RALEIGH, N.C. – (NYSE:RHT [1]) Red Hat has released Enterprise Linux 5.1 with integrated virtualization. This release provides the most compelling platform for customers and software developers ever, with its industry-leading virtualization capabilities complementing Red Hat's newly announced Linux Automation strategy. It offers the industry's broadest deployment ecosystem, covering standalone systems, virtualized systems, appliances and web-scale “cloud” computing environments.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 [2] virtualization delivers considerably broader server support than proprietary virtualization products, and up to twice the performance. This allows greater server consolidation and eliminates a key obstacle to deploying virtualization more widely. And Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers benefit from one of the industry's largest and fastest-growing set of certified applications.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux's deployment flexibility uniquely allows customers to deploy a single platform, virtual or physical, small or large, throughout their enterprise. By providing one platform that spans the broadest range of x86, x86-64, POWER, Itanium and mainframe servers, regardless of size, core count or capacity, customers can gain dramatic operational and cost efficiencies when compared to proprietary solutions. And fully integrated virtualization, included at no additional cost, amplifies these benefits. Notably, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 provides enhanced support for virtualization of Microsoft Windows guests, providing significant performance improvements for Windows XP, Windows Server 2000, 2003 and Windows 2008 beta guests.
Red Hat works closely with its hardware partners to lead the industry in providing support for new hardware features, an advantage unique to the open source development model. This is reflected in support for features such as Nested Page Tables in the new release.
"Our initial testing indicates that Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization delivers significant performance gains for our compute intensive applications and should provide an additional layer of abstraction that will help us manage multiple competing priorities,” said Derek Chan, Head of Digital Operations for DreamWorks Animation.
“With Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization, customers can easily deploy any application, anywhere at anytime,” said Paul Cormier, executive vice president, Worldwide Engineering at Red Hat. “Other virtualization products don't scale to support large numbers of cores or CPUs, which limit customers' ability to utilize their infrastructure, or force customers to deploy multiple virtualization platforms. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, customers enjoy a flexible yet consistent application environment for all of their virtualization requirements: from small servers to mainframe-class systems, for Linux and Windows servers and for even the most demanding workloads.”
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 is immediately available to customers via Red Hat Network, Red Hat's management and automation platform. Red Hat Network provides customers a common platform for managing both physical and virtual servers, eliminating the need for organizations to acquire, manage and train their staff on new tools to manage virtual servers. Red Hat Network allows customers to provision, monitor and manage their servers throughout the entire lifecycle.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization includes the ability to perform live migration, allowing customers to seamlessly move running applications from one server to another, maximizing resource utilization in the face of changing business requirements. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform includes high-availability clustering, storage virtualization and failover software to provide enhanced levels of application availability, for both physical and virtual servers.
Utilizing multiple cores and CPUs is more important than ever with the release of Intel’s latest Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors and Itanium processors. Users deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 and utilizing Intel Virtualization Technology can experience even greater gains. “Red Hat and Intel have worked together in delivering a high-performance platform for virtualization,” said Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president, general manager, Intel Digital Enterprise Group. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 allows customers to scale up their virtual infrastructure to run high-performance virtual machines that utilize Intel Virtualization Technology and all the processing power of the Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors and high-end Itanium servers, without the overhead seen in traditional virtualization environments.”
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is also available on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2 [3]), a web service that provides resizeable compute capacity in the cloud. This collaboration makes all the capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including the Red Hat Network management service, world-class technical support and over 3,400 certified applications, available to customers on Amazon's proven network infrastructure and datacenters.
The combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing customers to pay only for the infrastructure software services and capacity that they actually use. Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2 enables customers to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, removing the need to over-buy software and hardware capacity as a set of resources to handle periodic spikes in demand.