Red Hat steps up enterprise push

Red Hat Enterprise Linux v4 marks the first firm's first operating system that is ready for any enterprise-class applications, Red Hat senior vice president of engineering Paul Cormier told vnunet.com at an event marking the launch at LinuxWorld in Boston.

"Customers are tired of being locked into relationships that are based on costs instead of value," he said.

Cormier added that, with Enterprise Linux v4 offering increased security and performance at a lower cost than competing Unix operating systems, this is the perfect time to switch.

The improvements are in large part a result of the 2.6 Linux kernel. Novell beat Red Hat to delivering the first enterprise Linux distribution based on the 2.6 kernel when it launched the SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 in August last year.

However, Cormier mostly courted current Solaris users, claiming that there is a major migration going on from Sun's operating system to Linux. To make it easier for them to switch, Red Hat also launched a version of its Red Hat Network management tool for Solaris.

There is currently a war looming between Sun Microsystems and Linux, he added. Red Hat's moves come after Sun last year launched Solaris 10 with which it hoped to court Linux users, and more recently in January released the source code.

But Cormier pointed out that Solaris does not have a developer community as large as that working on Linux. "There is more to open source than just looking at the code," he said.

The new Red Hat is a formidable competitor for Solaris, according to Evan Bauer, principal research fellow with the Robert Frances Group.

Although Solaris is currently good enough for most users, the analyst believes that Linux will win in the long run. "You should not run away from Sun just yet," he said.