Red Hat Hauls in Qumranet for $100M

Open source software giant RedHat has bought Israeli startup Qumranet for $100 million in an attempt to boost its virtualization story and challenge Microsofts Hyper-V offering.

Qumranet touts its Solid ICE software as a way for users to virtualize their desktops thanks to the vendor’s Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) technology, which turns the Linux kernel into a bare-metal hypervisor. Solid ICE lets users host desktops in KVM virtual machines, and also provides centralized management, storage, and policy enforcement for the desktops.

“We already deliver and are expanding a set of virtualization solutions including management, provisioning, migration, servers, and storage,” said Brian Stevens, Red Hat’s CTO, during a conference call this morning. “With Qumranet, we’re acquiring some key technology components which will accelerate this development, enabling more companies to use virtualization more cost-effectively.”

With Microsoft planning an elaborate launch event for its own Hyper-V hypervisor in Bellevue, Wash. next week, Red Hat execs could not resist taking a swipe at their arch-rival during this morning’s call.

“The acquisition of Qumranet means that Red Hat is positioned to be one of only two companies in the world with a comprehensive virtualization solutions portfolio,” said Paul Cornier, Red Hat’s president of products and technologies. ”We realize this is a bold statement -- but the lack of this breadth of solution is the Achilles heel of many other vendors.”At least one analyst feels that the Qumranet deal makes good sense for Red Hat, particularly at a time when more and more firms are looking to extend virtualization from servers and storage to desktops.

“We believe this acquisition makes sense strategically as it gives Red Hat more control of key virtualization platform technologies and provides the company with a complete virtual desktop solution,” wrote Todd Weller, an analyst at Stifel, Nicolaus, and Company, adding that the deal could impact VMware. “We view this move as an incremental negative for VMware as it will likely increase concern about increasing competition in the Windows space and Red Hat in the Linux space.”

Red Hat execs on this morning’s call did not reveal the full details of their Qumranet plans, although they confirmed that there will be continued investment in KVM.

”It overcomes the number one barrier of desktop virtualization -- a rich user experience,” said Brian Stevens, the Red Hat CTO. “It does this by delivering a user experience that is identical to physical desktops, even with graphical and multimedia applications.”

Red Hat nonetheless downplayed the suggestion that the firm is now facing a hypervisor war that will include not just Microsoft but VMware and Citrix, which all have their own hypervisor technologies.“VMware itself runs on a version of Red Hat Linux, and Citrix runs on a clone of Red Hat Linux,” said Stevens. “Both companies need to wait for Red Hat to add new features and updates.”

Red Hat also confirmed that Qumranet’s CEO Benny Schnaider, his management team, and the rest of the startup’s 45-plus workforce will be moving over to the open-source software specialist.Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.