Virgin America Has Chosen Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Virgin America is a U.S. based low-cost airline with its principal base at the San Francisco International Airport, and which started its activity on 8 August 2007. The airline's stated aim is to provide low-fare, high-quality service for "long-haul point-to-point service between major metropolitan cities on the Eastern and West Coast seaboards".

The company considered using an open source solution for its proxy servers and they've chosen Red Hat's sponsored Fedora. And up to a certain point, this choice seemed to have been a pretty good one, as Ravi Simhambhatla, director of architecture and integration with Virgin America, said: "Fedora was a fantastic solution for us as we began our journey with open source,".

Ravi then explained that once with the company's growth, there was need for a more reliable solution - and one that would also have a longer lifecycle - to replace Fedora, therefore they've started looking for another product. The search didn't take too long as Red Hat's Enterprise Linux seemed to suit the company very well.

"As our need for fine-grained control and scalability grew, we decided to migrate to Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its reputation as a resilient, secure and scalable platform as well as for its incredible support.", said Ravi when he announced the switch.

Therefore, all the company's proxy servers started being migrated to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, migration that will be complete by the end of this year, according to the current estimations.

Red Hat's Enterprise Linux distribution targets mostly the commercial market, including mainframes. According to Red Hat, each version of RHEL is supported for 7 years after its release. There are many commercial vendors who say they're using Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a base for the operating system in their products and one of the best known would be the Console Operating System in VMware ESX Server.