CentOS is now under the Red Hat umbrella.
Red Hat did this because it believes there are three very different ways that 70 to 80 percent people tend to use Red Hat Linux distros. Businesses that want a lot of support and device and staff certification pay for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
Their Fedora offering is for users, often developers who use the latest and greatest Linux and open-source software and want to be ahead of the curve.
CentOS is for Linux experts who can handle their own support and want a stable platform. It is intended for organisations that do not want to pay an ongoing fee for support to Red Hat.
At the same time, CentOS was seeing that its users wanted some cool new software that the Fedora fans were getting, while keeping the stability of RHEL. Since CentOS didn't have the resources to do this, they were open to incorporating their Linux distribution with Red Hat.
For its part, Red Hat wanted all the people who use CentOS, which may be more than those who use RHEL and Fedora combined, to be using an "official" Red Hat Linux distribution. In addition, Red Hat wanted to defragment the major Red Hat rebuilds. ppears well on its way to unifying the Red Hat clones.
Network Professional Services has extensive experience with CentOS and has been successfully implementing in private data centres for some years now.
As a virtualisation platform with KVM and XEN CentOS provides a stable alternative to VMWARE for small to medium private data centres.
Without the need to pay for ongoing support our customers enjoy substantial savings over alternatives such as VMWARE.
We also integrate CentOS for
- Message handling solutions (email etc.)
- Text processing and text beautification
- Secure encrypted document archiving
- And many other applications.