Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the Trickle-Up Effect

“The announcement of a royal wedding is a cause for excitement
among loyal subjects, but it’s also an opportunity for assorted
tea-towel vendors, commemorative plate makers and many other people
to make a great deal of money off the back of it.

“And so it is with enterprise server operating systems. Last
week’s release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.0 generated
much excitement from its loyal customers. Many of Red Hat’s
partners are hoping the release will provide them with an
opportunity to make a great deal of money off the back of it, too.
Although the RHEL 6.0 server OS includes numerous significant new
features — a new hybrid 2.6.32 kernel; support for more cores and
memory; better reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS)
capabilities; the ext4 file system by default; and so more — it
was hard to discern that from the clamor of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT)
hardware partners preparing to make money by selling more of their
lovely server boxes and associated services.

“HP for one certainly sees RHEL 6.0 as an opportunity to boost
its sales, both to existing customers and to “UNIX defectors”

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