Red Hat, IBM Provide Performance and Value

fact sheet Vendor: Red Hat, Inc. (www.redhat.com) Vendor's Information: About Red Hat Enterprise Linux About Red Hat, Inc.

Businesses need an IT infrastructure that will simultaneously carve out costs today and allow them to expand and compete aggressively when the economic picture improves. Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® running on IBM® Power Systems can help users do both. In addition to helping businesses survive the current economic downturn by improving hardware utilization, reducing energy consumption, and increasing employee productivity, Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the IBM Power System provides the high performance, scalability, and modularity businesses need to thrive going forward.

IBM and Red Hat have been partners for more than a decade, collaborating with and supporting each other to deliver value and innovation to their joint customers around the world. Both companies are committed to open source in general and Linux in particular. Red Hat is the single largest contributor to the Linux operating system in the world, and IBM is the largest hardware contributor, according to the Linux Foundation.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is supported as a Tier 1 operating system on the IBM Power Systems family. Customers can choose one-stop shopping that includes contracting for support for both the hardware and the operating system from IBM. Or, if they prefer, they can purchase Red Hat Enterprise Linux independently and receive support directly from Red Hat.

A rapidly rising number of companies are achieving significant competitive advantage by running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM Power Systems. This hardware/operating system combination's virtualization, energy-saving, and productivity-enhancing capabilities can help customers in a number of ways.

• Reduce costs: The increased performance and 60 to 80 percent higher utilization improvements due to virtualization means customers need fewer and smaller systems overall. They'll see a significant decrease in management overhead, software licensing, energy usage, and other expenses as well. And by moving Linux workloads onto a single Power System, IT employees can do more with less, reducing overall administrative costs. According to IDC, the payback period for a Linux-IBM Power Systems implementation—including hardware, software, consulting services, training, and IT staff to manage the server platforms—was just 6.3 months.
  
  
• Enable IT service excellence: Better reliability and serviceability means mission-critical Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems and applications are available when users need them. The ability to dynamically shift resources allows customers to be responsive to their needs for the highest priority applications.
  
  
• Minimize risk: Systems scalability, on-demand capabilities, and seamless upgrades mean customers can rapidly respond to shifts in market dynamics by keeping your business-critical systems always available. Additionally, disaster recovery capabilities protect businesses from unanticipated events—both internal and external.

Amidst the current turbulent economic conditions, the value proposition of low-cost, high-value open source solutions resonates more than ever. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is recognized worldwide for its ease of use, high performance, security, and affordability, and is seeing unprecedented acceleration of adoption over alternative platforms. Because thousands of independent software vendor (ISV) applications have been certified on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, commercial off-the-shelf software (COTS) applications are readily available. And Red Hat's dominance in the market means that businesses can easily find the skills and resources you need to support your business.

IBM Power Systems allow users to do more with less. Their virtualization capabilities let systems dynamically share processors, memory, and I/O across operating environments, increasing utilization by more than 60 percent, reducing energy costs 60 to 80 percent, and rapidly responding to changing business needs. By supporting end users with around-the-clock availability and reliability, businesses get the most from their IT infrastructure at a cost lower than they could have imagined.