Red Hat Desktop

Red Hat Desktop is the newest member of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux family. It provides a high-quality, full-featured client system that is suitable for use in a wide range of desktop deployments.

Although this product is aimed at the enterprise market, its useful whenever there is a need for a large number of desktop computers. The licenses are available in units of 10 or 50 seats (so if you are looking to install a small number of machines Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS is probably a better bet).

This product comes with all the usual support and backup that you'd expect from Red Hat. Updates are via the Red Hat network service. If you are interested in this product, please contact us for pricing and further details.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux

We sell the complete range of Red Hat enterprise level products. There are three basic products in this range. At the entry level, there is the WS (WorkStation) product which is designed for desktop use. Further up the range is ES (Enterprise Server) which is designed as a server for a small company or department. The AS (Advanced Server) product is the top of the range product for large servers.

There are three levels of support available, basic, standard and premium. You can select between basic and standard support for Red Hat Enterprise WS and ES. For Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS, you have the choice of standard support or premium support. With some products you have the option of buying 3 years of support up front which results in a discount to the cost. More information about support is available on Red Hat's web site.

A note about versions: although the current version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is at 4, version 3 and 2.1 are still available. Its wise to check with your application vendor in case they require a specific version of RHEL. Once you have a license for a particular product (AS,ES or WS) and level of support (basic, standard or premium) then you can upgrade (or revert if you wish) between the different versions at will. You can also change architecture (for example if you move up to a x86_64 based machine or an IBM pSeries) with no further cost. Although there is one exception to this which is the IBM s390(x) architecture for which there is a separate pricing structure.

Many of the enterprise level products are supplied as a subscription contract where what you actually receive is an email containing a "key" which allows you to download the software. Media kits are available for all products if required.

If you need to check that your hardware is supported by Red Hat Enterprise Linux, then you can find the information here. If you have any questions or require pricing, please don't hesitate to contact us.

Red Hat GFS

We can supply the Red Hat (formerly Sistina) GFS cluster filesystem and we offer a full consultancy service where required. Please call or email for details.

GFS is a filesystem which is aimed at Linux clusters where there is symmetric access to storage from all the participating nodes. It is part of Red Hat's cluster infrastructure. The access to storage is usually via some kind of SAN, often fibrechannel, but sometimes Myrinet and/or gigabit ethernet (using the gnbd block server).

We can help advise on the best system architecture in which to run GFS, application optimisation in the GFS cluster environment and help you decide whether GFS is right for you.