Top reasons to choose

red hat enterprise linux

3 The top 10 enterprise applications run on enterprise linux

4 The most demanding applications run better on red hat enterprise linux

5 enterprise linux is robust, scales well, and is more reliable

6 enterprise linux is secure

7 Red hat partners with hardware vendors

8 Enterprise linux supports standard datacenter management tools

9 everyone benefits from red hat’s strategic partnerships

10 red hat training and support

11 enterprise linux is ahead of the curve

www.redhat.com
 Top Reasons to Select Red Hat Enterprise Linux

You probably already know that some of the largest and most demanding companies trust Red Hat to drive
the IT infrastructure behind their successful businesses. It’s easy to see why: An Enterprise Linux-equipped,
industry-standard x86 server was the first and only operating platform to exceed one million transactions
per second in TPC-C benchmarks. We provide NSA-certified security that doesn’t require add-on tools. And
Enterprise Linux meets the highest standards of reliability with scalable performance.

It’s not just that Enterprise Linux runs your applications faster and
why red hat scales from small to very large systems. It is the backbone of a robust
enterprise linux? environment that powers the demanding applications you rely on to run
your company. Red Hat has a mature software stack based on decades
• Applications of technology collaboration that is tested and certified by a broad
• Performance ecosystem of certified applications and delivered with enterprise-class
support to customers. We have deep partnerships with major hardware
• Easy to deploy vendors to ensure that new devices are certified and supported as
• Great support soon as they enter the market so that customers get heightened
• Low cost performance results from their systems.

• Strategic partners
The industry evolves at a rapid rate. The flow of new hardware and
applications is a major attraction for many companies, but that rate
is difficult to manage directly. Red Hat acts as a buffer between
technology changes and our customers, providing a stable platform
with a long lifecycle, while allowing for rapid, non-disruptive updates
and patches for security and serious bugs.1

All these benefits are available in one reliable package: Red Hat
Enterprise Linux. One that is easy to purchase and deploy and
backed by world-class training and support to ensure you extract the
performance you need to outpace your competition. All this at a cost
that is lower than our competition.

We’ve also been receiving accolades beyond our technology and

products for our business successes. We’re a stable, profitable, publicly
traded company with deep roots from our 15 years in operation. Others
are noticing too–Forbes recently put us on its list of the 25 fastest-
growing software companies in America.

We are invested in your success, now and into the future. Because of
our relationships and expertise, we’re ahead of the curve. We thrive
on innovation and competition and use it to continually evolve into a
better organization.

1 Red Hat Linux Life Cycle: www.redhat.com/security/updates/errata/

2 www.redhat.com
 Top Reasons to Select Red Hat Enterprise Linux

The top 10 enterprise applications

run on Enterprise Linux
Over 85 percent of the top 50 ISVs in IDC’s recent forecast support Enterprise Linux,2 including Oracle, SAP,
IBM WebSphere, IBM Domino Lotus, SAS, DB2, JBoss, VMware, Apache, MySQL, and many others. They know
Enterprise Linux offers the complementary applications companies rely on for their enterprise solutions,
and that Enterprise Linux provides a high-performance, secure, and robust environment that will make their
applications meet customer expectations.

For example, SAP provides business integration and optimization for all sizes of enterprises, and SAP is
committed to providing its software on an open, standards-based platform–an ideal match for Enterprise
Linux. SAP is not just certified on Enterprise Linux but is also tightly aligned, with nightly system testing and
collaborative technical support for joint customers. All of the components necessary for building integrated
IT solutions are available and optimized in Enterprise Linux. From support of standardized encapsulation and
access provided by enterprise services orchestrated by application servers such as SAP’s NetWeaver and
IBM’s WebSphere, to Oracle in the data tier, industry leaders thrive in Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Building collaboration and

