Why Red Hat need partnerships with Cloudera, MapR, Intel and OpenDNS

by Marcos Ortiz, Marcos Ortiz Valmaseda

Yes, I know. I´m a little crazy young man, saying to Jim Whitehurst, current Red Hat CEO and their management team all these ideas, but who knows? Perhaps, some of these ideas are not so crazy, and they could be implemented. But I will let that responsibilities to the board.

My ideas are focused on two key needs for many organizations and companies today:

  • Apache Hadoop: the de-facto platform for Big Data Analytics and its relationship with Cloud Computing
  • Internet Security: a serious problem today for companies, governments, and global organizations
  • Apache Hadoop’s Security: a very discussed topic by customers, developers and System Engineers which needs a solution right now

So, let me expose my ideas, and I will let to you to think about your own conclusions, my dear reader. Red Hat, with its last release of its popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, raised very high the bar for all Enterprise Linux distributions, and many customers have taken this advantage, and they have migrated their critical applications to RHEL for its amazing performance, scalability, stability and outstanding security features on top of SELinux.

But, there a lot of opportunities out there, and one of the best and clear is: Apache Hadoop. So, Why not to work with the leaders in this field and build the best Operating System for Hadoop clusters hosting, since the optimization of the TCP/IP stack until the improvement of the Red Hat virtualization and networking stack for it? Keep reading my friend.

First Partnership with Cloudera to make Hadoop full-compatible with OpenJDK

Cloudera has an amazing engineering team behind its walls with a lot of committers for many Hadoop-related projects, and Red Hat took the leadership in the development of OpenJDK; so, it would be nice to see a great joint between Doug Cutting (Chief Architect at Cloudera) and the main OpenJDK contributors like Roman Kennke (Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat), Mark J. Wielaard (Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat) Paul Sandoz (Software Engineer at Oracle) and Mark Reinhold (Chief Architect, Java Platform Group at Oracle) to make Hadoop full compatible with OpenJDK. If you do a simple search in the Hadoop JIRA Issues portal related to OpenJDK, there are 36 open issues to work on it, so why not to work on this to make Hadoop fly in OpenJDK?

Another point for this parnertship is about the RHEL’s System Engineering to make the best Operating System for Hadoop clusters hosting. How? Tuning the high performance kernel of RHEL to make the best use of network services, because Apache Hadoop depends totally of the communication between its NameNode and DataNodes, and of course, to help to the Cloudera’s team to build a high performance repository network for RPM-based installation of its Cloudera Hadoop Distribution .

Second Partnership: MapR Technologies: Optimizing MapR’s M5 and MapR’s M7 for RHEL in AWS

There are a lot of customers using MapR’s Hadoop distributions for its amazing performance, and its strong partnerships with Cloud Computing providers like Google Compute Engine, and Amazon Web Services. So, why not take advantage of the presence of RHEL in AWS, and build the root for MapR’s distributions in AWS? It would be nice to see a future webinar between these two amazing teams taking about the integration of MapR’s distributions in RHEL on top of AWS. Who knows?

Third Partnership: Intel: making Hadoop more Secure with “Project Rhino”

Intel is doing a terrific job related to Hadoop development, focused in the security of the platform, and Advanced compression capabilities on top of Intel’s processors, who could be a strong point for Hadoop and the large quantity of Enterprise customers. But Red Hat is a strong leader in IT Security, so why not to work together to build the most secure Hadoop distribution and make it available for every Enterprise customer from both? Intel and Red Hat have a healthy relationship and all this could be very good for both companies. So, who knows? Perhaps, they could be work together in the near future.

Fourth Partnership: Two Open; One Goal: OpenShift by Red Hat and OpenDNS

If you saw my last post about Umbrella, you should know that OpenDNS is redefining Internet Security industry for good reasons, so, why not to include Umbrella like a great offering for OpenShift’s enterprise customers and helping them to protect even more its applications? Talking today with Dan Walsh (Mr SELinux, Security Engineer at Red Hat), I found that all OpenShift applications are protected by SELinux, so if Red Hat and OpenDNS work together and include this new feature: to protect all OpenShift’s applications DNS requests by OpenDNS, it could be very good for every customer of the well known PaaS. If you want to know more about how SELinux is being used to protect OpenShift, you can watch this talk called SELinux & PaaS: Deep Dive on Multi-tenancy, Containers & Security by Dan in the OpenShift Origin Community Day 4/14/2013 in Portland, Oregon:

So, Could we see a possible deal between Jim and David? Perhaps, who knows?

Conclusions

So, my dear readers, it would be nice to see all these people connected to drive innovation every single day, in every field here. Perhaps, I will have the pleasure to see one or several of these deals come true. Who knows !! Thanks for taking your precious time to read this. If you like it, spread the word.