Red Hat Launches Enterprise Linux 7

Open source specialist Red Hat has released the latest version of its Linux-based enterprise operating system.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL) adopts XFS as the default file system to scale volumes up to 500 TB and features improved compatibility with Microsoft Windows environments. It also adds support for Linux application containers, including Docker containers.

“With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, we’re raising the bar again and bringing the next-generation of IT to customers,” said Paul Cormier, president of Products and Technologies at Red Hat.

“As the worlds of physical, virtual and cloud systems converge, Red Hat is delivering a true open hybrid cloud platform that gives both ISVs and applications a consistent runtime platform across bare metal systems, virtual machines, and public and private clouds. This will be essential as applications move from on-premises to the cloud.”

New and improved

Red Hat has been making Linux software for business since 1995. RHEL itself is over a decade old, and the latest version improves the OS with modern converged computing features. According to Red Hat, it offers more control, less complexity and better scalability than the previous generation OS, launched in 2010.

RHEL 7 is based on the Fedora 19 community Linux release and the Linux 3.10 kernel. Besides the application container support and the move from Ext4 to XFS file system, new features include ‘systemd’ – a standard for process management previously tested in Fedora which should result in much shorter boot times, among other things.

There’s also cross-realm trust with Microsoft Active Directory which should ease user transition between Windows and RHEL domains in environments that use both.

RHEL 7 is the first version of the OS to replace MySQL with MariaDB as the default database management option. “RedHat chose MariaDB because it is based on truly open source innovation processes that address the needs of users for increased performance, security, high availability and interoperability with NoSQL,” Patrik Sallner, CEO of SkySQL told TechWeekEurope.

The OS also includes new performance profiles, extended tuning and instrumentation, updated to take into account advances in virtualisation and new service delivery models.

“We believe that open source is an engine of innovation that brings the best minds and companies together to create exciting new software and services,” commented Masahiko Iwata, general manager at NTT Open Source Software Center.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is the crystallization of four years’ worth of such collaborative efforts across all of the stack into an enterprise-class distribution, which we view as a rock-solid foundation for new services in the cloud era.”

In order to reassure RHEL users about the future,  the company has decided to guarantee support for this release for the next ten years.

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