Red Hat Formally Announces 'Integrated Virtualization'; AMD, Intel, Network Appliance and XenSource Join Red Hat to Ensure Customers Receive the Full Benefits of Virtualization, from Red Hat's New Software and Tools to the Chipset

Business Wire, March 14, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO -- Red Hat (NASDAQ: RHAT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions to the enterprise, today formally announced its 'Integrated Virtualization' strategy. During a launch today in San Francisco, company executives detailed plans for creating a Red Hat virtualization environment and working with partners such as AMD, Intel, Network Appliance and XenSource to simplify virtualization deployment for customers. Red Hat announced it will support customers and partners with tools, services and technology previews that let customers deploy computing resources at the lowest possible cost while maximizing utilization of each resource over the long term.

"Conservative estimates show that servers typically operate at between 15 and 25 percent of CPU capacity, but with virtualization that could improved to 80 percent," said Brian Stevens, CTO at Red Hat. "Our customers, who already see Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the choice for lower cost of ownership, will be able to ride this next wave of virtualization to further reduce costs and increase operational efficiency. Red Hat's strategy is to methodically target and reduce every cost driver associated with deploying IT infrastructure, we believe integrated virtualization will be a major milestone in this effort."

Integrated Virtualization

Red Hat will tightly integrate virtualization capabilities with its operating system and ensure all aspects of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform, from management tools and installation to software management, will enable customers to deploy virtualized environments easily and effectively. Consistent with Red Hat's open source model, the company will provide seamless integration and support for the Xen virtualization technology developed by the open source community. Specific details of the integrated virtualization initiative include:

--A complete platform to implement server consolidation, reducing costs and improving service levels.

--A comprehensive development and QA environment, which allows developers to substantially reduce the time and complexity of writing and testing code on diverse target systems

--Support for hardware abstraction, which allows IT managers to reap the benefits of the latest hardware using existing software stacks, without the expense of extensive qualification and migration processes.

Product Roadmap

This month Red Hat will make Fedora Core 5 available, which will contain a preview of Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization technology. In the summer of 2006, Red Hat will make Virtualization Migration and Assessment Services available along with an Enterprise Virtualization beta. Red Hat Enterprise Linux v. 5, scheduled for general availability by the end of 2006, will feature fully integrated virtualization.

"By the end of this year the integration of Xen into Red Hat Enterprise Linux will result in several important customer benefits, including better support for consolidation; more flexible lifecycle management; and improved workload management and availability, said Tony Iams, Vice President of System Software Research at Ideas International, Inc. "Further, by making Xen a pervasive part of its Linux distribution, Red Hat will drive virtualization deeply into the mainstream."

Integrated Partnerships

AMD and Intel are working closely with Red Hat in its development and test labs to ensure their virtualization-enhanced chipsets are tightly integrated with the 'Integrated Virtualization' environment initiative. This tight integration will give Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers maximum software and hardware performance, as well as enabling support for legacy Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases running on upcoming releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Network Appliance's participation will ensure seamless integration with their storage solutions. The development relationship between Red Hat and XenSource will ensure Red Hat Enterprise Linux status as being best-in-class, including the enablement of XenSource management tools.

"Virtualization, a technology with it's roots in mainframe computing, is expected to bring new levels of performance, security and utilization to x86 systems, designed to delivering measurable business value to our customers," said Joe Menard, Corporate Vice President, Software Strategy, AMD. "As part of our ongoing efforts to collaboratively support the adoption of virtualization technology across our broad ecosystem, we are working with Red Hat to tightly integrate virtualization as a core technology in its Linux offerings, with full support for the AMD64 architecture and its hardware-enabled technology. This is what our customers are asking for, and we expect they will be very happy with the combination of Red Hat Integrated Virtualization on AMD64-based platforms."

Intel Virtualization Technology builds support for virtualization into the processor and chipset, helping accelerate industry innovation, and enhancing manageability, ease of use and security on server and client platforms. "Intel and Red Hat have a strong collaboration rooted around supporting customers in their advanced deployments of Linux and open source, and Virtualization is a key focus of that collaboration," said Richard Wirt, corporate vice president and general manager of Intel's Software and Solutions Group. "We have worked together so that the capabilities of Intel Virtualization Technology will be fully realized all the way through the Red Hat operating system. This collaboration is an example of our continued joint efforts to bring innovation to the IT industry."