Red Hat, Inc., a leading provider of open source solutions, today announced an expanded offering on Amazon Web Services LLC in an effort to provide enterprises with a more efficient way to reduce costs, drive innovation and improve business agility with cloud computing.  Amazon Web Services is the first Red Hat Premier Certified Cloud Provider that enables customers to extend their Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions into the cloud simply and easily with Red Hat Cloud Access.

With Red Hat Cloud Access, customers can move their Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions between traditional on-premise servers and Amazon Web Services.  With this feature, customers can select appropriate computing resources for their needs, without the need for new business or support models. 

Red Hat is also introducing new features designed to continue allowing enterprises to leverage the benefits of Amazon Web Services:

• The latest versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be available on Amazon EC2 at the same time as the release for traditional on-premise deployments, in an effort to provide consistency between on and off-premise usage.  This includes the features in the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5.
• Standardized, secure 32-bit and 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux images, which include cloud-specific content like creating images from a specific manifest and certificates, are secured using SELinux and firewall protections.
• Continuous delivery of updates to Red Hat Enterprise Linux within Amazon Web Services, offering delivery of security errata and feature enhancements.

“Enterprises using Amazon Web Services are looking for a combination of leading technology, deployment flexibility and ease of scalability,” said Terry Wise, director of Business Development at Amazon Web Services.  “Red Hat is enabling even greater ease of access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, offering an opportunity for our joint customers to benefit by further reducing costs and improving performance for their enterprise cloud deployments.”

“Red Hat brings enterprise-class software, subscriptions and support capabilities all built into a business model that was designed specifically for the cloud,” said Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager, Cloud Business Unit at Red Hat.  “With Red Hat Cloud Access, our enterprise customers can run their applications on the type of server capacity that best suits their needs: physical, virtual on-premise or in Amazon Web Services.  Red Hat is continuing its efforts to help more enterprises move to the cloud.”

The Red Hat Cloud Access subscription feature is available for Amazon EC2 today.  To learn more about Cloud Access, visit http://www.redhat.com/solutions/cloud/access/.