RALEIGH, N.C., and SAN JOSE, Calif. - March 16, 2009 - Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, and Cisco today announced that they will work together to deliver Red Hat Enterprise Linux software with the Cisco Unified Computing System, a ground-breaking solution that helps customers deploy mission-critical applications in a virtualized, high-performance data center environment. In addition, Red Hat and Cisco will collaborate to deliver joint global sales and services as well as customer engagement, and to develop deployment and enablement tools for customers.

Facts/highlights

• Utilizing collaborative engineering and testing, the companies will combine the new Cisco Unified Computing System with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
• Cisco will act as an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) for Red Hat's Enterprise Linux platform to allow customers to purchase a complete solution from Cisco along with services and support.
• The Cisco Unified Computing System unites computational, network, and virtualization resources into a seamless system, simplifying its setup, helping customers to improve business metrics, and enabling timely resource provisioning.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is the trusted platform for running mission-critical application workloads, offering customers an easy-to-adopt, open alternative for enterprise computing. It offers a base operating platform, leading security and high-availability capabilities, and comprehensive networking capabilities.
• Red Hat's independent software vendor (ISV) ecosystem, including more than 3,000 certified applications, will enable customers to run thousands of Red Hat-certified applications on the Cisco Unified Computing System upon availability. In addition, with Red Hat's certify-once, deploy-anywhere certification program, its ecosystem of applications are enabled to run in both virtualized and non-virtualized environments.
• Red Hat and Cisco are also planning to certify the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization suite of technologies following its general availability. The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio will offer advanced hypervisor technologies built from Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) and a new suite of management tools.

Red Hat software running on Cisco Unified Computing

• The combination of the Cisco Unified Computing System and Red Hat software solutions offers customers a platform for deploying computing infrastructures that takes advantage of both companies' strengths, including Cisco's unique integrated device management, unified fabric and expanded memory technology available with the Cisco Unified Computing System and Red Hat's proven software technology.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 is certified to run on the Cisco Unified Computing System as a stand-alone operating system or as a guest operating system on VMware virtualization.

Supporting quotes

"Red Hat and Cisco have long collaborated in the open source community and today bring joint innovation to customers through the combination of our next-generation enterprise solutions," said Brian Stevens, CTO and vice president, Engineering at Red Hat. "Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization technologies power a wide range of the world's mission-critical, Internet and high-performance computing workloads, as well as the majority of the early cloud environments. Cisco's Unified Computing vision offers customers a long-term platform for deploying powerful computing infrastructures."

"Red Hat solutions run many of the world's most demanding computing environments and can take advantage of the high density of Cisco Unified Computing System," said Soni Jiandani, vice president of the marketing, server access and virtualization business unit for Cisco. "Cisco's scalable architecture enables more enterprise-class applications to run on a lower-cost system with half the physical infrastructure required, enabling our customers to grow their virtualized environments, improve business agility, and provide coherent security and network policies for both virtualized and non-virtualized environments."

Additional Resources:

• Red Hat and Cisco's relationship, visit www.redhat.com/promo/cisco.
• For more information about Red Hat Enterprise Linux, visit www.redhat.com/rhel and www.redhat.com.
• Video: Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat President and CEO, Remarks on Unified Computing
• Press release: Cisco Unified Computing System
• Press release: Cisco Open Partner Ecosystem

About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat, the world's leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 65 offices spanning the globe. CIOs ranked Red Hat as one of the top vendors delivering value in Enterprise Software for five consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value survey. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.