Red Hat Partners with European Union on Cutting-Edge Cloud Research

Earlier this year the European Union’s Commission on Information Society and Media published a report that outlined their view of cloud computing and how it will transform business across the EU. The report made several recommendations, including increased research and development, the encouragement and adoption of interoperability standards, creation of an open source reference implementation, and not surprisingly; the promotion of open source approaches within the cloud.

As evidenced from the extensive report and its long-standing focus on next-generation computing paradigms the EU has become one of the leading areas for R&D in cloud. It has been driving cloud and its precursors, grid and ubiquitous computing, for many years.

In conjunction with the report recommendations the EU has been funding cloud related long term research projects, and we are pleased to announce that Red Hat engineers have been asked to take a leadership role in one of the largest EU cloud research projects, Cloud-TM.

Led by Project Coordinator, Paolo Romano and Red Hat’s Mark Little, the Cloud-TM (transactional memory) project is a top priority for the EU and Red Hat engineers were brought in to lead several of the work packages because of our expertise as well as the fact that this project is heavily open source driven. We are working with a team of experts to define the next generation of large scale transactional data storage for the cloud.

This is a very important area for Red Hat but also for any organization looking to move enterprise applications into cloud environments. According to the Cloud-TM fact sheet, “the project seeks to develop a self-optimizing distributed transactional memory middleware that will spare programmers from the burden of coding for distribution, persistence and fault-tolerance, letting them focus on delivering business value.” The project is actually about large scale data grids and the appropriate development model for users. As such, Red Hat engineers will be looking at leveraging and improving several JBoss Community sponsored projects, including: Infinispan, JBossTS and Hibernate, as well as working in standards areas that are directly relevant to our customers and other contributing partners. Our motivation for participating in the project is to help the EU disseminate this research and development widely in open source communities.

The Cloud-TM project fits well with the goals of Red Hat’s recent cloud announcements, as open standards and application portability are cornerstones of our cloud strategy. Stay tuned for more updates on our participation in the Cloud-TM project and our PaaS strategy by visiting, www.jboss.com/paas.