Red Hat and Cisco Combine Their Unique Capabilities to Usher in a New Model for Enterprise Computing
What You Will Learn
Red Hat is the world's leading supplier of open source solutions, offering a compelling lineup of an enterprise operating system, virtualization, middleware, and services that dramatically reduces costs while delivering the applications, performance, security, and manageability of traditional environments. Red Hat solutions support the most demanding workloads. The combination of the Cisco Unified Computing System™ and Red Hat software offers customers next-generation computing-beyond RISC, beyond UNIX, beyond yesterday's solutions.
Introduction
Red Hat Enterprise Linux powers a very wide range of the world's mission-critical, Internet, and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads, as well as the majority of the early cloud environments. Bringing the power of the Cisco Unified Computing System to these workloads offers customers a long-term platform for deploying powerful computing infrastructures.
Customers with the most demanding mission-critical requirements have been turning to Red Hat Enterprise Linux as their platform of choice since 2002. As older proprietary systems have declined, Red Hat solutions have provided the next generation of performance and features for enterprise customers-across the globe, in all industries.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux has enabled customers to reduce their IT costs through its ability to support innovative platforms such as the Cisco Unified Computing System and the integration of the latest software technologies, including features such as virtualization, which allows customers to consolidate their servers efficiently and increase their business agility, and features developed by the highly creative and fast-moving open source development model, with its exceptional capacity for innovation and outstanding product quality.
In the current economic times, every customer needs to make the right choice without compromise. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is that choice.
Red Hat Solutions and the Cisco Unified Computing System
Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform are Red Hat's flagship operating environment platforms. Used by many of the world's most critical application workloads today, they are fully certified for use with the Cisco Unified Computing System and offer an extensive ecosystem of application software and hardware. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform includes not only the base operating system, but high-availability and storage capabilities coupled with support for larger systems, features that other vendors often provide as expensive add-ons.
The Red Hat Enterprise Messaging, Realtime, and Grid (MRG) offers increased performance, reliability, and interoperability and faster computing for enterprise customers. Red Hat also offers a comprehensive JBoss Enterprise Middleware product line that supports enterprise application development, portal deployment, and a service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform.
Every product is backed by Red Hat's customer support and professional services, offering highly responsive, comprehensive, worldwide coverage.
Red Hat and Cisco Services
Cisco and Red Hat together offer a comprehensive range of services, from planning through deployment to ongoing support. Cisco has partnered with the Red Hat services team to provide customers with all levels of support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the Cisco Unified Computing System.
Cisco® Services provide a comprehensive suite of offerings to assist joint Cisco and Red Hat customers in building next-generation data centers, from architecture design to implementation of optimal sustainable operations.
Cisco Services can accelerate deployment time for clients implementing the Cisco Unified Computing System. These services provide knowledge transfer and best-practices deployment strategies, architecture, and configuration for Red Hat products, including the cluster suite and satellite server, optimized to run on the Cisco Unified Computing System. Cisco Services provide a single point of resolution for customer issues across all technologies that include Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the Cisco Unified Computing System.
Cisco Services provide continuous remote monitoring and management activities, resolving problems for the devices and applications in customer data centers, including Red Hat Linux on the Cisco Unified Computing System.
Coupled with the Cisco Unified Computing System, these solutions can be deployed into the world's most demanding computing environments, providing exceptional levels of service and price/performance.
Benefits of Red Hat Enterprise Linux in Combination with the Cisco Unified Computing System
• Superior performance and reliability at lower cost: Red Hat Enterprise Linux has a long record of producing industry-leading performance benchmark results, including, for example, more than 1 million transactions per minute (tpmC) with the TPC-C benchmark. This result was achieved at the incredibly low cost of less than US$2 per tpmC. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has also achieved leading results for SAP in both physical and virtual settings running the SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) benchmark. Customers can be assured that Red Hat Enterprise Linux supports their most demanding workload requirements and is depended on today by thousands of enterprise customers.
• Better server utilization and power and cooling efficiencies: Superior performance enables Red Hat Enterprise Linux solutions to reduce power consumption through improved server utilization. This increased efficiency directly translates into lower costs. Advanced new features in Red Hat Enterprise Linux take advantage of Intel hardware capabilities that support improved power management. All these efficiencies lead to lower costs and improved IT efficiency.
• Support for a broad range of hardware and software: Red Hat solutions are enhanced by an extensive ecosystem of certified hardware and software that is provided by leading industry vendors. This ecosystem support allows Cisco Unified Computing System customers to choose from a broad mix of hardware and software solutions to meet their requirements. Red Hat's "certify once, deploy anywhere" assurance lowers costs for certification and validation for vendors and customers and also accelerates virtual machine deployment for enterprise workloads.
• Access to the technical advances made possible by the innovative open-source development model: Red Hat Enterprise Linux solutions run on industry-standard components, bypassing the risk of vendor lock-in and enabling tremendous flexibility. This capability leads to lower costs and more rapid solution deployment, for faster return on investment (ROI) and improved competitiveness. It also means that customers are protecting their future and are not anchored to dead-end platforms with diminishing ecosystems.
Business Benefits
The combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the Cisco Unified Computing System can help companies achieve new levels of IT efficiency. The superior performance and unique integration of the Cisco Unified Computing System and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating environment, combined with the cost benefits offered by innovative hardware and open source software, provide customers with an exceptional price-to-performance ratio. This combined solution allows customers to run a broad array of critical workloads with a much lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
This price-to-performance profile is further advanced with improved power and cooling efficiencies, which can help companies avoid having to build expensive new facilities as their current infrastructure runs out of capacity. By reducing their energy and infrastructure costs, customers can make investments that align with their most critical business priorities.
If there is one certainty in IT, it is change, so it is comforting to know that platforms from Red Hat and Cisco are trusted, efficient choices with a broad ecosystem of hardware and software. Customers can build solutions for their particular business needs with the confidence that they are working with industry leaders.
