Red Hat Infrastructure Strategy Spans Virtualized, Cloud and Appliance Deployments

Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced its strategy to solve the key problems facing IT by enabling increased operational choice, flexibility and efficiency. Increasing IT complexity and server capacity, coupled with application proliferation, requires new automation paradigms that allow CIOs to handle rapidly changing business needs. As the leading open source infrastructure company, Red Hat uniquely enables customers to automate and simplify their Linux infrastructure, allowing any application to run on any server, at any time.

"With new deployment models and technologies making corporate IT deployments much more dynamic, applications are no longer tied to a single server. Linux Automation simplifies that complexity, providing a unified platform for application execution, management and orchestration," said Scott Crenshaw, vice president, Enterprise Linux Business at Red Hat. "Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the industry's fastest-growing operating environment because of superior performance, reliability, economics and customer support. Red Hat manages an installed base of millions via Red Hat Network. This experience guides our strategy for Linux Automation."

At the core of Red Hat’s Linux Automation strategy is the broad ecosystem provided by Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This allows customers to extract the greatest return on their IT investment by allowing them to deploy applications in the way that meets their business needs most effectively. This includes standalone servers, virtual servers, on-demand "cloud" computing environments and appliance-based solutions - all with a common set of development, deployment, management and automation tools. And software partners gain access to this entire ecosystem with a single application certification - "certify once, deploy anywhere." Red Hat manages the complexity of these environments so that customers and ISVs can automate core functionality, deployment and management processes consistently and efficiently across their entire infrastructure.

Red Hat’s Linux Automation strategy covers all facets of the IT environment necessary to enable any application to be run anywhere, at any time. It creates an infrastructure which is built for automation, including virtualization, identity management, high availability and performance capabilities. The strategy will deliver a rich set of automation, management and orchestration tools – now available and under development – by Red Hat and its partners.

Customers can choose to deploy every Red Hat Enterprise Linux-certified application on the widest range of environments in the industry, including:

• Standalone server systems, scaling from the smallest single-processor systems to the largest servers (including 1,024 processor multi-core servers and mainframes).
• Virtual servers, which can provide improved service levels, operation flexibility and efficiency through features such as live migration, dynamic resource allocation, high availability and clustering. Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides the industry's highest performance, complete virtualization solution, for no additional charge.
  • Released today, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 provides significant new virtualization capabilities, including performance enhancements for Microsoft Windows-based guests.
  • Red Hat Network has been extended to provide seamless management and automation across physical and virtual servers.
• Cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service deployments allow customers to seamlessly extend their compute resources outside the walls of their data center into "the cloud" to provide an on-demand infrastructure that scales up or down to meet their business needs.
  • Red Hat today announced the beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). This collaboration makes all the capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Linux available to customers on Amazon’s proven network infrastructure and datacenters.
• Software appliances allow ISVs to distribute their applications as complete pre-packaged solutions, with the operating system included, to simplify deployment, management and maintenance.
  • Announced today and planned for availability in the first half of 2008, Red Hat’s Appliance Operating System and Appliance Development Kit uniquely enable and simplify a wide range of deployment options, including:
    • Fully featured application stacks available from ISVs or through Red Hat Exchange.
    • Lightweight portable media solutions – self-contained, pre-provisioned media such as USB keys and live CDs.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux applications can be executed on Microsoft Windows Viridian servers using the Red Hat Appliance Operating System, providing a new way for ISVs and customers to deploy more manageable applications.

The choice of an Automation platform influences the flexibility, compatibility and reliability of an organization's entire IT infrastructure. Infrastructure this critical should be based on open source and open standards, rather than proprietary alternatives that lock in customers and restrict flexibility and choice. Red Hat delivers a common infrastructure platform, which brings together the largest range of certified applications, the industry's most reliable platform and an open ecosystem of software developers, hardware vendors and customers to create innovative solutions now and in the future.

"Swisscom uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux as our virtualization platform," said Beat Buetikofer, Head of Strategic Relationship of Swisscom IT Services. "We value the ability to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux-certified applications in all application deployment models, including standalone servers and virtual servers, as well as to provide our customers capacity on demand. Add the high performance and compatibility with existing server hardware and applications, and the choice of Red Hat was easy."

For more information on Red Hat’s announcements today, including details about Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2 and Red Hat’s Appliance Operating System, see www.redhat.com/about/news.

About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 50 satellite offices spanning the globe. CIOs have ranked Red Hat first for value in Enterprise Software for three consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value study. Red Hat provides high-quality, low-cost technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to the integration of acquisitions; the ability of the Company to effectively compete; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company's growth and international operations; adverse results in litigation; the dependence on key personnel as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission's website at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions Risk Factors and Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations. In addition, the forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company's views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company's views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release.

LINUX is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. RED HAT and JBOSS are registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. and its subsidiaries in the US and other countries.