Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 arrives this month as a small but beautifully formed "minor" release with several new components including scale-out data access through parallel NFS (pNFS). To provide this, Red Hat has collaborated with its partners and the upstream community on the parallel Network File System (pNFS) industry standard.
This is projected to help to solve the problems associated with NFS sprawl, characterized by the explosive growth of data and the increased burden of managing filesystem complexity.
Capabilities have also been added that result in performance gains for I/O-intensive workloads like database access. Using the first-to-market, fully supported pNFS client — delivered in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 — Red Hat says that customers can begin to plan and design next-generation, scalable filesystem solutions based on pNFS.
VP and GM of Red Hat's platform business unit Jim Totton says that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 continues to expand security through enhanced identity and host-based access management. This release is also intended to provide easier interoperability in heterogeneous environments, whether identities are Linux-based or managed by Microsoft Active Directory.
NOTE: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 also provides enhancement to control groups (cgroups), allowing multi-threaded applications to migrate between them.
"Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 now includes the Microsoft Hyper-V Linux drivers, improving the overall performance of the operating system when running as a guest on Microsoft Hyper-V. The latest release also offers installation support for the VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V para-virtualized drivers, improving the deployment experience for users working in these environments," said the company.
