Red Hat unveils Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7

Red Hat, Inc. has announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, the latest major release of the company’s flagship platform. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 not only lays the foundation for the open hybrid cloud and serves enterprise workloads across converged infrastructures, but it also pushes the operating system beyond today’s position as a commodity platform. Built to meet modern datacentre demands along with next-generation IT requirements, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 powers the spectrum of enterprise IT, from application containers to cloud services.

Since its introduction more than a decade ago, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has become the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, and it has set industry standards for performance, capacity, and security. Today, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a leading force in the enterprise datacentre and in the cloud. More than 90 percent of 2013 Fortune 500 companies, along with organizations in nearly every industry and around the globe, rely on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Bare metal servers, virtual machines, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) are converging to form a robust, powerful datacentre environment to meet constantly changing business needs. Answering the heterogeneous realities of modern enterprise IT, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 offers a cohesive, unified foundation that enables customers to balance modern demands while reaping the benefits of computing innovation, like Linux Containers and big data, across physical systems, virtual machines and the cloud – the open hybrid cloud.

Addressing Next-Generation IT Requirements
Enterprise IT does not exist in a static vacuum; technology is dynamic, with new innovations emerging almost daily, promising improved operational efficiencies as well as providing the ability to respond to radically-evolving business requirements. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 offers customers the agility and the flexibility to meet these new needs head-on without increasing complexity, from rapidly delivering new applications via secure, lightweight containers to scaling infrastructure to meet big data requirements with new and enhanced file systems. Key Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 features to address next-generation IT needs include:
· Enhanced application development, delivery, portability and isolation through Linux Containers, including Docker, across physical, virtual, and cloud deployments as well as development, test and production environments.
· Significant file system improvements, including XFS as the default file system, scaling to 500 TB.
· Cross-realm trust to easily enable secure access for Microsoft Active Directory users across Microsoft Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux domains, providing the flexibility for Red Hat Enterprise Linux to co-exist within heterogeneous datacentres.
· Powerful and secure application runtimes and development, delivery and troubleshooting tools, integrated into the platform and container-ready.

Managing the Modern Datacentre
Beyond providing the capabilities to meet emerging IT innovation, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 also addresses today’s technology needs. With growing requests for complex systems, on-demand services and robust security, IT teams need more control, more clarity and more scalability without having to deploy dozens of specialized tools. Independent of deployment scale, scope or complexity, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 serves as not only a catalyst for enterprise innovation, but also delivers the military-grade security and the mission-critical reliability, as well as the performance, the features and the ease-of-use to efficiently “keep the lights on,” including:
· Innovative infrastructure components like systemd, a leading standard for modernizing the management of processes, services, security and other resources.
· Built-in performance profiles, tuning and instrumentation for optimized performance and easy scalability.
· Unified management tooling and an industry-standard management framework with OpenLMI for streamlined administration and system configuration.
· Enhanced application isolation and security applied via containerization to protect against both unintentional interference and malicious attacks.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Ecosystem
As with all of Red Hat’s enterprise open source solutions, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is backed by Red Hat’s extensive global ecosystem of services and support. Read more about the global technology leaders that are rallying behind Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

Additionally, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 will be supported by Red Hat’s robust hands-on training and certification program, featuring classroom, virtual and on-site team courses. More details about the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 training and certification portfolio will be available soon.