In our minds, Red Hat and AMD have followed similar company trajectories. We aligned extremely well together in the early adopter and high performance communities, solidifying a platform desired by enthusiasts. The roots established in these areas led to what we believe has been a banner year–18 months for our customers. We would argue a lot of it has to do with the AMD-Red Hat partnership’s common DNA. There is a common philosophy of openness and open standards driving innovation. Proof of this has been the rapid adoption and continued broad migration of proprietary RISC to the AMD-Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform. The adoption has been infrastructure-wide, not just in pockets– from performance computing to web serving, to application servers and into the heart of the data center, powering customers’ major packaged enterprise applications. It’s been a good year for everyone.

So what’s in store for the future? Red Hat releases the much-anticipated Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 today with integrated virtualization and storage management technologies. Integrated virtualization in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and AMD Virtualization-enabled processors (AMD-V) will make the value of open source ubiquitous in computing workloads. An extremely compelling proposition of improved performance, security and operational flexibility at fractional price. We’ll have multiple operating systems simultaneously running on a single physical system–dogs and cats living together in harmony–because let’s face it, customers live in a heterogeneous IT world.

This is why we are personally excited for our upcoming fiscal year at Red Hat. We’re excited to see if adoption outpaces or mirrors our previous patterns. We anticipate Red Hat will see the same continued vote of confidence from where it matters most–our customers. If you haven’t tested Red Hat Enterprise Linux yet, you should. We encourage you to try out Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 on AMD-V and decide for yourself. Send us a note and we’ll have somebody locally to come meet with your company.

Interested in more information on AMD, Red Hat and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5? Read the AMD Accelerate article. To hear more from AMD and Joe Menard, VP of Software Strategy at AMD, about Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, watch the video.