See the full case study and video: http://customers.press.redhat.com/2008/05/12/nyse/.

JBoss ON is all about increasing the reliability and visibility into applications deployed on JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP). Among the new features are enhanced configuration editing and auditing, enhanced application discovery and deployment and an advanced query-based grouping system called DynaGroups. JBoss ON is now capable of scaling to much larger environments while still collecting a rich model of infrastructure performance. Rich exposure of everything from VM statistics to Hibernate details provides easy access to critical data in one place. The new grouping and security capabilities also greatly simplify the use of the security model to allow just the right levels of access to even the most complex environment. These features are designed to make it easier to know what is going on in your applications and to keep them running smoothly in mission-critical environments.

Customers are getting more sophisticated within IT Operations with respect to middleware management and are looking for specialized tools to help manage the application life cycle. JBoss ON is designed to improve efficiency for IT operations staff while reducing the TCO of managing JBoss Middleware. The consistency of application deployments and configurations from a central location throughout an enterprise results in a more secure environment, better performance & adherence to compliance requirements. As an added benefit, the monitoring solution provides health & diagnostic data to improve operational performance.

Equally as exciting is that for the first time, JBoss ON is based on an open source project called RHQ – we started talking about RHQ at JBoss World Orlando. The project aims to deliver the core management capabilities of JBoss ON in a platform model. Plugins developed for RHQ can be used with JBoss ON and will serve as a reliable platform for extending JBoss ON and further integrating JBoss projects into production systems. We’ve licensed the code, under the GPL open source license and project information and community forums are accessible at www.rhq-project.org. We’d love to have more contributors join the project so be sure to check it out.

Finally, we’ll be hosting a JBoss ON webinar on Thursday, May 15th at 4:00pm ET where you can watch a demonstration and have any questions answered in person. We’ll be focusing on the new capabilities for administration, deployment management, and monitoring of JBoss Middleware. Click here to register for the webinar. JavaOne was a really exciting event for us, check out more of our team’s blog about the event.

From May 6-9, Red Hat will be in San Francisco, CA at the JavaOne conference in booth #734. Here, you can meet JBoss core developers and attend over 15 different presentations and live demos that will show you how to use JBoss technology to solve real-world problems.

Make plans to join us at our Enterprise Acceleration events around North America too. These events provide the opportunity to hear from Red Hat executives about how IT can enable you to transform your business. You’ll also learn how to move beyond legacy, client server and first-generation Java technology and how to do more with less. JBoss customers will also tell you about the success they’ve had in developing JBoss Enterprise Middleware.

Red Hat executives will also be delivering keynotes at several stops on the CIO Forum and Executive IT Summit this spring. During keynotes, our executives will discuss driving innovation and value across the enterprise with open source, and will draw on the needs of today’s CIOs to map the adoption of open source in the enterprise. Hear how Red Hat is helping customers realize better performance from development to deployment.
We’ll be at the following cities:

• May 1, 2008, Philadelphia
  Keynote speaker: Iain Gray, Vice President, Global Support Services
• May 8, 2008, Chicago
  Keynote speaker: Tom Rabon, Executive Vice President, Corporate Affairs
• May 15, 2008, Hartford
  Keynote speaker: Katrinka McCallum, Vice President, Management Solutions Business Unit
• May, 28, 2008, Charlotte
  Keynote speaker: Lee Congdon, CIO

Other North American events:

• May 1, 2008 JBoss Enterprise Acceleration Irvine, CA
• May 6, 2008 Virtualization: Getting from Pilot to Production Houston, TX
• May 6-9, 2008 JavaOne San Francisco, CA
• May 11-16, 2008 VA Infosec Las Vegas, NV
• May 12, 2008 JBoss Enterprise Acceleration Toronto, Ontario
• May 13, 2008 JBoss Enterprise Acceleration Montreal, Ontario
• May 14, 2008 JBoss Enterprise Acceleration Reston, VA
• May 15, 2008 North Carolina Research Campus keynote by Tom Rabon, Executive Vice President, Corporate Affairs, Kannapolis, NC

See more Red Hat North American events here.

EMEA

• May 6, 2008 JBoss Tech Day, Rome, Italy
• May 13, 2008 JBoss Tech Day, Milan, Italy
• May 14, 2008 Open Source Forum 2008, London, UK
• May 21, 2008 JBoss Welcome, Wien, Austria
• May 28-31, 2008 LinuxTag, Berlin, Germany

See more on Red Hat EMEA events here.

APAC

For information on Red Hat’s APAC events here.

Latin America

For information on Red Hat’s events in Latin America, visit here.

The report was compiled by Waugh Partners based on research carried out in late 2007 and it recognizes the many ways that Australia has made its mark on the numerous facets of open source – industry, community, education and skills, careers and employment, innovation, the market and business development.

Some key points in the study:

• Open source is ‘a key platform for Australian innovation and productivity’
• A number of Australian open source companies are finding success in local and export markets
• International organizations are acquiring open source experts from Australia
• Local contributors are rated among the leaders of the global open source community
• The report also estimates the value of the open source industry to be around AUD$500 million (revenue per annum), with over 50 percent of that directly related to open source.

