Red Hat announced today availability of its latest enterprise Linux packed with what it says are significant performance, availability and management enhancements.
Red Hat Enterprise Lnux 6.2, available now, reportedly “achieved the the largest multi-core Linux configuration results certified to-date on the two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) standard application benchmark.”
The upgrade to the 6 line also offers improvements in resource management, high availability, storage, file performance and identity management, Red Hat announced.
Just a quick swipe rom the press release issued today, about resource management:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 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 Quality of Service (QoS).
About high availability:
When an enterprise deploys its applications to run in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 guest hosted by VMware, the applications can now be utilized for High Availability (HA) Add-Ons. This also includes full 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.
About storage/file improvements:
Red Hat 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 10Gb Ethernet are available to even the most 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.
About identity management:
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 interoperate with Microsoft 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.
About performance:
Performance is key to all customers. Red Hat 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 numerous file system enhancements that reduce read-write times and boost overall system utilization.
