Red Hat Directory Server, Global File System 6.1 Due In June
At the Red Hat Summit in New Orleans, Red Hat formally debuted the Red Hat Directory Server, which will be priced at a flat $15,000 subscription fee per server, per year. It will be available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Solaris on SPARC and HP UX 11i, said Michael Ferris, director of product marketing. The LDAP-compliant server will be sold through select distributors, the company said.
Executives said the directory server and its forthcoming Certificate Management System--both acquired from AOL's Netscape Security Solutions group last year--will offer password synchronization and eventually identity synchronization.
The launch of the Red Hat Directory Server and forthcoming Certificate Management System represent the first steps toward a full identity management system that will be offered further down the line. Red Hat is expanding its middleware and applications line and now has Red Hat Application Server, Directory Server, Global File System, Cluster Suite and Red Hat Network.
In addition to bolstering its open-source architecture with identity management systems, the Raleigh, N.C., Linux distributor is enhancing its own storage management system.
Red Hat Global File System 6.1 moved into beta testing roughly six weeks ago and will ship in June, said Rob McKenna, senior product manager of storage at Red Hat. The Global File System, acquired from Sistina Technologies, has been enhanced with a distributed lock manager and optimized for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, McKenna said.
Global File System 6.1, which runs on the Logical Volume Manager 2 in RHEL 4, will feature an enhanced Cluster Suite for RHEL 4 that also uses the distributed lock manager, McKenna said. Longer term, Red Hat is considering integrating the existing ext3 local file system in RHEL4 with the Global File System in order to offer a universal file system.
While the Linux company is focused on building out its own middleware and application stack, it also unveiled plans to contribute its directory services and certificate server to its Fedora open-source community.
Red Hat has contributed Red Hat Directory Server and CMS to Fedora. The directory server code is now available. The directory server's administration console and certificate management system are not yet available as open source, but the plan is to do so once the company irons out security issues, said Karen Tegan Padir, vice president of engineering for infrastructure technologies at Red Hat.
On the flip side, Red Hat plans to use the Xen open-source virtualization code into RHEL 5, although Xen is already available on Fedora.