RHAT: US Marshals Switching to Red Hat Linux

The U.S. Marshals Service is switching the databases at all 94 of its district offices in the United States and its territories to Red Hat (Nasdaq: RHAT) Linux.

The Marshals expect to have as much as 80 percent of their production databases and all of their data running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux by the end of June, said John Campbell, an information technology specialist for the Marshals' Justice Detainee Information System. The move will include all databases for prisoner information, some financial databases and decision-support systems.

Red Hat Enterprise Server is cheaper and has better features than the Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW) OS the Marshals have used for years, Campbell said. "It was a natural for us to consider Red Hat as an [operating system] to run on," he said.