Red Hat and Sybase launch virtual appliance

Sybase and Red Hat have announced an expansion of their partnership which will include the launch of a virtual software appliance that combines the business applications specialist's database product with Red Hat's Linux operating system.

Launched on Thursday at the Red Hat Summit in San Diego, the pricing for the database appliance won't be available until later this year when the product is actually released, the companies said.

The term "appliance" usually refers to a piece of hardware with one application installed on it — such as Google's Search Appliance — but it is also increasingly being used to describe the ability to create a combination of an operating system and application which come pre-packaged. These are often based on virtualisation technology.

Rather than spend time on knitting together their own instances of the Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) running on Red Hat's Linux operating system, customers can now buy a pre-integrated appliance which should vastly reduce the complexity of setting up a virtual environment, according to Tim Yeaton, senior vice president of Enterprise Solutions at Red Hat.

"With clustering and integrated virtualisation in the Red Hat Advanced Platform unlocking incredible cost savings for enterprise infrastructures, the pairing of Sybase ASE as an appliance solution is natural," he said.

Red Hat Advanced Platform is the high-spec version of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5) operating system. The companies refused to comment at this time on whether the virtual appliance would be a cheaper option for customers than choosing to purchase RHEL 5 and ASE separately and handle the integration and virtualisation themselves in-house.

Red Hat also claimed that, despite the fact that the instance of RHEL 5 that ships as part of the Sybase appliance will only be concerned with running a database application, no effort has been made to strip out excess functionality from the operating system, though it will have little use in this kind of virtual appliance environment. A Red Hat spokesperson claimed that the Linux specialist had avoided making such a move because changing RHEL 5 in such a way risked coming close to "forking".

The term "forking" refers to a perennial threat for the open-source movement in that a piece of code created by the community will be altered by one specific vendor to such a degree that it becomes effectively a different product from the source code that spawned it. The myriad incompatible versions of Unix — now being replaced wholesale by Linux — that became prevalent in the late '80s and '90s were a direct result of forking.

Questioned on whether the extension of the relationship with Sybase was related in any way to the public falling-out between Red Hat and database-leader Oracle, Yeaton said that the two companies have had a long-standing relationship dating back to 1997.

Oracle and Red Hat's relationship became heated in October 2006 when, seemingly out of the blue, the database specialist decided to start shipping its own version of Linux to compete directly with Red Hat.