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Epic Systems is enabling its electronic health records to run on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux open source platform, and a group of vendors announced at HIMSS13 in New Orleans they will open a center near Epic’s Wisconsin headquarters that’s designed to let hospitals test and deploy the Linux applications.

Red Hat, Dell, Intel and VMware are partners in the new center, called the DRIVE Center for Excellence, which will be located near Epic’s Verona, Wis. headquarters.

Epic’s software has run on AIX and other UNIX servers, but the company last year announced it would license a version for the Linux open source platform supported by Red Hat. At the DRIVE facility, hospitals can test the Linux version on Dell server and storage options using Intel x86 servers. VMware’s vSphere virtualization platform is a component of the Linux offering.

The vendors say that running the Epic system on their combined technologies will lower the cost of ownership and are targeting mid-size to small hospitals for the technology bundle. St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center, a 431-bed health system in Syracuse, N.Y., has used DRIVE services for implementing Epic on Linux.