Collaboration Brings Cost-Effective Virtualization Solutions to Customers

Yesterday, Red Hat announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, the foundation of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio of solutions. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 is now available on HP BladeSystem and HP ProLiant servers. With this combination, customers can take advantage of an open source, standards-based virtual infrastructure that provides scalability and security capabilities. Additionally, enterprises will be able to leverage management capabilities offered by both companies. In the future, customers can expect increasing levels of management integration between the system and operating environment to further drive administrator productivity.

“We are excited about the future opportunities with HP to build new platforms that will bring customers to virtualization and cloud computing,” said Scott Crenshaw, vice president of platform technologies at Red Hat. “The BladeSystem Matrix solutions will ultimately enable companies to accelerate complex IT projects, simplify daily tasks and lower costs across the data center.”

Open Source Cloud Solutions on HP BladeSystem Matrix

Customers seeking the economic benefits of cloud computing with the ease of use, reduced costs, and increased flexibility of a converged infrastructure need to look no further than HP and Red Hat for a cost-effective, industry-standard solution.

The HP BladeSystem Matrix is a “cloud infrastructure in a box” that brings the economics, scalability and response times of the cloud to diverse applications across customers’ data centers.

“Organizations are looking to deploy open source strategies to take their infrastructures and their businesses into the future,” said Scott Farrand, vice president of Infrastructure Software and Blades at HP. “Together with Red Hat, HP BladeSystem Matrix provides companies with a cost-effective infrastructure solution that simplifies management, increases resource utilization and speeds deployment of technology services to drive business growth.”

Customers can obtain increased performance improvement and cost savings by deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and JBoss Enterprise Middleware on HP ProLiant G6 platforms. They also can get a single point of accountability for the purchase and support of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on HP systems. With its comprehensive range of world-class support services, HP offers customers complete confidence to grow their businesses while controlling costs.

For more information, please visit www.redhat.com/HP or www.hp.com/go/redhat.

About HP

HP, the world’s largest technology company, simplifies the technology experience for consumers and businesses with a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure. More information about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at http://www.hp.com/.

About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 65 offices spanning the globe. CIOs ranked Red Hat as one of the top vendors delivering value in Enterprise Software for five consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value survey. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.

LINUX is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. RED HAT and JBOSS are registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. and its subsidiaries in the US and other countries.

Red Hat Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to delays or reductions in information technology spending, the integration of acquisitions and the ability to market successfully acquired technologies and products; the ability of the Company to effectively compete; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; the ability to deliver and stimulate demand for new products and technological innovations on a timely basis; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company’s growth and international operations; fluctuations in exchange rates; adverse results in litigation; and changes in and a dependence on key personnel, as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions “Risk Factors” and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations”. In addition to these factors, actual future performance, outcomes, and results may differ materially because of more general factors including (without limitation) general industry and market conditions and growth rates, economic conditions, and governmental and public policy changes. The forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company’s views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 provides the integrated platform foundation for the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio of solutions. With virtualization technology that is developed as an integral part of the Linux kernel, Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers the next generation of virtualization technology. Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers deploying Xen virtualization will continue to be supported through the full lifecycle of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, in combination with the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio of products, is intended to enhance Red Hat’s position in open virtualization as being the first Virtual Machine Vendor to support both Intel® VT-d and PCI-SIG SR-IOV, allowing customers to deploy virtualization pervasively.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux plays a significant role in Red Hat’s virtualization strategy, and the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 with the same virtualization technology base as Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization today is a significant step in our delivery of virtualization to the market,” said Scott Crenshaw, vice president, Platform Business Unit at Red Hat. “The release also features advances in performance, security and storage that span virtual and physical environments. With this update release, Red Hat Enterprise Linux aims to raise the bar once again, offering compelling software technologies with impressive quality and reliability.”

