eRacks today announced a channel partnership with Canonical Ltd to ship its hardware pre-loaded with Ubuntu.

eRacks, a premier rackmount server and Open Source system vendor, today announced a channel partnership with Canonical Ltd., the commercial sponsor of the award-winning Linux OS, Ubuntu.

eRacks customers can order hardware pre-loaded with Ubuntu via the eRacks online ordering system, and will benefit from a full service offering, including complete operating system installation, custom hardware configuration and post sales support.

Joseph Wolff, CEO of eRacks said, “eRacks is dedicated to providing organisations with full control of their own business infrastructure. Increasing demand from our customers, and the recommendation from our engineers that Ubuntu is unbeatable for ease-of-use, and its compatibility with peripherals such as printers and network cards, makes Ubuntu the perfect partner for eRacks.”

“Both eRacks and Canonical are committed to bringing the benefits of Open Source to a wider business audience. Our partnership will help business customers to deploy and maintain Ubuntu, resulting in increased productivity and reduced costs”, commented Chris Kenyon, Business Development Director at Canonical Ltd.

Ubuntu is Open Source software, costs nothing to download, and users are free to customize or alter their software in order to meet their needs. The Desktop Edition can be deployed as a general-purpose workstation, thin client, or engineering workstation. The Server Edition provides a well integrated platform and simplifies the deployment process of new servers with any of the standard Internet services such as e-mail, web, file serving and database management.

The eRacks agreement is in line with Canonical's objective to bring the benefits of Open Source to a wider business audience by delivering world-class support and assistance through a growing network of specialist partners.

*About eRacks*

eRacks Open Source Systems is the premier provider of open source solutions and features its own rackmount servers, desktops and laptops as well as a wide array of services including open source enterprise migration, security, and network architecture design. eRacks offers a wide choice of operating systems and open source applications configured on its products, ensuring hardware compatibility and saving the customer valuable time in installation and configuration.

*About Canonical and Ubuntu*

Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, is a global organisation headquartered in Europe committed to the development, distribution and support of open source software products and communities. World-class 24x7 commercial support for Ubuntu is available through Canonical's global support team and partners. Since its launch in October 2004 Ubuntu has become one of the most highly regarded Linux distributions with millions of users around the world. Ubuntu will always be free to download, free to use and free to distribute to others. With these goals in mind, Ubuntu aims to be the most widely used Linux system, and is the centre of a global open source software ecosystem.

Download Ubuntu from www.ubuntu.com/download
. To learn about commercial support for Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Edubuntu, please see www.canonical.com/support
. For more information visit www.canonical.com or www.ubuntu.com.
Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu and their associated logos are all registered trademarks of Canonical Ltd.

**Contact:**

**eRacks:**
*E: Britta Serog, VP Marketing*
*T: 00 (1) 714 532 5322*

**Canonical Ltd:**
*Christina Armstrong, Communications Manager *
*T: +44 (0) 207 590 2551 *