also recently announcement a partnership with VMware to resell its products and develop support for its Solaris 10 platform.

Stevens said that virtualisation for the next RHEL, along with Red Hat's other projects, will spur a recruitment drive. But with areas such as virtualisation outside the core expertise of many open-source developers, he expects the many of the new hands to come from the proprietary world.

Will this add more fuel to the celebrity developer phenomena we're beginning to see as search giants needle each other for the names and expertise to give them the edge? Not so, said Stevens. He wants people 'that can get the job done'.

Red Hat is putting a fire under its development schedules, Stevens said: 'We're short-cycling everything.' The company is also being aggressive on its testing and certification programs, working on reducing the time needed from development to deployment.

Every silver lining has a cloud. And in the case of virtualisation, it's the licensing agreements with application vendors. Most of these enterprise-level apps are licensed per processor. When virtualisation means that the number of instances of an application are limited to overall computing power rather than the physical number of processors, the software makers are going to want a licence for each software image running.

Red Hat's Timothy Yeaton, Senior VP, Marketing, said he expects a customer revolt to settle the issue. With the major platform vendors working on virtualisation, the technology is literally on the doorstep. And the big companies such as financial houses which are likely to be the first adopters of virtualisation will demand that the software vendors change their licensing models to something more reasonable.