Red Hat's new e-commerce suite has received an unexpected boost from its wannabe-best-buddy Compaq and an electronics firm called Pioneer-Standard. The suite is to be bundled with a host of configurations and servers and pushed out to customers through a joint initiative.

The package consist of three offerings. Bundle No.1 will see the Red Hat e-commerce suite loaded onto a Compaq ProLiant DL360 server. The second configuration is slightly more complex in that it runs across a cluster of three ProLiant DL 360 servers and comes complete with one year of Red Hat's systems response services - albeit only covering usual operating hours.

All in all, they're pretty attractive packages. The smallest of the bunch would keep the majority of small medium sized business happy while the bigger, five server configuration puts it into the heart of e-commerce territory. It's not too big though.

Undoubtedly it will not be cheap but for mid-sized business looking to get some ecommerce operations moving pretty quickly this could be a worthwhile punt.

One point worth considering before anyone ventures out and buys the five system cluster is that of the database. Red Hat's database is based on the PostgreSQL database which, although fine under normal loads, has little in terms of proof points when it gets into real heavy-duty work. It is, essentially, unproven at the high end which is, presumably, the kind of work it will encounter on a five node cluster.

This isn't exactly the most stunning of deals. But it does show quite clearly how Red Hat is likely to clean up in this space. The simple fact is that everybody who's anybody wants to get involved with Red Hat and this e-commerce suite has provided yet another route to market for the firm's already popular wares. Further to that of course, it should help the company proliferate the reach of its 'destabilising' database.

The relationship between the vendors is actually a little disappointing though. There's no mention of joint marketing or sales operations, but they do all buddy up pretty close on the development and configuration of the package.

Pioneer Standard is to do a lot of the grunt work. Through its systems integration arm, it plans to put the packages onto the servers, configure them and flog them through its own operations. Presumably this is part of a plan by the firm to tap into the increasingly lucrative world of Linux developments. But it would have been nice to see Compaq shifting this package too.

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