Red Hat moves out from the server

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 13 Mar 2003 at 15:02

Linux vendor Red Hat launches two new Enterprise systems.

Linux vendor Red Hat has launched two new Enterprise systems seeking to edge out to workstations and appeal to corporate departments and smaller businesses.

'Everywhere throughout the enterprise there is a place to have Linux,' said a Red Hat spokesperson. 'You can now move your whole enterprise to Red Hat Linux.'

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS and ES are aimed at the workstation and entry level/departmental markets respectively and are essentially stripped down versions of Red Hat's Advanced Server, complete with support for X86 and Itanium 2 processors geared specifically for these different needs.

The WS workstation offering is aimed at the electronic design environment and does away with several server-specific packages but shares kernel, libraries, toolchain and admin tools with the Red Hat Enterprise family. It boasts certified support for industry standard software such as Cadence, Synopsys and Mentor and offers support clustering, for one to two processors and up to 4GB of memory.

The system comes with either Standard support that is available for 90 days between 9 to 5, Monday to Friday along with version upgrades through the Red Hat Network update online service, for $179 (£111), or with Premium support for $299 (£185) which is an annual subscription and promises a 4 hour response time and the Red Hat Network update online service.

The ES entry level system is positioned as a main server for small businesses or as a departmental server for say Web, mail or print serving. It matches Red Hat's AS system nearly feature for feature but handles only one or two processors and does not have round the clock support. The Standard package with the services outlined previously costs $349 (£216) and the Premium version $799 (£495).

Certified software partners are Adobe; Alias|Wavefront, EMC, BEA, Legato, Softimage, BMCsoftware, Lotus, Synopsys, Borland, Novell, Tibco, Oracle, Tivoli, Computer Associates, Reuters, Veritas, IBM DB2, IBM WebSphere, Rogue Wave Software and SAP. For a full list of supported software and hardware vendors see this Web site.

For more details visit the Red Hat Web site.