Red Hat to power Vienna

Red Hat has landed a major deal to power the servers of the city of Vienna, even as it fends off fresh attacks from Oracle and Novell.

Oracle recently said it would offer support for Red Hat’s distributions and would sell its own Red Hat knock-off. For its part, Novell signed a landmark deal with Microsoft that some fear will open the way to patent-infringement lawsuits against other Linux distributors — a fear Microsoft is doing all it can to reinforce, short of actually filing lawsuits.

Meanwhile, Red Hat has continued on signing some major customers. Vienna is rolling out Red Hat for a variety of its systems, including mission-critical database servers, and has already migrated more than 100 systems, the city said.

Vienna has been running Linux servers since the early 1990s, mostly using FreeBSD, according to Red Hat. The city’s server management head, Franz Brauneder, said it had decided to move to Red Hat for its stability, large partner network and wide software and hardware certification. “Since the start of our use of Red Hat, we have not once had a critical problem connected with the operating system,” Brauneder said in a statement.

Read more at LinuxWorld