Red Hat opens up for virtualization innovation

Red Hat announced on Friday the sourcing of a high-performance communication tool for hosted virtual desktops.

The world’s leading authority in open source solutions, Red Hat has open sourced its SPICE (Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environment) hosted virtual desktop protocol, to bring its partners innovative virtualization solutions. SPICE, previously released in beta, will be expanded in an effort to break down barriers to virtualization adoption.

“By open sourcing this technology, we are allowing our industry partners and the community to contribute to the future of virtualization with us,” said Brian Stevens, CTO and vice president Engineering at Red Hat.

Designed specifically for virtual environments, SPICE enhances user experience for multi-media and VoIP applications, by adapting to the graphics and communications environment that is running in.
Although open sourcing technologies are the core of Red Hat’s business model, virtual desktop technology is still in its early days.

“Red Hat’s delivery of the open source SPICE protocol is an important step toward the goal of interoperability for the industry’s heterogeneous virtualization solutions,” agreed Daniel Frye, vice president, Open Systems Development, IBM.

SPICE is one of three main technology components included in Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Desktops, a solution set currently in a private beta with general availability expected in 2010.

Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 65 offices spanning the globe. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with virtualization, applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and JBoss Enterprise Middleware.