Quoting Linux-Watch

Red Hat Inc., the world's leading business Linux distributor, announced earlier this week that SAP AG, a global provider of business software solutions, has certified the SAP NetWeaver platform on RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) Advanced Platform 5. The certification includes the virtualization technology embedded in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 for use with SAP applications.

SAP's certification means that all criteria necessary for full interoperability of Red Hat solutions with all modules of SAP NetWeaver are in compliance. All features included in RHEL Advanced Platform fulfill SAP's certification for mission-critical applications.

The two companies say that the combination of RHEL 5 and NetWeaver offers a complete solution stack through the integration of Red Hat Global File System, Cluster Suite, SELinux and further technologies for high availability, storage management and security. The virtualization technologies included in Advanced Platform have been successfully tested by SAP during the certification procedure and can be used in production environments after a general release of virtualized SAP application-based Linux environments over the course of the year.

The real news here, according to Dan Kusnetzky, principal analyst of the Kusnetzky Group, is that by certifying NetWeaver on RHEL 5's virtual machines, RHEL virtualization becomes much less of a neat technology trick and much more of a way for SAP customers to really get value from server virtualization.

"One of the challenges facing users of mainstream enterprise applications, such as those from SAP, is finding ways to use high performance, low cost, industry standard systems rather than having to rely on single-vendor, low volume, high price systems. Making best use of these industry standard systems usually requires adoption of some form of virtual processing software [the clustering software mentioned in the release], virtual storage software [the global file system software mentioned in the release] and management software for these virtualized environments," said Kusnetzky.

"Customers can substantially reduce costs, time and effort with Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform that would only otherwise be possible through the purchase, implementation and maintenance of software for virtualization, storage management and high availability," said Werner Knoblich, Red Hat's vice president and general manager EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa), in a statement. "At the end of the day, with Advanced Platform, customers can put their money back into their core business instead of investing heavily in costly infrastructure. This certification of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 by SAP, a Red Hat Premium Partner, underlines the close partnership of the two market leaders and brings additional innovation and investment security for enterprise customers."

Red Hat and SAP have long had a successful partnership. In fact, in 1999, when the Linux market's future was still far from assured, SAP invested money in Red Hat. Several years later, in 2002, when Red Hat released its first "enterprise" Linux, Advanced Server Red Hat Linux 7.2, SAP was one of the first business ISV (independent software vendors) to support it.

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