ROBERT J.R. GRAHAM: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Officially Released

“Some updates take longer than others.

“Linux vendor Red Hat (NYSE:RHAT) today officially released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL 6). The new RHEL 6 operating system includes new Linux kernel, scalability, virtualization and performance improvements over its predecessors.

“”RHEL 6 is not a point of a new product,” Paul Cormier executive vice president, engineering at Red Hat said during the RHEL 6 launch event. “This is the culmination of 10 years of development, learning and partnering to get to the point now where we feel that RHEL 6 is at the heart of the data center.”

“RHEL 6 is the first major version update to Red Hat’s flagship Linux platform in three years. RHEL 5 debuted in 2007 and has since been updated with five point releases, with a sixth currently in beta.”

Among the highlighted capabilities in RHEL 6 is the ability for massive scalability. According to Red Hat, new NUMA (non-uniform memory access) awareness gives RHEL 6 increased performance. Memory addressability is another area of key improvement. RHEL 6 is able to handle up to 16 Terabytes of memory, which is more than any single server system currently enables. The new Linux release can also scale to support up to 4,000 processors, providing further power for Red Hat users.

Controlling all that power is another area of improvement in RHEL 6. A new feature called ‘control groups’ is included which provides for fine grain resource control.

“So when you have many things running on RHEL 6, whether it’s multi-tenancy for cloud computing or it’s multiple workloads that have been consolidated, you can build policy based controls around how much of the CPU, how much memory, disk or networking resources will be committed to each of the workloads running the servers,” Jim Totten, general manager and vice president platform business unit at Red Hat said.