Red Hat infrastructure strategy spans virtualized, cloud and appliance deployments

Company Brief

New Delhi, November 15, 2007

Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced its strategy to solve key problems facing CIOs by enabling increased operational choice, flexibility, efficiency, and responsiveness to rapidly changing business needs. Increasing IT complexity and server capacity, coupled with application proliferation requires the ability for businesses to automate and simplify their infrastructure, allowing any application to run on any server, at any time.

Red Hat's Linux Automation strategy covers all facets of the IT environment, creating an infrastructure which is built for automation, including virtualization, identity management, high availability and performance capabilities. At the core of the Linux Automation strategy is the broad ecosystem provided by Red Hat Enterprise Linux, delivering a rich set of automation, management and orchestration tools – now available and under development – by Red Hat and its partners. Software partners gain access to this entire ecosystem with a single application certification - “certify once, deploy anywhere.”

“With new deployment models and technologies making corporate IT deployments much more dynamic, applications are no longer tied to a single server. Linux Automation simplifies that complexity, providing a unified platform for application execution, management and orchestration,” said Nandu Pradhan, President & Managing Director, Red Hat India “Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the industry's fastest-growing operating environment because of superior performance, reliability, economics and customer support. Red Hat manages an installed base of millions via Red Hat Network. This experience guides our strategy for Linux Automation.”

Complementing the Linux Automation strategy are three supporting announcements, including:

The immediate availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 that features integrated virtualization that allows live migration, where customers can seamlessly move running applications from one server to another, maximizing resource utilization in the face of changing business requirements.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's deployment flexibility uniquely allows customers to deploy a single highly scalable platform, virtual or physical, small or large, throughout their enterprise. This spans x86, x86-64, POWER, Itanium and mainframe servers, regardless of size, core count or capacity. Fully integrated virtualization, included at no additional cost, amplifies the benefits of improved service levels, operation flexibility and efficiency. Notably, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 provides enhanced support and significant performance improvements for virtualization of Microsoft Windows guests.

The Red Hat Appliance Operating System that will allow applications that are certified on Red Hat Enterprise Linux to be deployed as software appliances on the broadest range of servers in the industry, including those running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, VMware ESX and Microsoft Viridian. Software appliances allow ISVs to distribute their applications as complete pre-packaged solutions, with the operating system included. This broadens the ISVs' market reach while minimizing their development and support costs. The Red Hat Appliance Operating System, planned to be available in the first half of 2008, includes the Virtual Applicance Development Kit, allowing thousands of existing software vendors to leverage this new deployment model without extra development effort. ISVs significantly reduce their development costs by standardizing on a single operating system - “certify once, deploy anywhere”.

"New software form factors such as software appliances have to overcome user skepticism, including concerns over what software elements are integrated inside the appliance itself," said Brett Waldman, Research Analyst, System Software at IDC. "Red Hat’s solution will reduce the barrier to adoption of software appliances by alleviating some of the packaging concerns, allowing ISVs to create appliances using the same processes and certifications as their other applications based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux."

Independent Software Vendors interested in participating in Red Hat's Appliance program are requested to write to appliance-info@redhat.com.

Together with Amazon, Red Hat also announced today the beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a web service providing resizeable cloud computing. This is the first commercially supported operating system available on Amazon EC2.

The combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing customers to pay only for the infrastructure software services and capacity that they actually use. Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2 enables customers to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, removing the need to over-buy software and hardware capacity as a set of resources to handle periodic spikes in demand. This collaboration makes all the capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including the Red Hat Network management service, world-class technical support and over 3,400 certified applications, available to customers on Amazon's proven network infrastructure and datacenters.

"We are pleased to collaborate with Red Hat in making more choices available for Amazon EC2 users," said Adam Selipsky, vice president, Product Management and Developer Relations, Amazon Web Services. "This offering will further help customers to avoid the heavy lifting of deploying and managing their own infrastructure, while paying as they go for Red Hat’s proven Enterprise Linux solution."

Base prices are US$19 per month, per user and US$0.21, US$0.53 or US$0.94 for every compute hour used on Amazon's EC2 service, depending on whether customers choose a small, large or extra-large compute instance size, plus bandwidth and storage fees. Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2 is available as a private beta today, with public beta availability planned for the fourth calendar quarter of 2007. For more information on the offering, visit www.redhat.com/solutions/cloud.

The choice of an Automation platform influences the flexibility, compatibility and reliability of an organization's entire IT infrastructure. Infrastructure this critical should be based on open source and open standards, rather than proprietary alternatives that lock in customers and restrict flexibility and choice. Red Hat delivers a common infrastructure platform, which brings together the largest range of certified applications, the industry's most reliable platform and an open ecosystem of software developers, hardware vendors and customers to create innovative solutions now and in the future.

For more information on Red Hat's announcements today, including details about Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2 and Red Hat's Appliance Operating System, visit www.redhat.com/about/news.

For media inquiries, contact:

Nanda Chawla

Asst Manager- Marketing

Red Hat India Pvt. Ltd

Phone: +91 22 3987 8888

Email: nchawla@redhat.com