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.

• OEM agreements with Brocade, Scalent and VMware position Dell to uniquely offer open, standards-based foundation for virtualized enterprise computing – from the desktop to the datacenter
• In keynote address, Dell outlines the future of open, efficient data centers

Addressing the desire to simplify and standardize the data center, Dell today unveiled additions to its efficient enterprise portfolio at the VMworld ‘09 conference. Dell announced new desktop, networking, and virtualization management partnerships that can allow businesses to reduce the cost and time associated with the deployment and ongoing management of desktop and data center virtual environments.

“The growing desire for increased enterprise efficiency, combined with the rapid evolution and adoption of virtualized, standards-based architectures is changing the way enterprise technology is built and deployed,” said Praveen Asthana, vice president of Dell Enterprise Storage and Networking, in his presentation at VMworld 09. “The future of enterprise computing does not lie in a proprietary, monolithic stack. Businesses are looking to drive efficiency and innovation and products from Dell help drive these gains while avoiding vendor lock in. The next-generation datacenter – or the Efficient Datacenter – will be standards-based from the compute to the networking fabric, fully virtualized and cloud enabled, and highly automated.”

Adhering to the philosophy of open, pragmatic and end-to-end, Dell’s datacenter approach is designed to enable choice in IT deployment, management and automation so that businesses can focus on their core competencies. This occurs in part due to Dell’s philosophy of designing business ready configurations which are engineered, architected and pre-built product offerings designed to work together and accelerate deployments. When coupled with Dell’s approach and perspective on enterprise computing – from the desktop to the datacenter and out to the cloud – the company is uniquely positioned to help business drive efficiency in the datacenter.

The News

Together with key partners, Dell is building a unified datacenter environment that is built on standards, highly virtualized and easy to manage:

• Today Dell expanded its OEM relationship with Brocade. Specifically, the two companies intend to:
  • Develop a dynamic infrastructure and optimization solution enabled by virtualization to allow customers to deploy and manage an efficient data center. Increasingly, customers need applications deployed rapidly to meet their performance requirements, with secure and reliable access to their mission-critical data.
  • Deliver integrated toolsets to manage application delivery and deployment as business services on highly reliable compute, network and storage infrastructure. The Brocade and Dell solution will help provide capital and operational expense savings by deploying server and storage virtualization more broadly across the data center.
• Dell is simplifying the deployment and management of virtual environments by delivering an OEM version of Scalent’s V/OE, an open infrastructure management solution.
  • Dell customers can avoid many of the common, repetitive IT tasks associated with deploying and managing virtual environments. The Scalent architecture is consistent with Dell’s approach in that it does not lock-in customer to a specific technology, putting the control of IT infrastructure back into the hands of businesses.
  • The Dell and Scalent solution is open and flexible, creating a more efficient way to manage virtual and physical infrastructures and create a foundation for cloud computing.

Dell is also helping customers drive efficiency and effectiveness in distributed computing environments through desktop virtualization. Dell’s Flexible Computing strategy uses client-server (network based) computing and virtualization technologies to improve manageability, data security, compliance and disaster recovery.

Dell today announced that it has expanded its Flexible Computing portfolio by incorporating VMware VIEW into its Virtual Remote Desktop solution. Now IT managers can run virtual desktops in the datacenter, while giving end users a single view of all their applications and data in a familiar, personalized environment on any device at any location.

About Dell

Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) is a leading technology provider to commercial enterprises around the world.

At VMworld 2009 today, HP announced innovative management and service solutions that extend the benefits of virtualization beyond servers to the entire infrastructure.

As a result, customers can maximize resource utilization, improve administrator productivity and drive business growth.

HP also announced the first virtual desktop infrastructure solution for under $1,000 per user seat.⁽¹⁾The solution was demonstrated during VMware Chief Executive Officer Paul Maritz’s keynote presentation today.

Virtual desktop infrastructure is a server-based computing model that gives users a PC desktop experience, while securing all applications, management and processing in the data center. The HP Virtual Desktop Reference Architecture for VMware View specifically addresses the performance bottlenecks and management complexities of other offerings. Customers can test the solution in select HP solution centers worldwide.

Industry analyst firm IDC predicts that companies will spend nearly $100 billion by 2012 on the management and administration of virtual servers and expects that new virtual server installations will outnumber physical server shipments, starting as early as the end of this year.⁽²⁾ HP is the first provider to address these challenges by delivering a converged infrastructure that brings together all data center resources, including server, storage, network, I/O, application and desktop.

“Chief information officers need solutions that increase the cost-saving benefits of virtualization while cutting through the complexity and administrative issues caused by virtual sprawl,” said Mark Potter, senior vice president and general manager, Infrastructure Software and Blades, HP. “For more than half a decade, HP and VMware have jointly invested in technologies that enable customers to maximize the value of their virtualization efforts. By extending virtualization beyond servers through HP’s converged infrastructure solutions, customers can fully realize the potential of their people, applications and technology infrastructure.”

