Breaking news: Red Hat and Sybase launch virtual appliance

This has just been announced in San Diego - you can expect the full story soon:

Sybase and Red Hat have announced an expansion of their partnership which will include the launch of a virtual software appliance which combines the business applications specialist's database product with Red Hat's Linux operating system.

Launched on Thursday, at the Red Hat Summit in San Diego, the pricing for the database appliance won't be available until later this year when the product is actually released, the companies claim.

Rather than spend time on knitting together their own instances of the Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) running on Red Hat's Linux operating system, customers can now buy a pre-integrated "appliance" which vastly reduces the complexity of setting up a virtual environment, according to Tim Yeaton, senior vice president of Enterprise Solutions at Red Hat.

The companies refused to comment at this time on whether the virtual appliance would be a cheaper option for customers than choosing to purchase RHEL 5 and ASE separately and handle the integration and virtualisation themselves in-house.