Red Hat Rolls Out Virtualization Platform for Heterogeneous Servers and Clouds

Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers, the newest product set in the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers is designed to enable pervasive adoption of virtualization, with a comprehensive end-to-end solution combining a standalone hypervisor and powerful virtualization management.

In February 2009, Red Hat announced plans to deliver the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio, building on its leading Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system platform, offering the proven security, performance, scalability and cost advantages of open source virtualization technology. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers entered a worldwide beta in June 2009. Extensive collaboration with large enterprise beta customers, such as Comviva, Host Europe, NTT Communications, Qualcomm and Swisscom, resulted in enhanced product capabilities designed to meet enterprise requirements for deploying and managing heterogeneous virtualization and cloud environments.

"As a participant in the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization beta program, we recognized expanded performance, security and scalability benefits for our systems. We look forward to continuing our technology collaboration with Red Hat and plan to deploy new virtualized workloads on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization going forward," said Amarendra Kumar Singh, vice president CAG , DPM , ISS & IT at Comviva.

"As an active participant in the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization beta program, we recognized expanded performance and scalability benefits for our thousands of virtualized systems," said Patrick Pulvermüller, managing director at Host Europe. "After comparing the industry's leading virtualization solutions, we are planning to use Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as the foundation for our cloud servers to leverage the powerful combination of Red Hat's next-generation KVM virtualization technology and Red Hat's new server virtualization management tools. We look forward to continuing our long-time technology collaboration with Red Hat through joint work on our cloud and virtualization deployments."

"With our participation in the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization beta program, we have experienced the impressive agility, scalability and performance benefits of Red Hat's virtualization solutions," said Masato Minamisawa, Executive Manager of IP Technology Department, Business Network Services Division at NTT Communications. "We recognize the unique technological advantages of KVM at the heart of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and look forward to continued collaboration around virtualization and cloud computing with Red Hat."

"Since Qualcomm implemented the 5.0 release, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has provided us with cost savings and efficiencies in Linux virtualization," said Dave Costakos, IT Architect at Qualcomm. "With the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager, Qualcomm can leverage enterprise-class virtualization management features with low-cost open source virtualization."

As an advanced virtualization user, Swisscom IT Services has leveraged a variety of virtualization offerings on the market, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux with integrated virtualization. With the introduction of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Swisscom IT Services gains an expanded Red Hat virtualization solution that breaks down the company's virtualization barriers and challenges.

"Building on our long-term use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, we have been an active participant in the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization beta program," said Heinz Többen, Head of division transformation, architectures & projects of Swisscom IT Services. "With the high levels of performance, security and scalability that we've achieved with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Red Hat's virtualization technology is a strategic addition to our IT infrastructure and excellent value of money."

In September 2009, Red Hat delivered the foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, which offers next-generation Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization technology.

Today, Red Hat delivers the next phase of the portfolio with the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers, which includes the following components:

• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor: A standalone, lightweight, high-performance hypervisor designed to host Linux and Microsoft Windows virtual servers and desktops. It provides a solid virtualization foundation for cloud deployments and other highly dynamic IT environments. Using KVM technology, the hypervisor provides high performance and security coupled with memory sharing technology, which permits more efficient guest consolidation, and enterprise features such as live migration.
• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers: A platform for configuring, provisioning, managing and organizing virtualized Linux and Microsoft Windows servers. It is designed for customers who seek to reduce the cost, complexity and time required to manage large-scale virtualization deployments. With a rich set of management capabilities and powerful search and grouping features, Virtualization Manager equips customers with the ability to efficiently control a virtualized infrastructure.

"Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is truly differentiated from other virtualization solutions as it inherits the powerful functionality, hardware support and certification of Red Hat Enterprise Linux," said Paul Cormier, executive vice president and president, Products and Technologies at Red Hat. "Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization provides ISVs, IHVs and customers with the opportunity to seamlessly move applications and hardware platforms from bare metal computing to virtualized computing to cloud computing while maintaining certifications. We believe that Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, especially the management components, will allow customers to use virtualization pervasively across their entire computing infrastructure."

"Red Hat's open approach to virtualization is recognized in the marketplace by our mutual customers that are deploying Red Hat on Cisco Unified Computing System," said Soni Jiandani, vice president of marketing, Server Access Virtualization business group at Cisco. "We are working closely with Red Hat to optimize the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization platform for the Unified Computing System in order to offer high-performance and reliable combined technology based on open standards to enterprises worldwide."

