Red Hat today announced the 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. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1, Red Hat continues to set the standard in flexibility, performance and quality that customers around the world rely on for their open source enterprise environments, spanning physical, virtual and cloud deployments. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 enhancements provide customers with improvements in system reliability, scalability and performance, coupled with support for upcoming system hardware.
“With Linux adoption growing across all workloads, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 provides more enterprise reliability, performance and control throughout the datacenter,” said Jim Totton, vice president and general manager, Platform Business at Red Hat. “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.”
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 is already established as a performance leader serving both as a virtual machine guest and hypervisor host in SPECvirt benchmarks. 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 also recently announced that the companies submitted a benchmark to SPEC in which a combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and IBM systems delivered 45% better consolidation capability than competitors in performance tests conducted by Red Hat and IBM.
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“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, 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.”
In addition to performance improvements, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 also provides numerous technology updates, including:
• Additional configuration options for advanced storage configurations with improvements in FCoE, Datacenter Bridging and iSCSI offload, which allow networked storage to deliver the quality of service commonly associated with directly connected storage
• Enhancements in virtualization, 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
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 is available today worldwide.