Linux vendor Red Hat buys Israeli virtualisation company for $107 million

05 September 2008

Major Linux distribution vendor Red Hat has spent $107 million to buy privately held Qumranet in an effort to expand its virtualization business. Under the deal, Qumranet's employees and open source communities will join Red Hat.

Raleigh-based Red Hat says its purchase of Qumranet, which is based in Israel, will enable it to offer ''a comprehensive virtualisation platform'' for business customers. That will help Red Hat compete with other companies in the space, such as Microsoft, Citrix and VMware.

Virtualisation technology essentially separates computer resources from one another. Applications that are usually tethered to specific operating systems, for example, can run on any computer. Computers can run their operating systems remotely. Data storage isn't tethered to a specific server or hard drive. That, in turn, reduces the amount of money companies have to spend on computing resources, making virtualization increasingly popular in the business world.

"Virtualisation is in its infancy," Paul Cormier, president and executive vice president of products and technologies at Red Hat, said. "In one respect, we don't even separate virtualisation from the operating system. We think the operating system with virtualization is the next-generation operating system."

"This really moves us into the next generation virtualization arena and provides the ability for us to drive it and make it ubiquitous across every server," Cormier added, "Virtualisation is just part of the plumbing."

''This acquisition advances Red Hat's efforts to transform the virtualisation market and drive comprehensive virtualisation technology and management solutions into every system, from servers to desktops, on both Linux and Windows,'' the company says in a statement posted to its Web site.