Expanding Red Hat Enterprise Linux choices for research and academia

Modern workloads, whether critical production applications or leading-edge research projects, require a more reliable, stable and secure operating system foundation. The adoption of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) by governments, businesses and nonprofit organizations across the globe, has led to RHEL being the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform and helps demonstrate our belief that it provides the best backbone for nearly every computing need, anywhere on the open hybrid cloud. This is why we’ve been working to make RHEL more readily available to more users, from enabling individual developers to run RHEL in production at no cost to streamlining how open source projects can access no-cost RHEL to drive the next wave of innovation.

Today, we’re further extending the availability of RHEL by expanding access to our subscription offerings for research and academic institutions. While Red Hat has historically offered a low-cost option for academic institutions, it was only available to degree-granting entities. Now, a much broader range of research and academia-related organizations can enter Red Hat’s academic subscription program, making it far easier to access, run and maintain RHEL to suit their unique needs, whether it’s simply running a web server to underpinning a high-performance computing (HPC) environment. This greater accessibility is also intended to help better prepare students and other learners for future opportunities in IT-related fields.

Serving as a technology engine for academic and scientific research is a key part of Red Hat’s commitment to open innovation, highlighted by the recent expansion of our collaboration with Boston University. We recognize that academic and research organizations are key members of the open source community, helping to drive open innovation as well as educating the next generation of IT leaders. We want the rising tide of open source to lift all boats, so to speak, which means that we want to be able to more effectively support all organizations in these areas. 

We feel that it’s crucial for scientists, researchers, educators and other contributors pushing for the next breakthrough, from healthcare and epidemiology to climate change and renewable energy, to have access to the scale and power of the open hybrid cloud. The open hybrid cloud starts with Linux, and we want all organizations working to advance quality of life at a global scale to have access to the trusted foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Note that the expanded academic subscriptions are not intended for U.S. government agencies or organizations or international government agencies, as these organizations have specific programs already dedicated to their needs. Additionally, commercial HPC deployments are covered under a separate, tailored subscription.

For more information on the RHEL academic program or to see if your organization qualifies, please contact your Red Hat account team or reach out to us at redhat-academic@redhat.com.

We’re continuing to look for ways to expand RHEL access, so stay tuned for more news in the future.