Red Hat acquires Qumranet

Red Hat Inc has acquired Qumranet Inc, the makers of SolidIce. The acquisition of Israel-based company adds a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) product to Red Hat's product portfolio. Red Hat paid $107 million for Qumranet. Qumranet's SolidICE product provides a kernel based virtual machine based around the open source KVM project which they also sponsor. The KVM project has been incorporated into the mainstream Linux kernel since version 2.6.20.

A virtual desktop infrastructure provides the components needed to virtualise user desktop sessions on a server and to present the user with their desktop on a network connected thin client system. KVM and SolidIce use the SPICE protocol (Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments), an alternative to RDP and other remote display protocols, to connect the server with the thin client. SPICE is claimed to give a superior desktop user experience; an short demonstration video from March shows SPICE handling HD video streaming among other desktop applications.

Benny Schnaider, CEO at Qumranet said he was pleased to be part of Red Hat now, adding "Red Hat's commitment to open source means that our technologies can be shared, improved and enjoyed by the entire open source industry".

See Also:

• The Week In Review: Red Hat vs Sun, a commentary on the state of virtualisation

(djwm)