Symantec has announced its portfolio support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, as well as new storage management capabilities for Xen virtualization. Through its partnership with Red Hat, Symantec plans to provide its core Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster Server, and Veritas NetBackup solutions for customers.

To help customers manage their complex data centres, Symantec is also leveraging the open source Xen server virtualisation that will be bundled as part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and other Linux distributions to launch a beta program for its Storage Foundation and Dynamic Multi-pathing technologies.

Symantec and Red Hat have also announced a collaborative effort to deliver rapid support expertise to customers through joint engineering, pre-release testing, and a shared virtual lab support model.

"IT organisations are eager to adopt Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 as an effective platform for driving IT costs out of deploying and managing their infrastructure software," said Scott Crenshaw, vice president, Red Hat Enterprise Solutions. "The rapid availability of Symantec's complete data management solutions for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 as well as our collaborative support efforts will help ensure that customers will benefit from their new open source environments as quickly as possible."