Red Hat, Inc., today announced a major milestone in the company's long-term strategy of delivering an Open Source Architecture to the enterprise. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 is now available, supporting a greatly increased range of IT deployments and spanning seven hardware architectures. Emphasizing scalability, performance and extended system coverage, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 provides a stable operating system platform that enables customers to realize the benefits of open source solutions across their complete computing infrastructure - from the desktop to the largest server.

The new release has already been welcomed with support by AMD, BakBone, BEA, Dell, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, IBM, Intel, NEC, Oracle, and Rackspace.

"Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 marks a significant achievement in the maturation of open source," said Paul Cormier, executive VP of engineering at Red Hat. "This release will act as the unifying platform, and will support seven hardware architectures for both client and server deployments. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has gained the reputation as the de facto enterprise Linux standard. This second generation solution from Red Hat will strengthen Red Hat's global foothold in the enterprise and eliminate the need for proprietary Unix."

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 was developed in close collaboration with customers, hardware manufacturers, and software partners with a focus on performance, scalability, and the support of a secure, consistent enterprise-wide platform. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 provides a potent combination of the latest technical features and enterprise stability:

Native Posix Threading Library provides significant performance improvement for multi-threading applications .

Scalability improvements include support for larger SMP, memory and I/O configurations.

Single code base improves code stability, maintainability and security.

Supported hardware architectures include Intel x86 and Itanium, AMD AMD64, IBM zSeries, iSeries , pSeries, and S/390.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 is available now as part of an annual subscription that includes Red Hat Network and services. Current Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscribers can upgrade now via Red Hat Network. Red Hat OEM partners will deliver Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 AS, ES and WS in pre-configured hardware solutions in the next 30-60 days. Several leading ISV applications are already available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and others have committed to be available in the near term.

• Red Hat Drops Consumer Linux, Sponsors Community Led Fedora Project