Today SGI announced the signing of an OEM agreement with Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions. This agreement enables SGI's world-class service organization to provide support of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to customers across SGI's full product line. This means that customers who choose RHEL can call SGI directly for any RHEL support they may require for their platform.

As an important expansion of our service capabilities for our solutions, I am pleased to offer customers the capability to directly support RHEL-based solutions," said Rick Rinehart, senior vice president of services at SGI. "Our ultimate goal is to allow our customers to stay focused on their business, while maximizing the return of their technology investments, and this new agreement is an important component of meeting that objective."

SGI has an extensive history of providing open source high performance computing solutions to customers, and ranks as one of the top contributors to the open source community. Built entirely on fully supported Linux operating systems, SGI's software allows users to achieve optimum application performance, system resiliency and management efficiency. Under the terms of the agreement, SGI will provide even broader support for HPC solutions.

As the leading supplier of Linux operating systems, Red Hat has been an important partner to SGI for more than 10 years. As a platform, RHEL facilitates innovation and supports higher processor and memory limits, as well as additional features to improve the performance of applications running memory-intensive workloads - something extremely important to customers using a SGI UV supercomputer.

Red Hat is pleased to extend our collaboration with SGI, one of the leading global suppliers of HPC solutions," said Jim Totton, vice president and general manager, Platforms Business Unit, Red Hat. "Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a secure, flexible and open foundation for SGI's HPC customers to run their compute intensive applications."

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