SAP / Red Hat Global Alliance

The SAP/Red Hat global alliance brings together two industry leaders in a partnership that delivers extraordinary business value to customers. Red Hat and SAP have a decade-long technology and engineering collaboration program through the SAP Linux Lab, resulting in comprehensive product support for SAP business applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Alliance Overview

SAP and Red Hat's partnership enables customers of all sizes to deploy SAP's business application portfolio on the market-leading Linux platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat is an around-the-clock, global network of the most experienced, motivated, and knowledgeable Linux open source software support engineers. For joint customers of SAP and Red Hat, the alliances organizations have established a cooperative support agreement whereby customers are assured of receiving best in class support services for their SAP infrastructure running on Red Hat.

Technical Overview

Red Hat's partner engineering team works with SAP to ensure that SAP products are optimized and certified on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat maintains a full-time engineering presence on-site at SAP to bolster the ongoing working relationship between the SAP Linux Lab and Red Hat product development.

This relationship has resulted in the addition of SAP-specific features for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, joint testing, problem resolution, ongoing performance work by Red Hat, and close cooperation between the partners around virtualization. One example of the SAP/Red Hat collaboration is the addition of a new framework to Red Hat Cluster Suite to manage SAP's requirements for bringing up a complex set of services in a specific order when doing high-availability clustering failover.

SAP has access to pre-release versions of Red Hat software, and Red Hat includes testing of SAP software against development versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux in a nightly test suite provided by SAP.

Enhanced Security is a top priority

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is designed by, and for, the most security-conscious organizations in the world. Red Hat leads the way in developing new security technology, making a secure operating system architecture an affordable, mainstream solution. Two examples:

• SElinux (Security Enhanced Linux) is a feature of Red Hat Enterprise Linux that enables granular policy-based control over programs' access to data and kernel resources, preventing a compromised program from acting outside its policy. SELinux was developed in coordination with the open source community and the National Security Agency (NSA) to provide the highest levels of security for the Linux operating system. This kind of functionality was previously available only in special purpose operating systems for the military.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux contains many innovations to prevent buffer overflow and other memory-based attacks. These include Fortify Source, Stack Smashing protection (canary values), Pointer encryption, and SELinux memory protection.

With its latest security solution, Red Hat Enterprise Identity, Policy, Audit (IPA), Red Hat has built upon open technologies and standards to provide centralized authentication and management of identity information in a package that's easy to install and manage. This centralized approach allows user accounts to be shared across multiple applications and systems, increasing the efficiency of IT administrators while increasing the productivity of end users. Enterprise IPA's centralized management also allows enterprises to more easily achieve compliance and reduce the risks associated with having identity information distributed across multiple locations. This is also paving the way for integration with customer's broader IAM environment including Active Directory, NIS, WAM, and Provisioning solutions.