Red HAt APPLICATION STACK
APPLICATION PLATFORM
JBoss Seam JBoss Hibernate
JBoss Application Server
PHP
OPEN SOURCE DATABASE (MYSQL OR POSTGRESQL)
RED HAT ENTERPRISE LINUX
cooperation within an enterprise
requires a solution like IBM Lotus
Domino, a reliable, security-rich
APACHE messaging and collaboration
WEB SERVER environment that enhances
productivity, streamlines business
processes, and improves overall
PERL
business responsiveness. Through
the “Lotus on Red Hat” initiative,
the firms have teamed up to
implement an open collaboration
solution for some of the world’s
largest and most demanding
organizations.3

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, featuring integrated virtualization technology,4 you can run any certified
application and take advantage of the underlying Enterprise Linux performance, confident that your
applications will run properly.5 Of course, we enable you to run Enterprise Linux on other virtualization
platforms such as VMware or Microsoft Hyper-V and still gain the Enterprise Linux performance edge
because we are committed to providing interoperability for our customers.

Many ISVs are strong supporters of open standards and take pride in providing their solutions on Enterprise
Linux. Customers benefit from not only world-class solutions and the full complement of support and
service, but cross-platform support that increases choice and lowers cost. These companies understand that
their solutions are stronger by being available on the platforms their customers trust and demand.

2 Worldwide Software 2008–2012 Forecast Summary (www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=213259)

3 Lotus on Linux (www.lotusonredhat.com)
4 RHEL 5 Virtualization (www.redhat.com/rhel/virtualization)
5 Running Your Applications on the Red Hat Virtualized Platform: What Partners Need to Know
(www.redhat.com/f/pdf/isv/ISV_Virtualization_update.pdf)

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 Top Reasons to Select Red Hat Enterprise Linux

The most demanding applications

run better on Red Hat Enterprise Linux
There’s no more challenging place to run applications than in an enterprise datacenter. From interfacing with
the external world, to working with enormous sets of data, to running the business logic that is the engine of
your company--application performance is critical. To compare Enterprise Linux-based performance to that
of our competition, it’s useful to look at industry-standard benchmarks. Here are two examples:

• In August 2008, Enterprise Linux on an IBM standard server recently broke the barrier of one million
transactions per minute in a TPC-C benchmark,6 the best performance ever recorded on an x86 server.
(The TPC-C benchmark is carefully crafted to model the activities of a business-to-business transactional
application server operating in a 24x7 environment).

• In February 2009, another record fell to a system using Enterprise Linux,7 this time running on VMware in
a SPECweb2005 benchmark that models web server performance in response to standardized banking,
ecommerce, and support workloads. Looking closer into those results, out of the top 15 systems, only the
fifth-place finisher was not running Enterprise Linux.

These benchmarks are used to

performance vs. price compare different operating
system and hardware platforms,
and the leading results with
18,000,000
Enterprise Linux prove that it
provides better performance and
16,000,000 will maximize the value of your
hardware.
14,000,000

12,000,000
However, because these
benchmarks use standardized
PRICE (USD)

10,000,000
workloads, it is possible your
applications and workloads may
8,000,000

provide somewhat different

6,000,000 results. Here, Enterprise Linux has
an advantage that is not available
4,000,000
from some of the competition:
2,000,000 tuneability. The operational
behavior of Enterprise Linux can
be optimized across a very large
0

0 1,000,000 2,000,000 3,000,000 4,000,000 5,000,000 6,000,000 7,000,000

PERFORMANCE (tpmC) set of parameters, including

kernel operation, disk operation,
which system processes run, etc.

The bottom line is that Enterprise Linux performance is excellent out-of-the-box, and with tuning can make
that performance even better.

6 IBM—first to break the barrier of 1 million transactions per minute on TPC-C benchmark—achieves industry milestone for x86-64
performance (ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/eserver/benchmarks/news/newsblurb_x3950M2-8P_DB2_tpcc_081908.pdf)
7 VMWare Sets Performance Record with SPECweb2005 Result
(blogs.vmware.com/performance/2009/02/vmware-sets-performance-record-with-specweb2005-result.html)

4 www.redhat.com
 Top Reasons to Select Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Enterprise Linux is robust,

scales well, and is more reliable
Raw performance in a controlled environment is an important means of judging an operating system, but it
doesn’t tell the whole story of how well an operating system behaves--particularly in the real world. Today’s
critical business applications are expected to be available 24x7 and withstand bursts of unexpected activity.
Moreover, demand typically grows over time, and systems are upgraded and expanded to meet those needs.
Minimizing the disruption of that growth with designed-in scalability saves time and money.

