20 years ago, though, Linux was the underdog and it took a lot of faith to bet big workloads on Linux. Red Hat had the confidence that it could bring Linux into the enterprise, and delivered on it with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Roughly 20 years ago we released the first version of RHEL, which we initially called Red Hat Advanced Server. Because 1.0 and .0 versions were always seen as iffy, Red Hat started with version 2.1 and embarked on an adventure few would have thought possible.

Early days: From server closet to supported hardware to major workloads

These days you can be fairly confident that server hardware is going to work with Linux. That wasn't the case 20 years ago. One thing that RHEL brought to the table early on for enterprise Linux was a list of certified hardware you could count on working with Linux, and a stable platform for software vendors.

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