RedHat Enterprise Linux

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the cornerstone of the company’s open source architecture. Initially launched in 2002, Red Hat Enterprise Linux can be found in the majority of Fortune 500 environments, and is renowned for performance, value and reliability. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the premier operating system for open source computing. It’s sold by annual subscription, runs on seven system architectures, and is certified by top enterprise software and hardware vendors.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a subscription offering, renewable one year after date of purchase. All Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions bought through this special offering will be purchased at 50% off for the first year, and will also renew for the second year at 50% off. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is offered as a per physical system annual subscription. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is largely composed of free and open source software, but is made available in a usable, binary form (such as on CD-ROM or DVD-ROM) only to paid subscribers. As required, Red Hat releases all source code for the product publicly under the terms of the GNU General Public License and other licenses.

Software technical support (phone support) for RHEL 5 will be bundled with the RHEL 5 subscriptions. This approach supports the matching service level requirement of our agreement with Red Hat. Software appliances allow ISVs to distribute their applications as complete pre-packaged solutions, with the operating system included. This broadens the ISVs’ market reach while minimizing their development and support costs. Oracle is not staying inline with RHEL, they have essentially forked away from RHEL when they started changing version numbers. It is no longer a rebuild of RHEL and I would not consider it “the same”.

Oracle could easily reproduce the RHEL product, as CentOS and others do, and bundle their own proprietary as well as open source product lines with support. In fact, it offers an even better value proposition but only if Oracle is able to deliver support and other value-adds to make it worthwhile to their customers. Virtualization lets you maximize your resources and increase deployment flexibility and responsiveness. Virtualization dramatically enhances the value of Red Hat Enterprise Linux due to its ability to reduce IT costs through consolidation and increase IT flexibility and responsiveness. Several Red Hat white papers are available that describe how customers can benefit from virtualized environments. Virtualization can be used to dedicate spare capacity on other systems to the cluster with no side effects or disruption to the other workloads running on that system. For example, ordinary desktop and workstation computers could be used during the day for their normal activities, but at night they could be joined to the cluster.