Red Hat launches Cloud Access with Amazon support

Red Hat Cloud Access will let enterprises use their subscriptions to support either traditional on-premise servers or servers hosted on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, the company said. The goal is to make it easier for companies to add server capacity using the cloud or move servers between the data centre and the cloud and vice versa without having to think about how support is handled, according to Magnus Svensson, Nordic manager at Red Hat.

Using Cloud Access, customers will be able to continue to use their standard support contacts and methods to receive support, according to Red Hat. However, not everyone is eligible to get Cloud Access. For example, customers need to have a minium of 25 active premium subscriptions and have a direct support relationship with Red Hat.

Customers who get their Red Hat support via third parties or hardware OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) are not eligible, according to Red Hat's website. A premium subscription costs $1,299 annually, for a server with up to two processor sockets, or $2,499, for a server with three or more sockets.

Red Hat also pledges to make the latest versions of Enterprise Linux available on Amazon EC2 at the same time as the release for traditional on-premise deployments, in an effort to increase consistency between the two worlds. The company will deliver updates to Red Hat Enterprise Linux within Amazon Web Services, as well.