Enterprise Linux scales on all levels: multi-core processors scale well with Enterprise Linux in SAP
benchmarks,8 and Enterprise Linux scales from laptop systems to blade and rack environments, to the
largest SMP servers, and to mainframes. Hardware can be upgraded with additional processing and storage
power and Enterprise Linux will scale along with that growth, automatically.

Anecdotally, Linux has always

oracle 10g performance on rhel been known as a reliable system.
Stories of servers being up until
power supply problems forced
350
them down are common. But
the Yankee Group’s second
300
annual Server Operating System
Reliability survey 9 provides
250
objective documentation of the
reliability of Enterprise Linux. It’s
important to note that the Yankee
THOUSAND of TPM

200

Group survey polled 400 users

from 27 countries worldwide–
150

users in real-world data centers.

While benchmarks give a
100
normalized and repeatable view,
real-world experiences expose
50
robustness–how systems operate
in difficult and unpredictable
0

0 5 10 15 20 25 30
situations. It is here that the
NUMBER of CORES strongest distinction is drawn
between Red Hat Enterprise Linux
and Microsoft Windows.

Robustness has been designed into Enterprise Linux. It is a result of its prime design principle, small is
beautiful. It is more robust to build a set of cooperating small modules than one large monolith that must
serve many masters. Complexity increases with size, and complexity increases risk.

8 Making Multi-core Performance Truely Scalable (redhatonintel.com/technology/art_scalable_perf.htm)

9 2008 Server OS Reliability Survey (www.iaps.com/2008-server-reliability-survey.html)

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 Top Reasons to Select Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Enterprise Linux is secure

Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Linux in general, has a strong security reputation, and for good reasons:

1. Enterprise Linux is NSA certified at the highest level.10 It is engineered from the start for robustness and
safety. And Red Hat continues to work closely with the CERT to stay aware of emerging threats.

2. Because of the pervasive concern about security and solid engineering practices, Enterprise Linux
doesn’t require costly add-on third-party tools to patch holes in the security fabric.

3. Rather than open source code being more vulnerable, many more critical eyes evaluate the code and
verify its robustness. This constant and wide review makes it almost impossible for “trap doors” or other
coded-in flaws to be distributed into production.

4. In a world where new threats can emerge within minutes, the community approach to development and
the independence (and updatability) of individual components is a major benefit. Resolutions to new
threats are developed, tested, and deployed to customers at Internet speed.

Some have argued that Linux hasn’t had the same security problems as some of its competition because it
isn’t as big a player, and as it continues to succeed it will show the same weaknesses. But Red Hat and Linux
aren’t new, hackers are attracted to challenges, and the NSA knows what it is doing. Red Has is more secure.

10 IBM and Red Hat Achieve highest Security Certification for Linux on IBM Servers
(www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/21742.wss)

6 www.redhat.com
 Top Reasons to Select Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Red Hat partners with hardware vendors

When Red Hat works with hardware vendors, it’s not just to bring timely and thorough hardware support to
our customers. These collaborations lead to synergistic and integrated hardware and software enterprise
solutions in areas such as virtualization, real-time systems, and the highest performance servers available
(and that doesn’t include the many software collaborations between Red Hat and those same vendors).

Red Hat works at several levels to stay ahead of the curve. Most importantly, it drives industry initiatives
to galvanize new technologies and participates in industry working groups 11 and consortia 12 to maintain its
lead in awareness of standards and trends. Red Hat collaborates directly with specific hardware vendors
to ensure that new hardware is supported upon introduction. This enables market-making hardware
capabilities, such as virtualization, to be exploited fully by the operating system and the customer. These
activities have built deep and long-standing relationships with the largest hardware companies, including
Intel, IBM, and AMD.

