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GCN Home > 12/12/05 issue

Brian Stevens | Performance boost virtually assured

Interview with Brian Stevens, Red Hat Inc. chief technology officer

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

Although Red Hat Inc. is based in Raleigh, N.C., the company runs a sizable office more than 700 miles to the north in Westford, Mass. Why? To tap the considerable pool of talented enterprise engineers living in the area, many of whom moved there years ago to work for Digital Equipment Corp. and other IT firms in the Boston area. The Westford outpost is also an indicator of Red Hat’s true direction. The company that helped build credibility for Linux wants to operate not just as an open-source OS company, but as a solution provider of enterprise software.

“Red Hat is a completely different company than it was five years ago,” insisted Brian Stevens, the company’s new chief technology officer. Stevens himself is a 14-year DEC veteran who lives in the Boston area. He’s been charged with shepherding open-source technologies (not just Linux) toward mission-critical readiness. At DEC, he was an architect for the company’s Tru64 Operating System. He also helped develop the X Window System, widely used as the graphical interface for Unix. Stevens stopped by the GCN offices and spoke with associate writer Joab Jackson.

GCN: Microsoft has argued that even though open-source operating systems are cheaper, they still have a higher total cost of ownership, once support is factored in. What’s your response?

Stevens: Our clients are looking for better TCO, but that is not going to come [from] the price of the OS. What they are really looking for is how quickly they can deploy their applications; how they can better utilize their systems. That next data center will cost $5 million, so [customers] want to avoid building that next data center. We’re working with them to see how they can harness their capacity and give them better utilization.

That is where the TCO will be fought—at the architectural level, around massive scalability. It will not be fought over the performance of a single system, or an individual feature. So that is why we are doing virtualization and stateless Linux.

GCN: What is going on with virtualization?

Stevens: Virtualization [running a second OS over the main OS] is the next architectural leap for OSes. In the past, virtualization has been left in hardware or in the virtualization [software] of a small number of companies. The deployment of virtualization has not been pervasive at all.

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