Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL) was launched this week, offering what the company calls a "new standard" for server operating systems in commercial open source operating environments. With more flexible architectural provisioning for physical, virtualized, and cloud deployments, Red Hat has delivered hundreds of technical feature enhancements in its new product.
Key new features include an application platform optimized for centrally managed enterprise deployments; enhanced hardware efficiency controls; flexibility and security for both host and guest environments; and support for features designed to minimize the ecological impact and carbon footprint of IT systems.
In basic terms, Red Hat claims that after a decade of RHEL development, it has now produced a platform suitable for long-term stable deployment that is able to incorporate new virtualization and cloud-computing-based technologies.
Red Hat also states that its product's latest enhancements range from kernel improvements for resource management to RAS augmentations, scalability improvements, and a greatly extended standards-compliant development environment.
"Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 complements broader use of Linux and open source software across a range of verticals and particularly for large service provider and enterprise datacenter users," said Jay Lyman, enterprise software analyst at The 451 Group. "This release also addresses Linux deployment at greater scale thanks to kernel and KVM performance and feature enhancements in areas such as security, scheduling, power savings, control groups, resource and system management, and multi-tenancy."
