Red Hat, HP Partner to Bring Linux to BladeSystem

Hewlett-Packard and Red Hat are working to simplify blade deployment with an all-in-one software bundle for RHEL and the HP BladeSystem environment.

On Tuesday, Red Hat and Hewlett-Packard will be announcing an all-in-one software bundle designed for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux and HP BladeSystem environment.

The goal of this newest partnership between Red Hat Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. is to enable enterprise customers and ISVs to develop solutions to simplify and accelerate the deployment of blade infrastructures.

In addition to RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), the companies will offer Red Hat Network products via a customized HP BladeSystem tool kit. The pair will also offer clustering support with Red Hat GFS (Global File System) in a package with HP Serviceguard for Linux.

Together, the HP BladeSystem, the RHEL management bundle and the HP BladeSystem Integration Toolkit for Red Hat Network version 1.0 are designed to make it easy to deploy multiple servers within an HP BladeSystem enclosure.

Resource Library:

This bundle will, therefore, include multiple instances of RHEL and provisioning modules and Red Hat Network Proxy, which is available for the first time to HP customers.

"There has been tremendous growth in the demand for the lower-cost, more flexible scale-out architectures afforded by blade environments and Linux clusters," said Tim Yeaton, senior vice president of global marketing at Red Hat, in a statement.

HP is also, according to Red Hat, the first vendor to support a solution bundle with Red Hat Network that will keep systems up to date with the latest security patches and updates.

IBM, however, will also be showing off RHEL on its high-end BladeCenter blade servers, as part of its new Grid to Grow program at LinuxWorld. These systems will use Altair Engineering Inc.s PBS Professional as its default grid workload manager. Other grid managers, such as IBMs LoadLeveler, will also be available.

The companies claim that with Red Hat Network, a business will be able to repurpose and provision blade servers as workloads change with business needs—in mere minutes instead of hours.

"HP is proud to be the first to partner with Red Hat to offer a bundled Linux solution for blades—a winning combination of two technologies that deliver flexibility, performance and savings across the data center," said Rick Becker, HPs vice president and general manager for BladeSystem.

Click here to read about HP and Fujitsu blade servers running Linux.

"We are confident that these new integrated open-source bundles from HP and Red Hat will benefit customers looking for ease of management, greater performance and the cost benefits of Linux, and applaud the two companies for being the first in the industry to make this happen," said Aditya Apparao, vice president of Oracle Managed Services, at DataRoad, an Oracle Corp. managed service provider.

The RHEL and HP BladeSystem management bundle should be available in September 2005. HP will also release a bundle of HP Serviceguard for Linux and Red Hat GFS. This package is expected to be available this fall.

Check out eWEEK.coms for the latest open-source news, reviews and analysis.

Reader Comments: Red Hat, HP Partner to Bring Linux to BladeSystem >>> Be the FIRST to comment on this article!

>>> More Linux & Open Source Articles          >>> More By Steven Vaughan-Nichols