IBM and Red Hat yesterday announced a deal that will see the two companies collaborate on the development, sales, and support of Red Hat"s Linux Advanced Server operating system.
While the generic Red Hat Linux operating system is geared for desktops, workstations, and infrastructure workloads on modest servers with a minimum amount of services, the Linux Advanced Server edition of the Red Hat variant of Linux offers more scalability--up to eight processors in SMP servers--and more support and hand-holding than a small business or ISP would need. (A small business doesn"t need a lot of services, and ISPs probably know more about Linux and how to make it sit up and bark than do any of the commercial Linux distributors.)
The IBM-Red Hat deal follows fast on the heels of a number of partnerships that Red Hat has inked with IBM"s competitors in a number of different markets. In mid-August, we learned that Red Hat Linux is the core operating system that Sun Microsystems Inc is using in its new LX50 general purpose Linux servers. Only a few weeks before that, Dell Computer Corp and Red Hat announced an alliance to go after the installed base of Unix servers with a collection of migration services, capacity planning services, and platforms based on Red Hat Linux Advanced Server and Dell PowerEdge servers, and in June of this year, Dell, database maker Oracle Corp, and Red Hat ganged up to push the Linux-Oracle software stack on Dell iron into the enterprise. And at around the same time, Red Hat inked a deal with Hewlett Packard to push Advanced Server on the then-new "McKinley" Itanium 2 64-bit processors and on HP"s ProLiant machines and its QuickBlade and Powerbar blade servers.