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"We think it's time that the open source community looked at a ubiquitous management platform," he said. "We want to create a new effort around SLA management for Linux infrastructure that ends up getting enough involvement from the community of users."

Stevens said Red Hat is looking at developing a new management platform for Linux focused on automated management to meet service level agreements. This again is not something all that new - the likes of HP and BMC have been focused on service level-based systems management for some time.

What is new is the approach Red Hat wants to take to solve the problem. By announcing now its intention to define a new management platform over the next two years, the company is hoping to involve both its user base and the wider open source community in its development.

"We're going to try to get an understanding of the vision, validate with clients, and then create something external as a community," said Stevens. "We're looking at getting participation before we've even finished thinking about how we solve the problem."

Details are naturally scarce at this stage, but Red Hat feels that the new approach is needed to cope with the explosion in logical Linux images that is likely to be prompted by increased use of virtualization technologies, as well as the increased focused on centralized management required for stateless Linux.

A long-term Red Hat project, stateless Linux is designed to enable network-based diskless deployment of the Linux operating system, enabling Linux-based thin client architectures, as well as centralized management of cloned servers.

Evenwithout the SLA-focused management platform, Red Hat is expecting rapid take-up for the stateless Linux functionality. Stevens revealed that Barclays Bank is being particularly aggressive in its stateless Linux deployment plans. "Now that we've started the project we're seeing people trying to get it into production," he said.