Some examples of the results of these partnerships:

hardware Partners • Collaboration between Intel and Red Hat led to developments inRed
Hat Enterprise Linuxthat provide a comprehensive virtualization
environment at lower initial and operating costs, with low
complexity and risk. Red Hat worked with Intel to feed these next-
generation technologies into the upstream open source community
that feeds all server vendors, ensuring that it was broadly
reviewed and tested. The resulting premium platform is a robust,
high-performance solution that scales from mobile to desktop to
server hardware from Intel--all running the same Enterprise Linux
platform.

• The long-standing partnership between AMD and Red Hat proved

critical to a smooth evolution from 32-bit to 64-bit computing
for x86 processors. The results of this collaboration were also
provided to the upstream community, benefiting all application
vendors migrating to 64-bit support on Linux. When coupled with
Enterprise Linux, AMD’s innovative processor technology provides
high-performance and stability that is delivered with exceptional
efficiency and low cost.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux balances innovative solutions with application

stability by supporting the Application Binary Interface (ABI) and with
product lifecycle management, allowing exploitation of new hardware
while minimizing changes at the application level.

After this discussion of forward-looking hardware accommodation, it almost goes without saying that Red
Hat has the broadest support of legacy hardware available.

11 Red Hat is a founding member of the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol Working Group (jira.amqp.org/confluence/
display/AMQP/Advanced+Message+Queuing+Protocol), which has defined the first open messaging standard.
12 Red Hat was a member of the Open Source Development Labs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Open_Source_Development_Labs), which included hardware vendors such as IBM, HP, Intel, and NEC.

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 Top Reasons to Select Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Enterprise Linux supports standard

datacenter management tools
From backups and disaster recovery to configuration and provisioning support, to more strategic business
service management--the major suppliers of datacenter management tools make their products available
under Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Having the same solutions available in your heterogeneous datacenter
allows you to leverage existing skill sets and maintain consistent management practices across all of your
operating systems. To complement our own enterprise management products, you’ll be able to choose from
the best-of-breed tool providers.

Here’s a brief sampling of the companies and offerings that are available under Enterprise Linux:

• IBM Tivoli Storage Manager: centralized, policy-based, enterprise-class, data backup and recovery
software

• Symantec NetBackup: an enterprise-level heterogeneous backup and recovery suite

• CA: a wide range of products that provide information technology management services

• BMC: Business Service Management BSM, a comprehensive approach and unified platform for running IT

• HP Business Technology Optimization (BTO): a suite of software applications that allow large-scale
system and network management of an organization’s IT infrastructure

• EMC: a wide variety of storage management and datacenter operations tools

• Net App: A range of solutions that include archive and compliance, backup and recovery, business
continuity, and security.

You can trust that Enterprise Linux provides the rich management environment to which you are already
accustomed.

8 www.redhat.com
 Top Reasons to Select Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Everyone benefits from Red Hat’s

strategic partnerships
When you use Enterprise Linux, you receive the benefits of the most thorough and transparent testing and
certification available. Red Hat partners with leading hardware manufacturers to ensure that on its first
day of release, new hardware is certified and works as well as hardware that has been in use for years. And
because platform testing requires thorough testing of applications, large and small, there is no better system
integration testing anywhere.

To fully appreciate how thorough our testing is, one must understand Red Hat’s partnership model and the
community that contributes to product quality. Red Hat has pioneered the On-Site Engineering Program,
where our partners place their employees inside our facilities to work with us every day. The flow of
knowledge and collaboration between experts means systems are developed at the highest level of quality
and problems are resolved efficiently.

Our close integration with hardware vendors also provides access to test environments that are out of reach
of most software companies. Single systems with a terabyte or more of memory, clusters of 128 processors,
10GB ethernet or Infiniband, and large storage arrays and clusters are often needed to provide testing,
debugging, and optimization of real-life systems.

One measure of quality is that Red Hat’s contributions to the open source kernel pool consistently exceed
those of any other single organization. In the spirit of open source, the entire open source community has
access to those improvements and can validate and test them. The combined size of the community, and the
breadth of different perspectives that it provides, far exceeds what any single organization could achieve.

