Virgin America Chooses Red Hat Solutions to Scale Website

Airline utilizes Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Network and services; makes plans for an extended JBoss implementation

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Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Virgin America, the newly launched American airline, has selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the platform on which to host its commercial website. The airline chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its reputation for scalability and security.

As San Francisco's hometown airline, Virgin America is a next-generation low-fare carrier that will serve as many as 10 cities within a year of operation, and up to 30 cities within five years. Virgin America's new planes will offer a host of innovative guest features aimed at bringing fun back to flying including the most advanced personal in-flight entertainment system in the domestic airline market, mood-lit cabins, custom-designed leather seats and plugs for laptops and other portable electronic devices at every seat. The airline begins flights in August 2007.

Since its start, Virgin America has based its IT infrastructure on Linux using varied distributions of Fedora since the launch of Fedora Core 2. The company valued its experience with Fedora and benefited from the community-based, cost-effective advantages of the operating system. Desiring to continue its work with Red Hat and also obtain a solution with a longer life cycle and reliable support, the airline chose to migrate its proxy servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

"Fedora was a fantastic solution for us as we began our journey with open source," said Ravi Simhambhatla, director of architecture and integration at Virgin America. "As our need for fine-grained control and scalability grew, we decided to migrate to Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its reputation as a resilient, secure and scalable platform as well as for its incredible support. Red Hat has the best kernel engineers in the world and when I'm in a real bind, it's priceless to have the ability to call someone who has the knowledge to get us on track quickly."

The airline's core website relies on a combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, Squid and Apache. Since migrating to Red Hat solutions, its consistent website requirement has scaled to over six times as many hits per second using two load balances. In addition to enhancing performance, Virgin America's solution still enables cost savings in terms of hardware and real estate costs and is supported by Red Hat Network, which the airline utilizes for systems management, security errata and as its primary source of information and guidance for maintaining its infrastructure.

Virgin America's migration from Fedora to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 will be completed by the end of 2007. The company already makes use of JBoss solutions for its core kiosks, plans to soon obtain support for the JBoss Application Stack and will eventually expand its JBoss rollout. "We feel it couldn't have been better news for JBoss users to see the middleware company become a part of Red Hat, and now have all its solutions offered under the same support umbrella. With Red Hat's level of supportability, we hope to see the next cut of our website using JBoss," said Simhambhatla.

"Virgin America has been a great example of a complex deployment where open source could truly be an asset. Milestones have been achieved with agility, and performance has increased dramatically," said Brian Stevens, CTO at Red Hat. "We're happy to be in this partnership with Virgin America as they grow their U.S. deployment. We'll continue to work together to keep scaling at a rapid pace."

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About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat, the world's leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 50 satellite offices spanning the globe. CIOs have ranked Red Hat first for value in Enterprise Software for three consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value study. Red Hat provides high-quality, low-cost technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.

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  • About Red Hat
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  • Forward-Looking Statements
  • Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to delays or reductions in information technology spending; the effects of industry consolidation; the ability of the Company to compete effectively; the integration of acquisitions and the ability to market successfully acquired technologies and products; uncertainty and adverse results in litigation and related settlements; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; the ability to deliver and stimulate demand for new products and technological innovations on a timely basis; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company’s growth and international operations; fluctuations in exchange rates; and changes in and a dependence on key personnel, as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions "Risk Factors" and "Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations". In addition to these factors, actual future performance, outcomes, and results may differ materially because of more general factors including (without limitation) general industry and market conditions and growth rates, economic and political conditions, governmental and public policy changes and the impact of natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods. The forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company’s views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of this press release.