Red Hat Delivers Dramatic Cost Savings and Performance to World’s Most Demanding Mission-Critical Platforms

Advanced Mission-Critical Qualified Systems Establish Unprecedented Levels of Service, Support and Cost Savings For Critical Workloads on Linux

MALAYSIA, 19 November 2008 - Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the availability of a groundbreaking global offering combining substantially enhanced service levels with the proven advantages of Linux through the Red Hat Advanced Mission-Critical Program. The worldwide program was designed by Red Hat, with joint collaboration with Fujitsu on the mission-critical support framework, to provide unprecedented service levels, support and decade-long product lifecycles for participating Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers. Many organizations around the world today run their most business-critical applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The Advanced Mission-Critical Program expands the advantages of Enterprise Linux to customers requiring even greater service and support levels.

Today, Red Hat is leveraging its status as the supplier of one of the leading operating platforms in the world and its renowned performance, stability and security capabilities to lead the industry expansion of Linux to new applications and customers. Driven by customer demand, these capabilities are designed initially to meet the uniquely demanding, high-availability requirements of mission-critical customers in Japan.

Through the Advanced Mission-Critical Program, Red Hat offers greater assurance that customers’ hardware and software platforms are qualified and supported at levels previously available only on mainframe-class systems. Servers bearing the Advanced Mission-Critical Program logo can deliver substantially reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) that can save significant acquisition and operating costs, and heightened levels of service -- all with the flexibility of industry-standard platforms like Intel.

The opportunities provided by the Advanced Mission-Critical Program include:
l Reduced Operating Costs through less frequent application re-testing and reduced management and administration costs.
l Reduced Acquisition Costs by using industry-standard platforms for most mission-critical applications.
l Exceptional availability through industry-leading service levels that offer quicker problem resolution and support for critical workloads.

"Red Hat continues to transform what IT can deliver to the enterprise through the strategic use of Linux and open source. Advanced Mission-Critical systems represent a major milestone for the industry. We are the only Linux vendor to offer a mission-critical program of this kind," said Scott Crenshaw, vice president, Platform Business Unit at Red Hat. "This represents a new choice for customers running the most critical applications. It also demonstrates the powerful potential for Linux – from mainframes to small servers -- as the datacenter operating system of choice for customers. Red Hat is proud to lead the way in demonstrating once again that open source can benefit the entire enterprise.”

Fujitsu and Red Hat have been engaged in joint software development, marketing, sales, system configuration, support and application porting from other platforms since the start of their global alliance in May 2003. The Companies have since worked closely together to provide high-end, mission-critical solutions for customers around the world. In recognition of this collaboration, Fujitsu and Red Hat today also announced the support of advanced mission-critical customers in Japan.

"To accommodate high-availability required by mission-critical customers in Japan, Fujitsu has jointly developed the new Linux support service with Red Hat – one of the world’s leading open source companies. Combining the Mainframe expertise of Fujitsu and the enterprise Linux expertise of Red Hat, we are now able to provide our mission-critical customers a completely new option to choose from," said Kiyoshi Sensui, senior vice president, Server Systems Unit at Fujitsu. "We believe that this new service will also benefit mission-critical users worldwide."

Through its long partnership with Intel, Red Hat has taken advantage of the rapid evolution of Intel architectures and its growing capability to support high-scale applications.

"Intel has a successful track record of delivering highly reliable and scalable processors and platforms for mission-critical applications," said Pauline Nist, general manager of Mission-Critical Platforms at Intel. "Red Hat and Intel have together delivered performance, reliability and cost benefits to IT customers for years and we look forward to continued innovations on future Intel platforms."

To learn more about Red Hat’s Advanced Mission-Critical Program, visit http://www.redhat.com/promo/mc_program/.