ThePlanet Joins Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, yesterday announced The Planet, a privately held dedicated hosting company, as its newest member.

The organization says that The Planet is a provider of IT hosting and will participate in community initiatives and projects that support enterprise Linux.

It explains that the emergence of cloud computing and virtualized environments in the web hosting industry has opened the door the Linux community to gain important competitive advantages. The Planet leverages Linux platforms to provide these services across its global customer base.

"The Planet is one of the world's leading IT hosting companies, and their contributions to Linux are important to sustaining Linux's business-class leadership," said Amanda McPherson, Vice President of marking and developer programs at The Linux Foundation. "We expect The Planet to be among the first companies to launch a large-scale public-cloud service on KVM and we applaud their foresight and vision."

"Our new Server Cloud, which is in beta with more than 500 customers, has been developed on the KVM hypervisor included in the Linux kernel," said Duke Skarda, vice president of IT and Software Development for The Planet. "KVM is the future of Linux-based server virtualization. As we continue to evolve and enhance the platform, our goal is to access the Linux development community to gain vision and insights on emerging technologies. More than 80 percent of our 20,000 customers and partners rely on Linux platforms to manage their hosting operations, so our membership directly supports their work."