Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 Available

Red Hat, Inc., provider of open source solutions, announced the availability of Enterprise Linux 6.2.

Red Hat includes enhancements that deliver benefits spanning multiple areas, including performance and scalability. Enterprise Linux 6 operating system achieved the largest multi-core Linux configuration results certified to-date on the two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) standard application benchmark. (Results of the HP ProLiant DL980 (2.40GHz Intel Xeon Processor E7-4870, 8 processors, 80 cores, 160 threads) on the two-tier SAP SD standard application benchmark running SAP enhancement package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0, MaxDB 7.8 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6: 22,713 SAP SD benchmark users. Certification number 2011052 as of December 2, 2011.) Proven to perform and scale, Enterprise Linux 6 supports large, mission-critical enterprise computing environments.

Jim Totton, Vice President and General Manager, Platform Business Unit at Red Hat, said: "The exciting features in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 with new impressive SAP benchmark results allow our enterprise customers to have increased confidence that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 can run their enterprise workloads with high performance across physical, virtual and cloud computing environments."

Enterprises can migrate to the latest multi-core technology with Enterprise Linux 6. On the latest two-tier SAP SD standard application benchmark, Enterprise Linux 6 achieved more than 22,000 SAP SD benchmark users on a single system. On this same benchmark, the HP DL980 G7 system running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 utilized all 80 cores and 160 threads in the 8-processor system running MaxDB 7.8 and the SAP enhancement package 4 for the SAP ERP 6.0 application. This is the largest Linux result submitted to SAP to-date. The results demonstrate the capabilities of the HP ProLiant DL980 G7 8-processor system’s PREMA architecture and smart CPU caching technology. Results are as of December 2, 2011, certification number 2011052.

"Clients need solutions to automate, scale-up or virtualize their environments to best fit their business requirements," said Martin Whittaker, vice president, Systems and Solutions Engineering, Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking at HP. "Optimizing Red Hat Enterprise Linux on HP ProLiant DL980 systems extends the power of open source to HP Converged Infrastructure, delivering uptime, increased capacity and faster processing speeds."

Enterprise Linux 6.2 delivers improvements in resource management and high availability, as well as new features aimed at storage and file system performance and identity management.

It 6.2 provides additional capabilities to manage system resources. For service providers or internal IT organizations that deliver applications or hosted services via multi-tenant environments, maximums can be set for CPU time associated with a given application, business process or a virtual machine. This allows for more efficient management of SLAs and enables the ability to implement service priorities, similar to those associated with network QoS.

When an enterprise deploys its applications to run in an Enterprise Linux 6.2 guest hosted by VMware, the applications can now be utilized for HA Add-Ons. This also includes support for use of GFS2 shared storage file system by the virtual machines. The result is additional deployment flexibility for customers requiring HA within a portion of their virtualized environment, as well as full support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the VMware hypervisor.

Enterprise Linux 6.2 adds enhancements to storage and file system features including full support of iSCSI extension for RDMA. Now, benefits of low latency and high throughput through a standard SAN implementation based on 10GbE are available to the demanding storage environments. This allows customers to opt out of expensive Infiniband hardware or other dedicated interconnect fabrics. Other enhancements around file system include delayed meta data logging, asynchronous and parallel file system writes, as well as support for multiple active instances of Samba in a cluster which improves overall throughput and increases availability for large Samba clustered deployments.

Identity Management in Enterprise Linux 6.2 provides the administrative tools to install, configure and manage server authentication and authorization in Linux/Unix enterprise environments, while still providing the option to interoperate with Microsoft Active Directory. This enables enterprises to manage Linux infrastructure cost-effectively. Centralized identity management and host-based access control can reduce administrative overhead, streamlines provisioning and improves security.

Enterprise Linux 6.2 continues to put an emphasis on accelerating I/O such as network traffic steering to improve network throughput by as much as 30 percent in performance tests conducted by Red Hat and delivering file system enhancements that reduce read-write times and boost overall system utilization.

Red Hat expects to deliver the beta for Enterprise Linux 5.8 later this month. Also underway is development for Enterprise Linux 7, the next major release of Enterprise Linux. Red Hat received an outstanding response from all subscribers – users and partners – for requested features coming from the recent Enterprise Linux 7 Ideas discussion group posted on the customer portal. This feedback allows Red Hat to continue to make Enterprise Linux a computing foundation for the next generation of OS platforms.

Enterprise Linux 6.2 is available to subscription customers and is accessible online using Red Hat Network and/or by using the Subscription Manager feature.