RHEL 6.1 revamps authentication services
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 is now available on general release bringing with it better system reliability, performance, and scalability, the company said on Friday.
The release is the first update to the platform since the launch of the milestone Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 version in November 2010.
As well as delivering improvements to reliability and performance, RHEL 6.1 also paves the way with support for upcoming system hardware and delivers patches and security updates. It can be issued as a physical, virtual or cloud deployment.
"With Linux adoption growing across all workloads, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 provides more enterprise reliability, performance and control throughout the datacentre," Jim Totton, vice president and general manager of the platform unit at Red Hat, said in a statement.
The company said the platform also provides a number of technological improvements, such as better support and configuration options for advanced storage configurations and easier enterprise deployments.
Among the improvements the company introduced a technology preview of Red Hat Enterprise IPA services, which provide identity and authentication features. Red Hat IPA is based on the open source FreeIPA project, itself a part of the Red Hat Linux Fedora project since 2008.
"IPA provides identity and authentication services - think of it as [analogous] of Microsoft Active Directory for Linux. IPA integrates well with Active Directory Server and is an ideal solution for customers with assorted Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Windows data centre environments," Aram Kananov, product marketing manager EMEA, platform and cloud at Red Hat told ZDNet UK on Friday.
Kananov also said the introduction of Red Hat IPA will also pave the way for future system management features such as Single sign-on using Kerberos and LDAP, basic host-based access control, support for open standards — an access control framework — and the ability to integrate with Active Directory, including users, groups, and passwords.
RHEL 6.1 also brings improvements to network traffic processing which allow companies to make the most of multi-processor servers, Red Hat said.