Open-source
solutions specialist Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 6.1, the first update to the platform since the delivery of
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 in November 2010. Linux 6.1 enhancements provide
customers with improvements in system reliability, scalability and performance,
coupled with support for upcoming system hardware.
Enterprise
Linux 6.1 also delivers patches and security updates, while maintaining
application compatibility and OEM/ISV certifications.
In
addition to performance improvements, Enterprise Linux 6.1 provides technology
updates, including additional configuration options for advanced storage
configurations with improvements in FCoE; Datacenter Bridging and iSCSI offload;
enhancements in virtualization, file systems, scheduler, resource management
and high availability; and technologies that enable smoother enterprise
deployments and tighter integration with heterogeneous systems.
Other
upgrades include 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; and improvements to network traffic processing to leverage multiprocessor
servers that are becoming increasingly common.
IT
research firm IDC recently conducted a study that evaluated organizations that
are heavily standardized on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and compared those
organizations with others that had a mixture of Linux distributions in use, and
organizations that were heavily penetrated by non-paid Linux distributions. The
outcome of the study found that there is demonstrable business benefit
associated with having professional support for an operating system, compared with
a do-it-yourself approach. Al Gillen, program vice president of system software
at IDC, said the real benefits came from lower IT staff costs and reduced end-user
downtime.
“Building
on our decade-long partnership to optimize 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 virtualization. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 combined with IBM
hardware capabilities offers our customers expanded flexibility, performance
and scalability across their bare metal, virtualized and cloud environments.
Our collaboration continues to drive innovation and leading results in the
industry.”