Red Hat, Intel Launch Global Solutions Program

virtualization

The Raleigh, N.C., Linux software leader will offer tools and facilities to help customers and partners plan, develop and deploy Linux-based solutions, and Intel will provide resources and equipment.

The program centers will be used for pilot projects of Intel's on-processor Virtualization Technology on Fedora Core 5 and the forthcoming Red Hat Enterprise 5, which uses the Xen hypversior.

The program operates online and at three major hubs in Red Hat facilities at McLean, Va., Mumbai, India, and Munich, Germany. The McLean location is up and running as of this month, and the other two hubs and another 14 satellite offices will go live during the second half of 2006, said Bret Hunter, director of partner marketing at Red Hat.

The hubs will be equipped with servers and desktops supplied by Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel, including Itanium 2 and Xeon servers, Pentium4-based desktops and Intel Centrino mobile PCs.

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Red Hat participates in Linux solution centers run by IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Dell, but this is the first homegrown effort by the Linux company to open solution centers to customers and partners.

Red Hat's Hunter said customers and partners need a place to do proof-of- concepts and demonstrate the value of technologies such as virtualization.

"People want to see it in action," Hunter said during an interview at LinuxWorld in Boston Tuesday.

For instance, the program will provide a channel and vertical product definition service. As part of this, Red Hat and Intel will work together to define and test hardware and software solutions specifically for resellers and specific vertical markets, Red Hat said.

The program will offer a variety of other services including training and knowledge centers, proof-of-concept support, reference solutions and certified solution stacks, application testing and porting and advanced knowledge projects.

On Monday, Novell and IBM launched a series of Linux solution stacks for customers. Novell recently launched its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 with Xen.