Red Hat's new chief executive, Jim Whitehurst, has his eyes on the sky.
The former Delta Airlines chief operating officer, who took the reins of the most established open-source software company from Matthew Szulik in January, names cloud computing as a top priority.
Jim Whitehurst
(Credit: Red Hat)
Loosely speaking, the term refers to computing services available to anyone online rather than custom data centers isolated within corporate confines, but it also dovetails with the general idea of computing services running at massive scale on a more flexible infrastructure.
"The clouds will all run Linux," Whitehurst said in an interview.
Being Red Hat's CEO is always a balancing act. On the one hand you have the sometimes philosophically fervid open-source software community, volunteers and professionals who collectively produce the software Red Hat packages, tests, tunes, sells, and supports.
On the other are the much more pragmatic customers who just want their technology to work. Red Hat must be friends to both camps — neither a parasite sponging off the hard work of others, nor a useless middleman selling what can be downloaded for free.
Whitehurst, who long has used Linux himself, discussed these and other subjects shortly before the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, which begins August 7 in the US.
Q: What's your biggest surprise since starting at Red Hat?
Whitehurst: I think I finally get the joke. I was a senior exec, and like every other senior exec I had a huge IT budget. Mine was as large as Red Hat's revenues last year. You sit there and say, "Why are my IT costs going up, but I'm getting less and less functionality?" Every IT professional says the same thing: my lights-on costs are going up. But wait a minute! I bought a laptop, and it cost me half as much as it did three years ago, and my costs are going up? I get the joke now.
If you look at the S&P 500, seven of the top twenty companies are tech, and other than Google, they're not high-growth. But they're just printing money because switching costs are so high. There's this incredible amount of residual goodwill to Red Hat because we're seen as an alternative to that. Oracle announced a 20-something percent price increase just as the economy starts heading south. How can you do that unless you're pretty sure nobody can switch? High switching costs led to infrastructure cost creep. Once you get hooked, you can't get off.
I recognize Red Hat's a prominent alternative to incumbent players, but Red Hat's been around for awhile now, and it's not easy to get off Red Hat. It might be easier to get off RHEL than say, AIX from IBM, but...
Whitehurst: It's very simple. You can stop paying us.
But the switching cost is still there.
Whitehurst: You can stop paying us and keep using the same bits [the software]. That's the point. The bits are free. You no longer get the support, but you can get support elsewhere. If you don't think we're adding value that year, you can stop paying us and keep the bits, so we've got to add value with service and support.
What if you want to switch to Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise?
Whitehurst: You'd have to ask different customers. A lot threaten us in contract negotiations over price. We luckily don't lose a lot that way. If you look at IDC numbers, there's about as much unpaid Red Hat as there is paid Red Hat out there, if you look at unpaid RHEL, Centos, and Fedora. Clearly people value the functionality, but a lot of people don't pay us for it.
What about all these high-growth companies with humongous scale-out infrastructure, like Google or Amazon? Does it concern you that these companies are able to use Linux for free?
Whitehurst: Amazon is very much a paying customer. Google is the very rare exception. As a company gets more sophisticated, one can argue the value of the support is less, but as companies get more sophisticated, the importance of the thing we provide goes up. So for instance, if Amazon wants to get something upstream into the [Linux] kernel because they need some functionality for EC2 [the Elastic Compute Cloud Web service], who can get it upstream? We can.
Today, we have Uli Drepper meeting with a bunch of major customers and invited Intel to talk about power management in chips, to talk about the next generation and what they need and what we need and feedback to Intel. If you're not a Red Hat customer, you're not there. That leadership in where the kernel is going is very important to most customers. It's much more smaller Web sites that decide not to pay.
Do the smaller customers pay when they get bigger?
Whitehurst: We see very little fee-to-free. We see quite a bit of free-to-fee, when customers get bigger, wake up, and say, "We probably need that support and certifications."
There's a lot of movement toward building large-scale Web infrastructure. Your product plays more to one server running the database here, one server running the app server there. What do you think about getting higher into the stack for enabling a very large, coordinated, distributed infrastructure?
Whitehurst: Like the Amazon EC2 cloud running on RHEL?
But what about the management, not just providing 1,000 individual operating systems?
Whitehurst: Most of the things we're doing now are all building blocks around effectively running grids or clouds. Whether those happen internally or externally, I don't know, but that's clearly the next-generation infrastructure. So with our virtualization strategy, which we call Linux Automation, we basically say applications certified once run anywhere — on bare metal, a virtual instance, or on the EC2 cloud or any other cloud running RHEL. If you look at the products we have coming out this year, Red Hat MRG for messaging and grid, it's all about the grid. We created a whole new business unit around management. IPA to start putting together the security. We worked with one large customer who live-migrated things from their own data center to the cloud and back.
If someone wants to move something from inside their firewall to outside, they need to feel confident it will run. If you're running it on Joe Bob's Cloud Linux, does it feel like it's certified? There is clear value to having a consistent Linux that's certified across those platforms. So we built the infrastructure to do that. It doesn't surprise me Amazon went with us. Anybody can run almost anything that runs on the data center on it, on it, it's certified, and they can call and get tech support.
What about management tools, though?
Whitehurst: We can live-migrate the things [moving running applications from one server to another]. A lot of the tools are there. We're working on it, though.
But you can automate it — if I need 18 more instances on the cloud I can turn them on, then turn them back off?
Whitehurst: Absolutely. Our user interfaces are not as good as VMware's, but we have pretty extraordinary functionality we haven't touted as much as we should. [Amazon has] the single largest instance of virtualization out there. It's all our virtualization. They're moving workloads around all the time.
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I work at a university in Redhat's Asia Pacific region where we have about 15000 redhat licenses - i.e. a support contract for 15,000 redhat installs.
We don;t acvtually use all of those licenses in fact we use less than 1000 of them and I am only personally concnered with 2-300 server systems.
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We also have a number of Sun licenses and support agreements.
We have top tier Redhat support and medium tier Sun support.
Unfortunately I get better support for non-production systems from middle of the road sun support than I get for production servers on Redfhat's top of the line package.
I have had redhat support staff suggest that I google for answers.
Hello, that's why we have support - so we don;' have to google - or so that after we have done your googling and not got anything useful back, we can get help form people who are supposedly familiar with the product and code base.
I don;t need someone to tell me to try this and see if it helps.
I need someone to tell me that they have reproduced the problem and this is the fix.
In addition I have been given advice which if followed would have broken my production servers - as I had already googled for and tried that fix on dev servers.
For the most part now I only raise tickets with Redhat now as due diligence, i.e. so I can say yes I raised it with the vendor and cover my **** I don't really expect a useful reply anymore.
Dear Mr Redhat CEO - you are not adding value.
You are fundamentally a support company and your support sucks.
I've been using Redhat now since 4.2 or so and it is my favorite distro ,/OS - I'd love to be able to recommend people buy Redhat support, but it is as far as I am concerned simply not worth the money - and we get it cheap.
I do recommend Redhat to people because of the long support cycle, i.e. security patches for 7 years - but you can get that with whitelabel and centos.
I'm happy to speak to Redhat managers if they want specific details - because I'd really like them to improve as I really like Redhat and would like to be able to recommend them in good conscience - which I can't now. Please feel free to provide my email address to Redhat management if they want specifics. Please don;t give it to a 1st or 2nd level 'droid.