Red Hat Ships Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2

Open source giant Red Hat, today announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2, the latest version of its enterprise operating system that brings significant improvements in resource management, high availability, and new features aimed at storage and file system performance and identity management.

On the performance front, enterprises can take advantage of the latest multi-core processor technology to boost and maximize performance. On the latest two-tier SAP SD standard application benchmark, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 achieved more than 22,000 SAP SD benchmark users on a single system. According to Red Hat, on this same benchmark, the HP DL980 G7 system running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 fully 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, the largest Linux result submitted to SAP to-date.

“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.”

For service providers or IT departments that deliver applications or hosted services via multi-tenant environments, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 allows for maximums to be set for CPU time associated with a given application, business process or a virtual machine.

For enterprises deploying applications in VMware environments, applications can now be utilized for High Availability (HA) Add-Ons, providing 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.

Storage and file system enhancements include full support of iSCSI extension for remote direct memory access (RDMA). Additional file system enhancements include delayed meta data logging, asynchronous and parallel file system writes, as well as support for multiple active instances of Samba in a cluster.

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

Continuing to put an emphasis on performance, I/O such as network traffic throughput has been accelerated by as much as 30 percent in performance tests conducted by Red Hat.

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