GOVERNMENT

Red Hat has announced the expansion of their virtualization collaboration with the integration of Cisco Virtual Network Link (VN-Link) technology with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. With this integration, Red Hat and Cisco customers will have an opportunity to achieve higher performance, greater network visibility and control and a reduced total cost of ownership for their datacenter virtualization deployments.

Bringing the network and virtualization domains closer to simplify datacenter deployments, Red Hat and Cisco are integrating the Cisco Unified Computing System Virtual Interface Card with the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor included in Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. This combination creates a logical network infrastructure that will help to provide full visibility, control and consistency of the network for virtualization without sacrificing performance. VN-Link automates the movement of network and storage services so they can follow virtual machines as they are moved around the datacenter, helping to ensure consistent policy-driven network capabilities across all servers, physical or virtual, in a customer's datacenter. With this combination:

-- Virtual machines can directly access dedicated physical I/O resources, improving network throughput and freeing CPU cycles to deliver greater application density and improved virtual machine density for greater performance.

-- Customers will be able to more easily manage and secure virtual environments with the higher visibility and network control provided by VN-Link on a per-virtual-machine basis for applications running under Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.

-- Application deployment will be faster with the automation of virtual machine creation with policy-based network configurations that are jointly supported by both companies' virtualization management tools.

-- Large-scale cloud deployment with more consistent network management, security and isolation is achievable.

-- Customers have the opportunity to lower their acquisition costs by up to 20 to 40 percent compared to traditional virtualization solutions. Utilizing the benefits of the Cisco Unified Computing System's simplified architecture and Red Hat's centralized virtualization management, customers can reduce both the cost and time to deploy their business applications, resulting in lower total cost of ownership.

"At Travelport, we have deployed the Cisco Unified Computing System to reduce our IT footprint and deploy both virtualized and non-virtualized applications more quickly, which is essential in the dynamic travel industry," said Steven Senecal, manager, global server engineering at Travelport, a broad-based business services company and a leading provider of critical transaction processing solutions to companies operating in the global travel industry. "As the Linux market grows, the integration between Cisco's VN-Link technology and Red Hat's KVM hypervisor represents a high-performance virtualization offering for the open source market from two industry leaders, and expands the choices for deploying virtualization on Linux platforms while enabling the same level of security and policy for virtual machines that exists for physical servers."

"With the tight integration between the Cisco Unified Computing System and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, we are offering our joint customers significantly enhanced virtualization performance capabilities," said Brian Stevens, chief technology officer and vice president, Engineering at Red Hat. "Today, Red Hat becomes the first Linux vendor to offer an integrated VN-Link virtualization solution with Cisco, marking another important step forward in Red Hat's virtualization and Linux technology leadership."

"The growth of virtualization in the datacenter and cloud computing, coupled with the adoption of Linux-based server infrastructures, has created a need for a simplified solution for virtualized server I/O," said Ed Bugnion, chief technology officer, Server Access and Virtualization business unit at Cisco. "The combination of the Cisco Unified Computing System and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization means that organizations can take advantage of Cisco innovation backed by the momentum of the open source community, resulting in an open, integrated and tuned environment for virtual infrastructure deployment."