Red Hat Streamlines Physical, Virtual, and Cloud Deployment with New Subscriptions for Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Red Hat is pleased to announce the availability of a new family of subscription options for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, enabling customers to deploy the platform anywhere—in physical, virtual, and cloud environments. In June, we introduced an extension to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux family to fulfill an open hybrid cloud architecture – Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. With today’s announcement, the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions are optimized to help customers embrace the open hybrid cloud, providing  IT flexibility to help deliver business agility.

Purchasing IT infrastructure can be a complex process. Increasingly, IT managers are responsible for several hundred - sometimes thousands - of servers; a challenging task by itself.  These same managers must also “gaze into the future” and predict what to purchase to cover future requirements.  This complexity is further compounded when considering decisions related to migration to virtual or cloud environments. These new subscription options for Red Hat Enterprise Linux provide customers a choice in how to assess and manage computing resources—by either counting physical hardware or virtual instances.  The benefit is a simplified buying process for either project scenario, and greater flexibility in deployment.

For example, an organization seeking to move some of its processing from a physical to virtual deployment may not understand the right mix of physical and virtual instances until key workloads are migrated. Not knowing exactly how many virtual instances are required until after the fact can quickly lead to one of two scenarios: over-buying and wasted budget, or under-buying and the risk of a stalled or failed project due to insufficient compute resources.

With the new subscription options for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat customers can now buy a number of subscriptions, deploy an initial mix on physical and  on virtual machines, and then re-deploy in different patterns as requirements evolve.  This flexibility facilitates computing movement across environments, especially swapping resources in and out of the cloud[1] as business requirements dictate, supporting a far more agile business environment.  In addition, by standardizing on a single operating environment for all deployment patterns (physical, virtual, cloud) significant operational benefits can be realized.

The 2013 Pricing and Packaging introduces a family of subscription options which include:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server (Physical or Virtual Node), which can be counted as virtual instances or socket pairs. These subscriptions can be deployed to physical machines, as virtual machines, and in the cloud, and shifted as business needs change. These subscriptions are stackable, meaning that multiple subscriptions can be purchased to cover various configurations of physical/virtual machines with Standard or Premium Support.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Virtual Datacenters is meant for a completely virtualized environment on supported hypervisors, and is deployed on systems that are sized by the socket pair. Each socket pair subscription comes with an unlimited number of guests that can be run on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, VMware, or Microsoft HyperV. These subscriptions are also stackable and can be purchased with Standard or Premium Support.

Additionally, Red Hat is enriching the support offerings included in its subscription service, the level of which, as always, is selected by the customer to match the nature of their workloads. Standard Support now includes access to Red Hat Software Collections, which delivers the latest, stable releases of key open source runtime software, including languages like Perl and Ruby and databases like MariaDB and MySQL, on an accelerated release cadence separate from Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Premium support adds Extended Update Support to extend the life cycle of mission-critical deployments, offering the long-term stability and predictability required by enterprise applications.

Jim Totton, vice president and general manager of Red Hat’s Platform Business Unit shared his thoughts on today’s announcement:

“We believe the purchasing process should  align well to both your IT deployment architecture  as well as bring the agility needed in today's rapid business innovation environment. Today’s enterprise infrastructures include a dynamic mix of physical, virtual and cloud deployments, and our customers need a streamlined process that allows them to quickly and easily adapt subscriptions at the speed of business, without having to constantly restart the buying cycle when requirements change and a workload needs to move. To answer this need, we created a simple and transparent way to purchase Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions that provides the customer with control over their  deployment decisions.”

With these new subscription offerings, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is primed to support nearly every conceivable technology implementation, whether customers are keeping operations in-house, fully committing to the cloud or taking an open hybrid cloud approach.

To learn more about Red Hat Enterprise Linux, please visit http://www.redhat.com/products/enterprise-linux/.

[1] Movement of Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions to public clouds made available through Red Hat’s Cloud Access Program