SaaS data loss: The problem you didn’t know you had

Red Hat has answered the virtualization bandwagon's call in a major way by ushering in a new era that could be described as "Linux on the move."

A cavalcade of company officials held a press conference today to detail various plans for letting customers run the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system in a more fluid way. Buzzwords? Grand promises? Talk of things in clouds? Yes, they were all present during the conference call, but they are some concrete plans afoot to complement the marketing speak.

In case you've missed it, Amazon has opened its data centers to customers, allowing them to tap into processing power and storage on a rental basis. This helps Amazon make use of the spare hardware it keeps around to deal with spikes in holiday shopping and presents smaller companies with a way of tapping into a world-class data center.

(Update: Amazon tells us this is not just an excess capacity thing. "In many cases, Amazon.com is using the same web services that our Amazon Web Services customers are using. In fact, we believe this is a core value proposition of these services. Given that these are shared services, we pay a lot of attention to forecasting to make sure that there’s plenty of capacity for everyone. This is really not a utilization of excess capacity.")

Under the Red Hat deal, customers can place their applications onto Amazon's system and then dial up more capacity as needed. Perhaps you've just launched a new version of your software and want to prepare for loads of downloads.

"As part of this solution, Red Hat Network offers a common set of management and automation tools across on-premises deployments and the Amazon EC2 cloud computing environment," Red Hat said. "Red Hat will provide technical support and maintenance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2. This is the first commercially supported operating system available on Amazon EC2. "

At present, the service is only available via a private beta. It should, however, go public by the end of the year. "Base prices are $19 per month, per user and $0.21, $0.53 or $0.94 for every compute hour used on Amazon's EC2 service, depending on whether customers choose a small, large or extra-large compute instance size, plus bandwidth and storage fees," the companies said.

You can find more information here.

Pulling our collective heads out of the cloud, we find Red Hat attacking virtualization via a couple more efforts closer to home.

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