"Enterprises are looking to increase flexibility and reduce complexity by deploying a converged infrastructure along with end-to-end heterogeneous datacenter management capability," said Scott Farrand, vice president of Infrastructure Software and Blades at HP. "HP is working closely with Red Hat to provide best-in-class hardware and software infrastructure and management solutions for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization."

"IBM has been working with Red Hat in the open source community to provide open source virtualization technology to the market," said Daniel Frye, vice president, IBM Open Systems Development. "We believe this technology will be a significant force in the market and Red Hat’s leadership in establishing the KVM-based Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization ecosystem will play an important role in meeting market demand."

"Management is rapidly becoming an important focus area for the virtualization market as customers evolve from basic consolidation to advanced use cases and the problems of virtual server sprawl. Against this backdrop, KVM is a major development in the open source and Linux virtualization market. Red Hat is actively investing in making the technology enterprise ready with its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers and the management component is arriving at an opportune time," says Gary Chen, Research Manager, Enterprise Virtualization Software at IDC.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Desktops remains in private beta today and is expected to be made generally available in early 2010.

To learn more about this announcement, join Red Hat's virtualization webcast, which will be broadcast live at 11 a.m. ET on November 3, 2009. The webcast will also be available for replay. To join, visit http://www-waa-akam.thomson-webcast.net/us/dispatching/?event_id=770cd2217a5d63c162e5cf4aefdcf07d&portal_id=af9b227bf07c733390c2738ee0330646.

To learn more about the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio or to purchase Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers, visit www.redhat.com/virtualization/rhev/servers/.

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

Red Hat and AMD are long-time technology partners that have worked closely together to deliver leading platform combinations to our joint customers. With the delivery of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers, Red Hat and AMD strengthen our value proposition to customers by offering the next-generation of virtualization technology in combination with AMD Opteron processors.
- Margaret Lewis, director, Commercial Software and Solutions, AMDThe availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers delivers new choice to the virtualization market and gives our joint customers a powerful, open platform to tackle their complex and unique IT challenges. Together Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and BMC's Business Service Management (BSM) for Virtualization enable organizations to remain agile in the face of change and respond quickly to events that deliver the greatest business impact.

- Paul Avenant, vice president of ESM products at BMC SoftwareCA has offered broad support for Red Hat's OS platforms for many years. Red Hat's virtualization platform aligns with CA's virtualization and automation strategy and our goal to provide wide-ranging support for heterogeneous virtualization technologies.

- Roger Pilc, Corporate Senior Vice President and General Manager of Infrastructure Management and Data Center Automation Business Unit, CABuilt upon the trusted Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization features next-generation KVM technology that helps customers break down today's barriers to virtualization adoption. Dell and Red Hat continue to work closely together around optimizing our platforms in an effort to benefit customers with more choice, flexibility and reliability when it comes to virtualization.

- Judy Chavis, Director of Business Development, Enterprise Product Group, DellCustomers are now deploying more business critical applications with open source than ever before and we view Red Hat's ABI commitment as an excellent way to offer enterprise capable products in a virtualized environment. Ingres is pleased to be part of the Red Hat partner network and we fully support and see the tremendous value in this. Customers demand ease of deployment when rolling out new applications and Red Hat's ABI offers this with Red Hat Enterprise Linux-certified applications running with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.

- Deb Woods, vice president of product management, IngresWe believe the launch of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization will mean the best of all worlds for Linux users: the flexibility of a first-class virtualization environment, the robust capabilities offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SAS, and confidence in knowing that their environment is fully supported by both companies.

- Craig Rubendall, Director of Research & Development, SASSymantec continues to extend our commitment and partnership with Red Hat and we look forward to offering Veritas Storage Foundation and Veritas Cluster Server with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. This will give organizations an opportunity to seamlessly utilize the industry leading storage management and high availability solutions across physical and virtual Linux environments.
- Josh Kahn, Vice President of Product Management, Storage and Availability Management Group, SymantecOur goal is to provide customers with choice and flexibility. VMLogix offers the only virtual lab automation solution that works with all leading virtualization platforms. By supporting KVM and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, we intend to provide companies who adopt our solutions the freedom to integrate whatever virtualization infrastructure works best for them.

- Sameer Dholakia, CEO of VMLogix

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