Red Hat ENTERPRISE LINUX Datasheet

RED HAT ENTERPRISE LINUX
Red Hat ® Enterprise Linux ®
trusted by thousands of enterprises around the world to
power their most mission-critical applications. Red Hat
Enterprise Linux delivers performance, reliability, scalabil-
ity, and security for its customers. Certified by the leading
hardware and software vendors, it is suitable for, and has
been deployed on, desktops, servers, and mainframes.
Engineered by Red Hat and backed by a powerful open
source development model, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has
proven performance and reliability. It has also completed
the most stringent government security certifications,
safeguarding your systems and your data. Key features
that customers rely on are built into and fully integrated
with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including virtualization,
mandatory access control (MAC) security, high-availability
clustering, modularity, and extensive energy management
capabilities. Operational ease-of-use is facilitated by allow-
ing customers the flexibility to select features and deploy-
ment methods that will enable them to manage thousands
of servers as easily as one.
KEY ATTRIBUTES
Stable, trusted platform. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the
long-term, predictable operating platform that embraces
open source software and delivers to customers an enter-
prise-ready solution that can handle any application work-
load. With a rigorous engineering process, Red Hat ensures
long-term stability, embraces industry innovation, and puts
customers in control of their environment.
Red Hat meets the challenge of maintaining a stable,
trusted platform in many ways. Key partnerships across
the industry allow Red Hat to test for the stability of their
hardware, software, and management interfaces. Support
for the latest hardware is included with service packs and
is delivered through minor releases. Applications do not
need to be re-built or re-certified with each release update
because the application programming and binary inter-
faces (API/ABI) are held stable for the full life of a Red Hat
Enterprise Linux release, regardless of the physical or vir-
tual deployment model. This means that Red Hat's rich
ecosystem of thousands of applications are immediately
available, avoiding delays that would otherwise occur with
expensive and time-consuming re-testing efforts.
is the operating system Flexibility. Red Hat Enterprise Linux gives customers a
wide range of features that can be selected to best suit
their environment. For example, a web-serving environ-
ment may require a different feature set than a database
or financial application environment. The same applies to
running guest instances of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on
common third-party hypervisors and hardware partition-
ing technologies. Customers can select the feature set for
their targeted environment while still receiving the value
and high quality of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In addition,
with Red Hat's unique subscription model, customers have
the choice of any currently supported version of Red Hat
Enterprise Linux. Visit redhat.com/rhel/server/advanced/
virt.html for details on the supported combinations.
Performance and scalability. Red Hat Enterprise Linux
performance scales on all levels, from desktops to work-
stations, from blades to rack environments, from single
CPU systems to the largest SMP servers and mainframes.
As hardware upgrades deliver additional processing and
storage, Red Hat Enterprise Linux scales with that growth.
Red Hat continues to innovate and deliver advanced func-
tionality of the highest quality to its customers. Red Hat
works continuously with hardware and software partners
to enhance the performance of its platforms. For example,
improvements in virtualization performance make it prac-
tical to deploy any application workload, even I/O-bound
applications.
The most dramatic improvements in recent virtual machine
performance are made possible by I/O optimizations,
including support for new hardware capabilities, such as
10 Gigabit SR-IOV adapters, and NPIV. These have reduced
overhead for I/O-bound environments to less than five per-
cent, which opens the door to a whole new class of applica-
tions, such as database, transaction, and file servers. Red
Hat leads the industry with new capabilities that enable
customers to fully utilize a virtualized environment.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in cooperation with Red Hat's
hardware partners, is enabling RAS (reliability, availability,
security) and scalability features that have been recently
introduced to mainstream architectures. Operational cost
savings and physical space considerations drive the need
for these higher-efficiency systems. For example, a 64-CPU
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