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 Top Reasons to Select Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Red Hat Training and Support

Enterprise Linux is backed by industry-acclaimed training.13 Training on a new system starts in the Red Hat
On-Site Engineering Program, which distributes new product information through strategic partners to a
broad reach of customers. Training programs are made available during beta-test as part of the collaborative
community development process, fine-tuning its format and quality. By release, Red Hat Training has been
proven to be accurate and effective.

Hands-on training is backed by world-class enterprise support that is available 24x7, directly from Red Hat.
Red Hat also maintains a comprehensive knowledgebase14 that includes Linux tips, tutorials, and advice
available from a rich web support portal. You will never feel you’re alone in finding the solutions you need,
how to deploy them, or how to tailor and tune them for your specific requirements.

Red Hat takes responsibility

IDC MARKETScAPE for solving your problems. We
I.T. TRaining line of business eliminate “finger-pointing”
in multiple vendor support
situations with our Cooperative
PARTICIPANTS CONTENDERS MAJOR LEADERS Resolution Center, which includes
PLAYERS
Joint Escalation Labs with key
ecosystem partners. In the
+ RED HAT unlikely case that you need it,
we provide transparency in
+ LAWSON management contacts.15
+ SAP
CAPABILITIES

+ SUN
For us, the bottom line is: “If we
- HP ship it, we support it.”
+ IBM

+ CISCO + MICROSOFT

+ SYMANTEC

+ ORACLE

STRATEGIES

13 IDC Marketscape: Worldwide IT Education and Training 2009 Vendor Analysis

(www.redhat.com/f/pdf/training/IDCVendorAnalysis2009.pdf)
14 Red Hat Knowledgebase (kbase.redhat.com/faq/en)

10 www.redhat.com
 Top Reasons to Select Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Enterprise Linux is ahead of the curve

What does it mean to be ahead of the curve?

For Red Hat, it means anticipating the future of technology, and helping lead the way there –now. It means
ensuring all the pieces of the puzzle are in place, and achieving that by cooperation among communities.

Red Hat has been a pioneer in helping the enterprise take advantage of the collaborative, open source model
for developing technology. There is a tangible excitement to being a part of an open community comprised
of committed individuals who thrive on cooperation, are producing work of enormous value, and are
changing the world.

These philosophical and emotional themes provide practical benefits. The open process multiplies the
efforts of the team. Red Hat contributes to and leverages the results of the work of the “upstream” open
community that advances all Linux software–a model that does not exist in the proprietary world. Openness
within the community encourages each contributor to work that much harder and reach for better solutions.
The result is a product that is of higher quality from conception, therefore developed more quickly and
supported more thoroughly.

The community involves so many people and disciplines that there is always cross-pollination of ideas
and representatives of nascent technologies, leading to an inherent awareness of new directions and
opportunities. For this reason and by virtue of Red Hat being so wired into the community, Red Hat has a
distinct advantage.

It’s one thing for Red Hat to be confident about our role, our work, and our value to the enterprise, but the
commitment of companies such as IBM, Intel, AMD, Cisco, and many others to Red Hat and the open source
model is a ringing endorsement.

www.redhat.com 11
In Summary, while we build and support products, provide services, and create value–we have important
differences and advantages over other, traditional technology companies.

We’re backed by a large community of external software developers, many of whom are professionals who
work at competing companies. Linux itself is fundamentally non-proprietary, allowing more cooperation
between vendors and letting resources flow to applications that are of benefit to end-users.

Red Hat is a catalyst for collaboration among hardware, operating system, and applications developers, and
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the high-value result.

But one can simply consider Enterprise Linux on its pragmatic merits: A stable and full-functioned operating
system with a diverse and complete complement of applications. Scalable to hardware from laptops to the
largest clusters. Backed by deep relationships with hardware and software vendors. Supported by the best
training and support available.

Red Hat Sales and Inquiries North America

1-888-REDHAT1
www.redhat.com

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trademarks or registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. in the US and other countries. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. #1130571_0609