Red Hat and HP expanded their collaboration to drive the next generation of converged server, storage and networking infrastructure solutions with the launch of open source software.

Red Hat announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, the foundation of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio of solutions. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 is available on HP BladeSystem and HP ProLiant servers. With this combination, customers can take advantage of an open source, standards-based virtual infrastructure that provides scalability and security capabilities. Additionally, enterprises will be able to leverage management capabilities offered by both companies. In the future, customers can expect increasing levels of management integration between the system and operating environment to further drive administrator productivity.

“We are excited about the future opportunities with HP to build new platforms that will bring customers to virtualization and cloud computing,” said Scott Crenshaw, vice president of platform technologies at Red Hat. “The BladeSystem Matrix solutions will ultimately enable companies to accelerate complex IT projects, simplify daily tasks and lower costs across the data center.”

Customers seeking the economic benefits of cloud computing with the ease of use, reduced costs, and increased flexibility of a converged infrastructure need to look no further than HP and Red Hat for a cost-effective, industry-standard solution.

The HP BladeSystem Matrix is a “cloud infrastructure in a box” that brings the economics, scalability and response times of the cloud to diverse applications across customers’ data centers.

“Organizations are looking to deploy open source strategies to take their infrastructures and their businesses into the future,” said Scott Farrand, vice president of Infrastructure Software and Blades at HP. “Together with Red Hat, HP BladeSystem Matrix provides companies with a cost-effective infrastructure solution that simplifies management, increases resource utilization and speeds deployment of technology services to drive business growth.”

Customers can obtain increased performance improvement and cost savings by deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and JBoss Enterprise Middleware on HP ProLiant G6 platforms. They also can get a single point of accountability for the purchase and support of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on HP systems.