Red Hat to ship midlevel server OS

Linux company Red Hat Wednesday plans to announce a new midlevel server operating system in a bid to expand its sales beyond its high-end, enterprise-focused Advanced Server. It also announced the availability of its workstation operating system for 32-bit systems.

The new Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES product is designed to do less heavy lifting than Advanced Server, which has now been renamed Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS. The ES product runs on 32-bit Intel processors and is designed for network, file, print, mail, and Web applications, according to Red Hat. The AS product runs on both 32-bit and 64-bit systems.

Red Hat also announced that its workstation product, now called Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS, will be available on 32-bit systems. The software was previously available only on 64-bit Itanium systems through HP.

With the new ES and WS offerings, Red Hat hopes to expand its reach farther into its current clients’ enterprises, said Mark de Visser, the company’s vice president of marketing. While the Red Hat sales team is focused on enterprise customers, de Visser expects that resellers or computer manufactures may find a market for the ES and WS products with small and midsized businesses, who may be interested in the lower prices of the ES and WS products.

“This expands the market for us,” de Visser said of the ES and WS offerings. “We can span a much wider area of deployment. We expect to drive deeper into the corporations we already do business with.”

Pricing is based on annual subscriptions for levels of service. Advanced Server prices were $799 for a basic level of service, which included 90 days of installation support; $1,499 for a standard package, including five-day-a-week, 12-hour-a-day support, and a premium package, with seven-day, 24-hour support. Prices on Itanium systems are $500 higher.

With the launch of ES, the basic support option for AS will be discontinued. ES will be $349 for the basic support package, and $799 for the standard support package, with no premium package available.

WS, which Red Hat has aimed at the engineering workstation market, will be $179 per seat for basic support, and $299 for standard support. Again, prices are $500 higher for WS on Itanium.

“We are certainly expecting that this product will expand into a corporate desktop type of product,” de Visser added.

Red Hat Linux 8.0, the open source operating system that can be downloaded for free, continues to be available for desktops and low-level servers.

Red Hat is taking orders on both ES and WS. The two new products should ship within two weeks, de Visser said.