Red Hat and HP team Up for Industry-First Open Source Blade Bundle

Red Hat (www.redhat.com) and HP (www.hp.com) announced new developments to help customers deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux solutions on HP technology.

At the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco, the companies introduced an all-in-one software bundle designed for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux and HP BladeSystem environment. The offering is a result of Red Hat's collaboration in the HP BladeSystem Solution Builder program, which is designed to develop solutions to simplify and accelerate the deployment of blade infrastructures for customers.

In addition, Red Hat Network products will be offered with a specially designed HP BladeSystem toolkit and the companies will also team up on clustering by making Red Hat Global File System (GFS) available with HP Serviceguard for Linux.

"There has been tremendous growth in the demand for the lower-cost, more flexible scale-out architectures afforded by blade environments and Linux clusters," said Tim Yeaton, senior vice president of global marketing at Red Hat.

HP is the first vendor to support a solution bundle with Red Hat Network to keep systems up-to-date with the latest security patches and updates. Red Hat Network allows quick provisioning of blade servers as workloads change with business needs - repurposing and provisioning a blade server can be done in minutes instead of hours.

"Customers use Linux today for the flexibility and control of open source. As a solution platform, customers are utilizing HP BladeSystem for its efficient, modular and integrated infrastructure," said Rick Becker, vice president and general manager, BladeSystem, HP.

The HP and Red Hat bundle, available to customers purchasing an HP BladeSystem infrastructure, also includes HP tools to simplify deployment of multiple server blades within a blade enclosure.

Red Hat and HP also announced the collaboration to deliver a complete availability solution on Linux clusters with HP Serviceguard for Linux and Red Hat Global File System (GFS) for HP ProLiant servers. HP Serviceguard for Linux provides continuous access to applications and services while Red Hat GFS provides continuous and shared access to data through a single cluster-wide file system.