Federal Aviation Administration Saves $15 Million by Migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux; FAA Achieves 30 Percent More Operational Efficiency for 50 Percent Less Cost.

RALEIGH, N.C. -- Red Hat (NASDAQ: RHAT), the world's leading provider of open source to the enterprise, today announced that the U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) saved the federal government more than $15 million in datacenter operating and upgrading costs by migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The FAA executed a major systems migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux in one-third of the original scheduled time and with 30 percent more operational efficiency than the previous system. In addition, by switching to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the FAA realized 50 percent savings and spent less than $10 million on a project initially estimated at $25 million.

The FAA accommodates more than two million passengers on domestic airlines every day. With roughly 8,000 airplanes in the air at any given time, the successful execution of the FAA's mission largely depends on the highly complex Traffic Flow Management (TFM) infrastructure and its real-time Enhanced Traffic Management System (ETMS). When the administration embarked on a technical refresh effort for the TFM and ETMS, the FAA faced significant implementation time along with a high price tag.

"There is no room for error or down time in our systems," said Joshua Gustin, TFM-Modernization program manager, FAA. "When we first considered refreshing our entire system, we were looking at $25 million in costs and 18 months to full deployment. By switching to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we were able to spend less than $10 million and accomplish a major system modernization in one-third that time. Red Hat Enterprise Linux fixed our problems of reliability and scalability, and gives us the support we need to reduce our risk."

The FAA deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux first in its remote computing locations and later moved Red Hat Enterprise Linuxto its central processing facility located at the Department of Transportation's Volpe Center. By migrating from a costly UNIX platform to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on its workstations, servers and at the hub site, the FAA was able to eliminate costs and ineffective systems, while creating a scalable architecture that met their high-demand environment today and for the future.

The FAA also used Red Hat onsite training during the modernization project to effectively transition engineers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux through the Red Hat Certified Engineer program.

"For training, we decided more was better, particularly with the developers," said Gustin. "As a result, we made training a priority, and it has really paid off."

"The FAA's successful and impressive migration truly exemplifies the value, performance and security of Red Hat Enterprise Linux," said Paul Smith, vice president of government sales operations, Red Hat. "There are scores of agencies across the entire federal government, as well as state and local governments in all 50 states that are moving Unix-like capabilities to Linux on commodity hardware. The fact that Red Hat delivers a platform for better total cost of ownership, throughput, and credentials for strong security makes it the obvious choice when agencies look at either a technical refresh or infrastructure modernization."

To learn more about the FAA's migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, read the case study and view the video testimonial, please visit http://www.redhat.com/.

About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat, the world's leading open source and Linux provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with satellite offices spanning the globe. The most trusted name in open source, CIOs and other senior-level IT executives have ranked Red Hat as the industry's most valued vendor for two consecutive years in the CIO Insight MagazineVendor Value study. Red Hat is leading Linux and open source solutions into the mainstream by making high quality, low cost technology accessible. Red Hat provides operating system software along with middleware, applications and management solutions. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide and through top-tier partnerships. Red Hat's open source strategy offers customers a long term plan for building infrastructures that are based on and leverage open source technologies with focus on security and ease of management. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com

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