Red Hat has started a new software maintenance service called Extended Update Support (EUS) that's supposed to save bigger customers money if they standardize on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment, like, say, RHEL 5.2, for up to 18 months, which, Red Hat says, is three times longer than the industry norm.

EUS is an add-on subscription available to customers with over 100 RHEL servers.

Red Hat says it'll reduce testing and revalidating software stacks, and reduce risk since critical systems would be stable longer. It says some customers asked for an EUS-like program.

It means ignoring the update releases that happen about twice a year and roll up the important bug fixes and security patches and support the latest hardware.

Some customers reportedly want to synchronize new hardware roll out, application stack updates and operating system upgrades at the same time instead of doing them independently.

For up to 100 machines, EUS starts at $60,000 a year. For up to 500 machines, it starts at $80,000 a year.