With new opportunities for development and innovation, the future for open source in Australia looks bright. The Australian Open Source Industry and Community Report confirms a strong market today and forecasts encouraging growth tomorrow.

Working with over 800 customers and over 100 partners in Australia, Red Hat is committed to working with the industry to foster this growth in Australia.

The full Australian Open Source Industry and Community Report is available here.

We’ve defined our new middleware architecture based on JBoss technology. This includes an Enterprise Service Bus implementing a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA); Seam, the JBoss integration framework; the JBoss Business Process Modeling suite (JBPM); and Drools, the JBoss rules processing environment.

The entire stack runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, taking advantage of the operating system tools for virtualization, provisioning, configuration, and other functionality. The full technical architecture incorporates Cobbler/Koan, JBoss SOA, Xen, LVM, Git, and more.

Architecture Framework

The new middleware architecture is defined as an element within the Zachman framework, in which we consider data, function, network, people, time and motivation mapped against scope, business model, system model, technology model, and detailed presentation. We are excited about the potential of the architecture because it gives us great flexibility while at the same time allowing us to implement projects in alignment with our desired future state. Ultimately, the architecture enables us to reduce complexity while enabling our business users.

Architecture Definition

The internal name for the new architecture is Everest. Among the key underlying elements are the use of the Logical Volume Manager (LVM) to support virtualized guest operating systems and Xen virtualization to assist in the management and deployment of multiple environments.

We use the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform to provide loose coupling, a messaging infrastructure, process orchestration, protocol translation, adapters, change management, quality of service, quality of protection (encryption and security), and management services. JBoss Seam provides our application framework, unifying and integrating multiple web technologies while reducing complexity for our developers.

Git provide source code management under the new architecture. Git is a flexible, distributed, offline source management tool. It addresses some of the shortcomings of our previous solutions and provides support for parallel development, collaboration and the ability to maintain a consistent deployable branch of the source tree. Git use will result in a smaller, cleaner set of changes to our source code.

Although not strictly part of the run time architecture, Puppet is an important architectural component. Puppet is a configuration management tool that can be used to provide container and system configurations that can be deployed into production without modification. Puppet will also free our Release Engineering team from many manual steps and enable them to move to a review and release mode.

Of course, the entire environment runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We anticipate that some of our developers will use Fedora as an alternative operating system for their development workstations.

Architecture Provisioning

One of the first challenges addressed by the architecture team was the need to provision systems which comply with the new architecture. The deployment implementation supports 20 machine types, ranging from a web-proxy to an ldap service.

The most common types include a host machine, a repo machine, and a JBoss development machine. The host machine type is used to host virtual guests in the Everest environment. It provides a suitable graphical user desktop, automated NFS home directories, a Kerberos login, Xen virtualization, and access to all of the Everest tools.

A repo machine is at the core of Everest. Repo machines are self-contained provisioning, configuration and artifact stores. Repo machines are capable of creating all other machine types, including other repo machines. Features of repo machines include Cobbler for RPM and provisioning, a Puppetmaster for configuration, an Artifactory Maven proxy, Git repos for content under /pub/git, and gitweb running on a known address.

A JBoss development machine is an aggregation of several machine types. (One of the features of the architecture is the ability to consolidate machine types for development and later disaggregate them for the production environment.) Features of the JBoss development machine include the ability to use it on base metal or in a virtual environment; nomachine for remote desktop access; the SUN JDK; an Apache proxy; JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP); JBoss Enterprise Service Bus (ESB); MySQL for JBoss data stores; build tools including Eclipse, Git and Maven; gitweb on a known address; and a Git daemon to serve repos.

Provisioning with Cobbler and Koan

Cobbler is a provisioning and update server that supports deployments via network booting, virtualization, and reinstalls of existing systems. A significant advantage of Cobbler is that it integrates multiple technologies and reduces the need for the user to understand the details of each. The update features of Cobbler integrate yum mirroring and kickstart.

Koan, which is an acronym for “Kickstart over a Network”, is an emerging technology that configures machines from remote Cobbler servers. Koan also enables the use of virtualization and re-installs from a Cobbler server. When launched, it requests install information from the server and creates a virtual guest or replaces the machine it is running on.

We’ve used both these tools as the foundation for deployment of systems complying with the new architecture. In our tests, we can quickly build and deploy a complete development server with no intervention. The provisioning solution significantly reduces both our time to deliver a development solution and to deploy systems in the production environment.

If you’d like to know more about Cobbler and Koan, see the Red Hat Magazine article on Cobbler by Michael DeHaan and the relevant man pages.

Application

We are working with Red Hat engineering, select partners, and the community to share our provisioning vision broadly. Although some elements of the provisioning solution remain as advanced technology and are not guaranteed to become supported elements of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the JBoss suite, we are confident that the benefits of the solution outweigh that slight risk. We also anticipate that our efforts in IT will facilitate moving the solutions into the mainstream.

More broadly, we are excited regarding the possibilities presented by the new architecture and the capability it gives us to execute our technical strategy. The ability to integrate best of breed applications solutions using a common stack, to project the resulting applications into web environments using common tools, and to take advantage of the scalability and recovery solutions inherent in JBoss will yield substantial benefits.