Virgin America migrates to Red Hat Linux

New US airline Virgin America has migrated to Red Hat Linux to host its website.

Using San Francisco as a hub, Virgin America is a next-generation low-fare carrier that will serve as many as ten cities within a year of operation, and up to 30 cities within five years.

The website has selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the platform to support the website, after previously using the less scalable Red Hat-sponsored Fedora open-source solution.

Since its start, Virgin America has based its IT infrastructure on Linux using varied distributions of Fedora since the launch of Fedora Core 2.

To obtain a solution with a longer lifecycle and reliable support, the airline chose to migrate its proxy servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

"Fedora was a fantastic solution for us as we began our journey with open source," said Ravi Simhambhatla, director of architecture and integration at Virgin America.

"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."

Fedora relies on open-source community support and is popular among hobbyists.

The airline's core website now relies on a combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, Squid and Apache.

Virgin America's migration from Fedora to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 will be completed by the end of 2007.