General Availability Of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1

Red Hat has announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1, the first update to the version 6 platform since November 2010.

Red Hat delivered Enterprise Linux 6.1 to key partners at the Red Hat Summit in early May but is now making the operating system generally available. With version 6.1, Red Hat hopes to set the standard in flexibility, performance and quality that customers rely on for their open-source enterprise environments, spanning physical, virtual and cloud deployments, the company said.

Setting The Pace For Enterprises

The enhancements in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 provide customers with improvements in system reliability, scalability and performance, coupled with support for upcoming system hardware. It also delivers patches and security updates, while maintaining application compatibility and original equipment manufacturer and independent software vendor (OEM/ISV) certifications.

The release provides a variety of technology updates, including: additional configuration options for advanced storage configurations with improvements in Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), data centre bridging and iSCSI offload, which allow networked storage to deliver the quality of service commonly associated with directly connected storage

• Enhancements in virtualisation, file systems, scheduler, resource management and high availability
• New technologies that enable smoother enterprise deployments and tighter integration with heterogeneous systems
• A technology preview of Red Hat Enterprise Identity (IPA) services, based on the open source FreeIPA project
• Support for automatic failover for virtual machines and applications using the Red Hat High Availability Add-On
• Integrated developer tools that provide the ability to write, debug, profile and deploy applications without leaving the graphical environment
• Improvements to network traffic processing to leverage multi-processor servers that are getting increasingly common

“With Linux adoption growing across all workloads, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 provides more enterprise reliability, performance and control throughout the data centre,” said Jim Totton, vice president and general manager of platform business at Red Hat, in a statement. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 continues to lead Linux innovation as we drive adoption across workloads that include physical, virtual and cloud deployments. We’re pleased to provide these new capabilities to our global customers today.”

According to company officials Red Hat has established RHEL 6.1 as a performance leader serving both as a virtual machine guest and hypervisor host in SPECvirt benchmarks. For instance, Red Hat and HP recently announced that the combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with KVM running on a HP ProLiant BL620c G7 20-core Blade server delivered a record-setting SPECvirt_sc2010 benchmark result.

Red Hat and IBM recently announced that the companies submitted a benchmark to SPEC in which a combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation and IBM systems delivered 45 percent better consolidation capability than competitors in performance tests conducted by Red Hat and IBM.

“Building on our decade-long partnership to optimise Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM platforms, our companies have collaborated closely on the development of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1,” said Jean Staten Healy, director of Cross-IBM Linux and Open Virtualisation, in a statement. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 combined with IBM hardware capabilities offers our customers expanded flexibility, performance and scalability across their bare metal, virtualised and cloud environments. Our collaboration continues to drive innovation and leading results in the industry.”

IDC Researches TCO

IDC recently conducted research, commissioned by Red Hat, to determine the long-term total cost of ownership (TCO) benefits provided by Red Hat Enterprise Linux when compared to other strategies, such as running mixed environments or non-paid Linux distributions.

Results show that through more efficient operations, higher ratios of servers and users per administrator and reduced downtime, customers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions can realise significant cost savings and price/performance improvements, Red Hat said. For the full report, go here.

“IDC conducted a study that evaluated organisations that are heavily standardised on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and compared those organisations with others that had a mixture of Linux distributions in use, and organisations that were heavily penetrated by non-paid Linux distributions,” said Al Gillen, programme vice president for system software at IDC, in a statement. “The outcome of the study found that there is demonstrable business benefit associated with having professional support for an operating system, compared to a do-it-yourself approach. The real benefits came from lower IT staff costs and reduced end user downtime.”