HP assumes all support for Red Hat products

HP took steps to align itself closer to the Linux/open source crowd last week by announcing that it is now a one-stop-shop for Red Hat Linux servers, offering deployment, service and support.

HP signed an agreement to become a Red Hat global services provider. This means HP will now preconfigure its hardware with all of Red Hat’s enterprise products, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS for high-end data center servers, Enterprise Linux ES for midrange and smaller departmental servers and Enterprise Linux WS for personal workstation and desktop deployments. HP will support Red Hat software on Intel’s 32-bit and 64-bit Itanium architectures for both workstations and servers.

While HP has sold and supported Red Hat servers and workstations for a while, support for HP’s Linux products was previously shared between Red Hat and HP. Now, HP will take on 100% of the support of its Linux servers.

According to a recent IDC report, HP shipped the most preconfigured Linux servers (29.5%) in the fourth quarter of 2002. The company beat out IBM, which was second, and Dell, which came in third. HP says Linux was a $2 billion business for the company in 2002. 

HP Linux customers include Amazon.com, which uses HP Linux Web servers to interface with its HP Unix backend systems, and the movie company Dreamworks, which uses Linux workstations from HP to create high-resolution digital images and animation for its films.