Red Hat, a provider of open source solutions, announced that Telstra (News - Alert), a telecom and information services provider in Australia, extended its alliance with Red Hat to enable expanded choice for enterprise customers in the cloud.

The partnership enables Telstra to become a Certified Cloud Provider. Telstra’s solutions meet the rigorous testing and certification needs suggested by Red Hat (News - Alert) to deliver a safe, scalable, supported and consistent environment for enterprise cloud deployments.

“Telstra has partnered with Red Hat as part of our hosting services program for many years and to now be a Red Hat Certified Cloud Provider is a significant and exciting development for Telstra cloud computing,” said Philip Jones, executive director, Telstra, in a statement.

“Offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux in our cloud computing environment offers our customers more choice, more flexibility and the opportunity to run more applications out of our cloud,” Jones added.

As a Certified Cloud Provider, Telstra offers Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a guest operating system on its infrastructure cloud service. Telstra cloud computing services leverage the Telstra Next IP network and Next G network.

Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager of cloud business at Red Hat, said, “To be one of the operating platforms available on the Telstra Cloud Computing service shows the demand for Red Hat Enterprise Linux in cloud deployments.”

Recently, VKernel, a provider of enterprise-class performance and capacity management products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments, announced that its plans to add Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization support to their vOperations Suite.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO West 2011, taking place Sept. 13-15, 2011, in Austin, Texas. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. To register, click here.