Red Hat Launches New Maintenance Service

Red Hat has launched a new software maintenance service, Extended Update Support.

Company officials said the new service offers customers extended service level support and cost savings by allowing them to standardize on one Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment for up to 18 months. That is up to three times the industry standard, company officials said.

For example, it would allow a customer to choose to standardize on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 for up to 18 months instead of only for the approximately 6-month period until 5.3 is available, the company said. Benefits include saved time and money with reduced need for testing and revalidation of software stacks, and reduced risk and better service with the ability to stably run critical systems without disturbance for longer periods of time, Red Hat said.

In a blog post about the new service, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL5) team said that what some customers have found is that every time they introduce hardware or software updates in their environment, they incur two costs:

"First, they have to re-validate all of the software stacks running on the affected operating system on the specific hardware. They do this to make sure that everything will run smoothly with the update and to guard against breaking anything when they release the update into production.

"Second, whenever they introduce change into their datacenter, they have to disturb running production systems. This introduces risk and could affect service levels, especially for mission-critical systems, as the change may cause the running system to have performance problems, or worse, go down."

The new maintenance service addresses both of these concerns, the company said. Moreover, EUS is an add-on offering for a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription and is available to customers with 100 or more RHEL subscriptions today. Customers can purchase it directly from Red Hat or through our channel partners.