Symantec Corp. and Red Hat, Inc., today announced an extended collaboration to deliver solutions that help customers deploy agile private and hybrid clouds and create highly resilient datacenters. The expanded relationship spans engineering, marketing, support, and sales groups in both companies. Based on proven real-world deployments, the new solutions will harness the power of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Symantec storage and availability solutions to deliver higher availability and increased agility while helping organizations deploy business-critical applications with confidence.

Many organizations are quickly adopting Linux as their platform of choice as they look for new ways to stay competitive in today's market and face increasing costs with flat IT budgets. While the flexible nature of Red Hat Enterprise Linux has led to the solution becoming the strategic platform of choice for enterprise private cloud deployments, the need to ensure resiliency from a service level perspective becomes increasingly more important. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is deployed by more than 80 percent of the Fortune 500 while Symantec, as the industry leader in protecting business-critical applications, brings a robust suite of storage and availability management solutions to provide highly available multi-tier applications and business continuity across multiple storage platforms, operating systems and virtualization platforms. Symantec's storage and availability management solutions are used by 99 percent of the Fortune 500.

Together, Symantec and Red Hat offer customers a unique opportunity to help manage mission-critical solutions applicable to cloud and datacenter deployments through delivery of a more flexible and open environment in terms of hardware, software and operating systems. The joint solutions will provide automated off-premise disaster recovery; improved storage management for multi-operating system, multi-storage datacenters; and cost-effective failover for Oracle databases.

Cluster Server running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides off-premise disaster recovery for organizations operating over long distances, automating global failover of multi-tiered applications to any disaster recovery (DR) site. In addition, Cluster Server manages the data replication layer and provides a single-click DR experience, enabling customers to simplify their DR workflow. The solution provides non-disruptive failover testing to ensure that recovery is configured to work properly when it is needed - whether the downtime is from power loss, natural disasters or other causes.

As organizations purchase and implement storage solutions from multiple vendors, each point solution introduces operational complexity into the storage environment and often results in the lack of critical data availability across heterogeneous environments. Storage Foundation Dynamic Multi-Pathing running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a uniform cross-platform solution that eases management across any OS and all storage platforms. With this solution, organizations have their choice of cost-effective storage and have the ability to negotiate better prices on storage hardware. In addition, hardware can be exchanged without disruption and without the installation of new point tools through a single unified data management platform.

Many organizations rely on Oracle databases to increase productivity and enable users to make faster and more informed decisions. However, due to the high business dependence on these databases, downtime results in lost revenue, damaged brand reputation and severe penalties for not meeting service levels. Storage Foundation Cluster File System and Cluster Server running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux provide very fast Oracle database failover, enabling organizations to deploy less costly single-instance Oracle databases while achieving sub-minute failover times. In addition, Cluster Server can orchestrate multi-tiered application failover to simplify the management of complex real-world application environments and achieve true business service resiliency.

Technology from Symantec's market-leading Cluster File System, Cluster Server and Storage Foundation, along with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, will form the basis for the joint architecture. Symantec and Red Hat will also team to provide additional engineering, marketing and support. More information on the new solutions will be made available at a later date.

"Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the fastest-growing platform for our storage management and high availability software as an increasing number of customers deploy Linux to increase agility and stay competitive," said Francis deSouza, group president, Enterprise Products and Services, Symantec. "We're strengthening our partnership with Red Hat to ensure companies are confident that their information is protected as they modernize their data centers and build resilient private clouds."

"Working closely together, Red Hat and Symantec offer joint customers tremendous value with an open source, secure pathway to modernize their legacy IT architectures," said Paul Cormier, president, Products and Technology at Red Hat. "We're pleased to expand our long-term collaboration with Symantec to bring our leading Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating platform and Symantec's compelling technologies together to enable our joint customers with further choice and flexibility for their IT infrastructures."

"As we've written previously, IDC believes Linux will be one of two primary operating systems that will power public cloud infrastructure," said Al Gillen, vice president, system software, IDC. "Symantec and Red Hat teaming to improve data availability and disaster recovery in data centers has the added benefit of bridging these datacenters to Linux-based cloud infrastructure, enabling today's enterprise customers to leverage cloud computing where it makes best sense."

"We have Symantec's Storage Foundation High Availability running on Red Hat Linux, and are excited to test the joint architecture from the companies addressing our needs for Oracle database failover and off-premise disaster recovery to fully protect our business-critical information," said, Ismael Moreno, IT Manager SESCAM. "We believe that this will not only better protect our information and applications, but protect us from vendor lock-in, giving us the ability to replace storage hardware without disruption.