The Hindu Business Line : New Linux version supports 10 Indian languages

SIMPLY SCALE UP: Mr Grey Messer (right), President, Red Hat Asia Pacific, and Mr Nandu Pradhan, President and MD of the company's India operations, at a press conference in Singapore on Thursday.

Singapore March 15

`Scale up, scale out and kick out the complexity' — This was the pitch of the market leader in corporate Open Source distributions, Red Hat, as it unveiled the latest Enterprise Linux version 5 at simultaneous launch events here and half a dozen other centres worldwide on Thursday.

To achieve this, the company for the first time has harnessed a number of virtualisation features which will allow system managers to run heterogeneous operating systems — even `mix-n-match' older 32-bit applications with current 64-bit tools in the same server and storage space.

"You will see a dramatic reduction in the cost of acquisition and operation," promised Mr Scott Crenshaw, Red Hat's US-based Vice-President for Enterprise Linux Platform Business. "The savings could range from tens of thousands of dollars to $100,000 per server."

New features in the fifth iteration of Red Hat's Linux flavour centre around beefed-up data centre and database offerings, as well as enhanced tools for high performance computing — the burgeoning application in number-crunching mammoths for drug discovery, energy exploration and other scientific quests.

Mr Gery Messer, Red Hat's Singapore-based Asia-Pacific/Japan President, told Business Line that its Pune centre was now the global engineering and customer support nerve centre of the company. India-based engineers had contributed key features to the new Linux release, he added.

Mr Nandu Pradhan, Red Hat India's President and Managing Director, explained that Release 5 had doubled the Indian language support to 10 languages - a case of fortuitous timing in the light of the government's budget-day announcement of sharply increasing monetary support for e-governance initiatives at the Centre and the States.

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