Intel and Red Hat have been strategic partners since the beginning of Red Hat’s inception. This is a deep business development relationship that includes engineering, sales development and co-marketing, allowing both companies to bring the Platform of Choice to the Industry.

Engineers from both companies work closely together to ensure the new features of Intel’s latest platforms, and features and capabilities of Red Hat’s Portfolio of solutions are designed, supported and optimized.

This year will be an especially important year for our mutual customers with the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 on Intel’s Multi-Core Platforms that provide the Best in Class Virtualization Software with Intel’s leading Virtualization Platform capabilities. This resulted in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 providing IT organizations with the highest performance, lowest power and most cost-effective solution over the competition. By utilizing new Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 capabilities–like virtualization on Intel’s MultiCore Platforms with virtualization built in–our joint customers are now able to enjoy new levels of performance, power savings and best in class total cost of ownership in their IT infrastructure.

Performance is designed in. Working together, Intel and Red Hat engineers ensured top of class performance. These can be seen in the latest series of benchmarks of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 on Intel’s Quad-Core Processor based servers. These benchmarks show the significant performance advantages over the competition. Recently principled technologies performed industry standard benchmarks on several servers using different processors running Solaris 10, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. See the latest reports here.

“As open source solutions become more mainstream, Intel is working with Red Hat to ensure Linux and open source applications are optimized for Intel platforms and technologies such as Intel virtualization technology. Red Hat and Intel are two of the key contributors to the Linux Kernel. We believe the infrastructure provided by Red Hat’s OS and Middleware offerings on Intel’s Multi-core platforms is the right platform to deliver these solutions to our customers,” said Ram Peddibhotla, Intel Director, Open Source Technology Center.

In addition to optimizing Red Hat Solutions on the Intel Platform, Intel and Red Hat together provide customers, ISV and OEM partners with tools and technical data to help accelerate and optimize advanced Linux solutions through their Global Solution Acceleration Program. See the press release here for more details.

The Red Hat and Intel Solution Accleration Program operates online and at Centers of Excellence spanning the globe. The Centers of Excellence are equipped with the latest Intel and Red Hat technology. Services offered through this program include: training and knowledge transfer, proof of concept support, reference solutions and certified solution stacks, application testing and porting, channel and vertical product definition and advanced knowledge projects. For example, our partners who are interested in taking advantage of the Red Hat and Intel Virtualization Platform can now go to a local Center of Excellence or via online, can conduct the porting and testing process for their linux solution. Visit the website for the latest information.

Another exciting program to enable and support our channel partner community is the Global Channel Acceleration Program. This is a joint Red Hat-Intel channel program that encompasses a pass-through certification model enabling the channel community a faster time to market with Industry Leading Red Hat ON Intel Pre-Certified Solution Stacks. Now those channel partners that are interested in taking advantage of the Linux Market Opportunity, can receive training, support and pre-certified solution configurations, making it easier than ever to provide more value to their customers while also expanding their market opportunity.

Red Hat and Intel’s collaboration with virtualization solutions is just the first step in a series of exciting new solutions and strategic initiatives that these two companies will announce this year. Stay tuned for more to come!

For more information about Intel, Red Hat and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 from Intel’s Doug Fisher, watch the video here.