Polycom Chooses Red Hat to Manage Storage Clusters; Company Reduces TCO with Red Hat GFS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Business Wire, Sept 19, 2005

SAN FRANCISCO -- Red Hat, Inc. (NASDAQ:RHAT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions to the enterprise, announced today that Polycom has chosen Red Hat Global File System (GFS) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux to accelerate the software development cycles for two key product lines by as much as 40 times over legacy UNIX systems.

Polycom, Inc. is the leading provider of Unified Collaborative Communications, which includes converged voice, video, web, and data solutions for emerging broadband networks. As the marketshare leader, Polycom is at the center of the industry shift to broadband networks. IP networks enable the proliferation and convergence of richer communications, including video, and are fast becoming the foundation for business around the world.

Needing to improve the speed of development for voice and video conference product lines, Polycom migrated to Red Hat GFS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Development builds were taking longer than desired, and the UNIX SMP system was not scaling to meet the team's requirements. With the submission of simultaneous builds, the delays were significantly impacting the development timeline.

"Reducing build times, processing multiple builds, and having a reliable infrastructure was critical to the video product development group at Polycom. With Red Hat GFS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we not only achieved those goals, but also reduced our TCO and saved tens of thousands of dollars by migrating away from a proprietary Unix environment," said Alan Alford, Senior IT Operations Manager at Polycom.

Red Hat GFS is the open source cluster file system designed for high-performance enterprise workloads, such as Oracle RAC, web and application server clusters. GFS makes it possible to manage a cluster of servers and shared storage as if it were a single system, by providing a common cluster-wide filesystem. Having a common file system eliminates conflicts and problems that arise when different servers want to access the same file at the same time.

Today Red Hat also announced that Red Hat GFS has received broad industry support from partners Oracle, NetApp and EMC. For more information on Red Hat GFS, visit http://www.redhat.com or call 866-2-REDHAT.

About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat, the world's leading open source and Linux provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with satellite offices spanning the globe. Red Hat is leading Linux and open source solutions into the mainstream by making high quality, low cost technology accessible. Red Hat provides operating system software along with middleware, applications and management solutions. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide and through top-tier partnerships. Red Hat's open source strategy offers customers a long term plan for building infrastructures that are based on and leverage open source technologies with focus on security and ease of management. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com

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