In addition to virtualization enhancements, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 also includes a broad set of hardware platform enhancements focusing on performance and scalability. At the processor chipset level, the release includes optimizations for Intel® Xeon® Processor 5500 Series platforms as well as AMD Istanbul platforms. Network advancements include Generic Receive Offload (GRO) that utilizes new processing components in advanced network adapters to offload portions of the receive stack. Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) performance enhancements and hardware support are also included. The release additionally offers a large array of device driver enhancements ranging from disk, network, graphics to OFED InfiniBand drivers.

“Red Hat and Intel have long collaborated on technology advancements to provide joint customers with reliable, high-performance and cost-effective technology for their IT infrastructures that runs great on Intel® Xeon® processor based platforms,” said Doug Fisher, vice president, Intel Software and Service Group and general manager, System Software Division. “With today’s update of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 operating platform, customers can take advantage of the latest Intel processor and chipset advances in physical and virtual environments. It’s clear that the combination of Intel® Xeon® Processor 5500 Series and Red Hat Enterprise Linux using Intel® VT-d and SR-IOV removes I/O virtualization bottlenecks to deliver increased performance, efficiency and scalability with high performance I/O devices.”

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 is certified on the Cisco Unified Computing System,” said David Lawler, vice president of Product Management, Server Access and Virtualization Business Group for Cisco. “We continue to work closely with Red Hat to optimize both the Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization platforms for the scalable Cisco Unified Computing System to help enable our customers to grow their virtualized environments, improve business agility and provide coherent security and network policies.”

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 also includes several key feature enhancements targeted at application developers and system administrators. Key to these features is enhancement to the Systemtap performance monitoring toolset, including support for profiling and monitoring C++ applications, as well as inclusion of a large number of static kernel tracepoints to simplify performance observation for the highest profile kernel subsystems. Providing a roadmap to future enhancements, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 includes a preview implementation of the highly used malloc memory allocation library, which is tuned for the latest, anticipated generation of multicore processors.

“IBM is pleased to support the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 with the inclusion of KVM technology for our clients,” said Daniel Frye, vice president, IBM Systems Software Development and Open Systems Development Executive. “KVM is an important emerging open virtualization environment that IBM has contributed to and will support.”

“As companies continue down a path of server consolidation, there is an increasing desire to derive cost savings from virtualization,” said Paul Miller, vice president of Marketing, Enterprise Storage and Servers, HP. “The combination of HP BladeSystem and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, now with the performance of KVM virtualization, provides customers with the low-cost, high-performance combination customers demand, backed by two industry leaders.”

“Red Hat and Dell continue to deliver joint solutions to reduce complexity and lower operational costs for enterprises,” said Judy Chavis, Director of Business Development in the Enterprise Product Group. “With today’s delivery of the foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, certified with Dell PowerEdge servers, joint Red Hat and Dell customers are offered expanded scalability and performance, as well as the next generation of virtualization technology.”

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 is globally available today and is automatically delivered to customers with an active subscription.

To learn more about this announcement, join Red Hat for a webcast that will be broadcast live from the Red Hat Summit in Chicago at 12 pm ET on September 2, 2009. The webcast will also be available for replay. To join, visit here.

For more news about Red Hat, visit www.redhat.com. For more news, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com.

About Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 65 offices spanning the globe. CIOs ranked Red Hat as one of the top vendors delivering value in Enterprise Software for five consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value survey. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.

Forward-Looking Statements
Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to delays or reductions in information technology spending, the integration of acquisitions and the ability to market successfully acquired technologies and products; the ability of the Company to effectively compete; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; the ability to deliver and stimulate demand for new products and technological innovations on a timely basis; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company’s growth and international operations; fluctuations in exchange rates; adverse results in litigation; and changes in and a dependence on key personnel, as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions “Risk Factors” and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations”. In addition to these factors, actual future performance, outcomes, and results may differ materially because of more general factors including (without limitation) general industry and market conditions and growth rates, economic conditions, and governmental and public policy changes. The forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company’s views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release.

LINUX is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. RED HAT and JBOSS are registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. and its subsidiaries in the US and other countries. Intel and Xeon are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the United States and other countries.