Dell South Africa and Red Hat announced an alliance to accelerate commercial adoption of the Linux operating system and to support businesses building Internet infrastructures. Linux is one of three strategic operating systems Dell factory installs and supports globally.
Enterprise product marketing manager at Dell South Africa, Sean Wainer, says the agreement outlines joint development programmes, expanded global services and marketing initiatives.
"This alliance addresses the huge customer demand for Web servers and appliances, providing a strategic advantage in how Dell builds, deploys and services global Linux solutions," elaborates Wainer.
Through the One Source Alliance, Dell and Red Hat will expand their direct engineering relationship to address the immediate, high-volume business opportunity in the Internet infrastructure build-out. "We will focus on core operating system developments in the areas of reliability, availability, manageability and security to support the maturation of Linux," explains Wainer.
According to this agreement, Red Hat will use Dell PowerEdge servers and Dell Precision workstations as its primary development and certification platforms, with new features for Red Hat Linux to be tested on Dell equipment, then submitted back to the open source community for further validation and testing.
Wainer expects this co-development and testing to provide Dell a time-to-market advantage in offering the latest versions of Red Hat Linux to customers. Dell will also work closely with Red Hat on Linux 64 as well as independent software vendors in porting applications to Intel`s IA-64 architecture.
Dell and Red Hat will create special Linux service and support offerings to meet the extensive needs of commercial customers, says Wainer. "These include technical support, technical consulting, Dell Plus and technology solution centres.
Colin Tenwick, vice president of Red Hat, EMEA, says: "Partnering with Dell, a company that has tremendous momentum in providing e-business solutions world-wide, is a critical step in driving broad commercial acceptance of Linux. It demonstrates significant commitment to delivering a complete framework of global service and support today, and to the continued development of Linux for a broad range of computing applications."
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