The bundle brings together Raleigh, North Carolina-based Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux operating systems and Red Hat Network management technologies with HP’s BladeSystem servers and Integration Toolkit for Red Hat Network.
The bundle will make it easier to deploy and manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux on blade servers, and also solves a problem Red Hat has faced since it converted its basic Red Hat Linux distribution into the unsupported Fedora project.
That move opened up the Fedora development to a wider community but also presented large volume blade and rack server users – such as hosting providers and web-based businesses – with something of a dilemma. They wanted the support that came with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but did not necessarily want to pay the price.
It’s good that they walked away, it gave more revenue to us, Marcus Rex, Novell’s CTO of the Linux and open source platforms and services group, told ComputerWire recently. It remains to be seen what impact Novell’s OpenSUSE project will have on that dynamic.
Meanwhile, Red Hat’s EMEA director of marketing, Paul Salazar, admitted that the new discounted blade bundle was a response to that problem, and revealed that relationships with other blade server vendors are also in the works. He described HP as the first to go public.
The bundle is about more than just pricing, however. It sees the Red Hat Network Proxy hosted systems management offering and Provisioning Module delivered alongside multiple instance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to customers purchasing HP’s BladeSystem. The bundle is due to be available in September.
The two companies are also working together to deliver an availability solution for Linux clusters on HP ProLiant servers that makes use of HP’s ServiceGuard for Linux and Red Hat’s Global File System, GFS.
The combination of ServiceGuard’s application and services availability features and GFS’s cluster-wide data access functionality provides high availability for applications, services, and data, according to the companies.
The two products are supported together, with each company handling support for their product, while a bundled product bringing the two together will be available worldwide from HP in the autumn.
