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Advanced Mission-Critical Program

The Most Demanding Mission-Critical Applications in the World,
Now on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat has announced the global Advanced Mission-Critical Program, establishing Linux as the go-to platform for worldwide customers with the most demanding mission-critical workloads. Organizations around the world today run their most business-critical applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Through this groundbreaking Program, Red Hat is expanding the advantages of Enterprise Linux to new classes of customers requiring even greater service and support levels. Now, Linux is truly capable of handling any workload, for any customer.

The Advanced Mission-Critical Program

The Advanced Mission-Critical Program is a worldwide program aimed at customers in the high end of the mission-critical market that cannot afford to experience downtime or disruptions to their application environment.

Driven by customer demand, the enhanced capabilities delivered through the Program will initially be designed to meet the uniquely demanding, high-availability requirements of mission-critical customers in Japan. In today's marketplace, customers desire the ability to run their most important workloads in a standardized operating environment without disruption, so they can avoid the expense and risk of re-testing their applications. Where every second counts, if an issue does arise, customers can depend on Red Hat to provide the fastest possible response and time-to-problem resolution for their critical systems.

Through the Program, customers are offered unprecedented service levels, support, and decade-long product lifecycles for participating Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers. Customers will be ensured that their software and hardware systems are fully capable of delivering the levels of service, support, and lifecycle management required to run the world's most demanding workloads. Advanced Mission-Critical Qualified Systems will be denoted by a program logo, indicating that the system is ready to take on customers' critical requirements. Participating OEMs can display the Program logo on qualifying servers and in related literature.

Benefits include:

  • Dramatic cost savings:
    Customers will be able to run their most critical workloads on less-expensive, off-the-shelf, industry-standard Intel platforms. And, they'll benefit from reduced cost profile software applications with standard management tools to help reduce operational costs.
  • Less disruption:
    Customers will benefit from fewer changes introduced into their critical environments -- for periods up to 18 months, or five years -- while maintaining access to critical bug fixes and security patches.
  • Longer support:
    Customers will be offered 10-year support cycles, reflecting the longer life expected for applications and workloads in the Advanced Mission-Critical market on major Red Hat Enterprise Linux platforms.
  • Industry-leading response times:
    Red Hat helps Advanced Mission-Critical OEM partners to provide industry-leading response time to help tackle any customer issues that arise based on an enhanced service level agreement.
  • Better communication:
    Customers are provided enhanced communications through frequent progress reports on key issues.
  • Proactive alerts:
    Customers remain protected with proactive alerts for OEM partners to indicate issues with possible impact on customers. This allows partners to develop more in-depth contingency plans and workable solutions more quickly, in case of need.

What's different:

Red Hat is the first Linux vendor to offer a program that delivers this advanced level of support and reliability, previously only thought to be delivered by UNIX platforms. With the Advanced Mission-Critical Program, Red Hat is breaking new ground -- no other Linux vendor specifically provides mechanisms to allow customers to standardize on a minor release for an extended time period with reduced change for their critical environments.

The leading support offerings included in the Program are:

  • Advanced Mission-Critical Update Support:
    Offers longer standardization periods that allow a customer to reduce server administration and management costs by maintaining a single operating environment minor release version throughout their datacenter for 60 months without compromising stability and data security.
  • 10-Year Advanced Mission-Critical Lifecyle:
    Offers 10 years of support for major revisions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
  • Advanced Mission-Critical Service Level Agreements (SLAs):
    • Improved Response Time:
      This includes faster response times for Severity 1 and 2 issues. Red Hat will respond to Severity 1 issues in 1/2 hour and Severity 2 issues in four hours.
    • New Emergency Fix Process:
      Red Hat will provide customers an emergency fix within 24 hours. While Red Hat today provides the fix individually, through this Program, efforts from Red Hat and involved OEMs will be combined to determine fixes.
    • Root Cause Analysis:
      With Advanced Mission-Critical, root cause analysis will be performed for severity 1 and 2 issues. A root cause analysis document will be provided within 24 hours or preceding the interim fix. It will then be updated preceding the permanent fix. This document will cover causal analysis, contributing factors, and a design description of the fix.
    • Proactive Notification of Critical Issues:
      With Advanced Mission-Critical, affected customers will be notified of pending issues. The issue will then be elevated to completion within 24 hours.
      • Enhanced Problem Resolution Communication:
      The involved OEM is updated with frequent reporting on the status of any issues that have been discovered along with the indication of progress on a resolution.
    • Technical Account Manager (TAM):
      TAMs are an in-zone Red Hat resource dedicated to the involved Advanced Mission-Critical OEM with direct access to all Red Hat resources and support centers for around the clock support.