Start virtualizing your infrastructure

Only HP can deliver a complete, end-to-end virtualization solution that combines hardware and software to:

• Cost-effectively deliver a virtual desktop infrastructure that provides increased data protection and uptime. HP’s Virtual Desktop Reference Architecture for VMware View™ also lowers support costs versus traditional PC environments.⁽³⁾
• Lower costs up to 50 percent and improve capacity utilization up to 33 percent by virtualizing storage capacity with HP LeftHand P4000 and other StorageWorks virtualization solutions.⁽³⁾

Information pertaining to other new solutions for virtualizing infrastructure is available at http://www.hp.com/go/virtualization.

Increase administrator productivity

To help simplify data center management of a virtual and physical infrastructure, and maximize VMware investments, customers need common tools. HP, teamed with VMware, is delivering new capabilities that bridge the physical and virtual data center silos through unified management and automation. Key customer benefits include:

• Direct administrator access, through VMware vCenter™, to the physical infrastructure to manage server health, power use and remote control for the first time with the new HP Insight Control for VMware vCenter™.
• Increased administrator effectiveness with HP Operations Manager for virtualization by monitoring the availability and performance of all virtual and physical assets through a single common dashboard.
• Reduced risk of downtime with HP Network Automation which, for the first time, gives network administrators control of the VMware vSwitch in addition to the physical network environments.
• Simplified storage management by monitoring and configuring HP Enterprise Virtual Arrays within a virtual machine using the new HP StorageWorks Command View Enterprise Virtual Array management suite.
• Simplified and reduced risk of migration to client virtualization with the HP Virtual Client Essentials software portfolio, which includes easy-to-use setup, configuration and management tools for thin clients. This solution also offers a repurposed PC deployment solution and will support VMware’s software implementation of PC over IP (PCoIP) protocol.

Accelerate time to value

HP provides the experience, breadth of technology, partner ecosystem and services needed to simplify complex virtualization projects, delivering:

• Improved management of virtualized environments in the data center as a result of a recently signed alliance agreement between EDS, an HP company, and VMware. The agreement brings together EDS data center expertise and VMware virtualization leadership to provide clients with a robust, well-managed virtualized environment.
• Reduced total cost of ownership and risk by leveraging virtualization best practices with the newHP SAN Readiness Assessment for Server Virtualization and the newly packaged HP Migration Services for VMware vSphere.
• More optimized partner virtualization solutions for HP BladeSystem hardware with the HP Solution Builder program for BladeSystem than any other systems provider. This program provides testing, technology, marketing and integration services from HP for 334 partners to ensure their solutions maximize the value of HP server platforms.
• Enhanced network efficiency and lower costs. Together with VMware, HP is leveraging open industry standards such as Virtual Ethernet Port Aggregator (VEPA) to provide a process for virtualizing switches, network interface cards and access points. These can be managed universally to increase visibility, improve traffic control and simplify manageability.

Global leader in VMware technologies

Leading in virtualization performance, the HP ProLiant DL785 G6 has achieved the highest VMware VMmark benchmark score in the industry – 53.73 at 35 tiles. This is 58 percent better than the previous highest eight-socket (48 cores) result. HP also garnered the highest scores for four processors and 24 cores, as well as two processors and eight cores.⁽⁴⁾

HP has the most VMware-certified server and storage systems and the largest number of VMware-certified professionals supporting heterogeneous environments. HP also offers customers the largest global VMware Authorized Training Center network, with more than 100 training centers in more than 30 countries.

More information on today’s news is available in an online press kit athttp://www.hp.com/go/HPatVMworld2009.

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/.

⁽¹⁾ Sub $1,000 per user price calculation includes the virtual desktop infrastructure hardware and software components (VMware View Premier, Microsoft® VECD, and HP software licenses) for a fully loaded virtual desktop configuration for 750 productivity users.

⁽²⁾ IDC Worldwide Server Virtualization Shipment Forecast, August 2009.

⁽³⁾ Calculation based on aggregate best practice guidelines.

⁽⁴⁾ VMware VMmark results, Aug. 25, 2009. VMmark utilizes SPECjbb2005 and SPECweb2005, which are available from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC), and HP independently published two-processor/eight-core VMmark result at http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/proliant-bl/hp_bl490g6_x5570_vmmark.pdf.

VMware VMmark is a product of VMware Inc. Microsoft is a U.S. registered trademark of Microsoft Corp.

This news release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. If such risks or uncertainties materialize or such assumptions prove incorrect, the results of HP and its consolidated subsidiaries could differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including but not limited to statements of the plans, strategies and objectives of management for future operations; any statements concerning expected development, performance or market share relating to products and services; any statements regarding anticipated operational and financial results; any statements of expectation or belief; and any statements of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include macroeconomic and geopolitical trends and events; the execution and performance of contracts by HP and its customers, suppliers and partners; the achievement of expected operational and financial results; and other risks that are described in HP’s Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended April 30, 2009 and HP’s other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including but not limited to HP’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended October 31, 2008. HP assumes no obligation and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements.

© 2009 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.