RHEL 6 aims for scalability, cloud computing
Red Hat has unveiled the latest version of its Enterprise Linux operating system.
At a press conference in San Francisco, Red Hat products and technologies group president Paul Cormier outlined the key features in an OS that the company says represents an entire decade of growth and development.
"This is a very important point for us," said Cormier.
"Overall we have been at this for the last ten years, bringing open source technology to the enterprise."
High on the list of new features for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 would be improved scalability. The OS will support up to 16 TB of RAM, as many as 4096 processors and up to 100 TB of storage space.
Part of the aim of that increased scalability was a desire to keep up with increasingly large virtualised systems and mutli-processor servers.
To help manage potential bottlenecks in mutli-processor systems, the company is offering the Non Uniform Memory Architecture (NUMA).
The NUMA system will allow the platform to better map out and manage memory and processor setup. In doing so, the company believes that RHEL 6 will be able to significantly reduce the speed "penalty" companies incur when running virtualisation deployments on systems with multiple processors.
IDC enterprise computing group research vice president Jean Bozman told V3.co.uk that RHEL 6 is going to look to expand the reach of Linux.
Once a limited market, Linux is now looking to not only enter the small business space, but also take areas of the high performance and high-availability market previously occupied by older Unix systems and platforms such as Solaris.
"When Linux started to take off you mostly heard it in connection with the web and edge, but over the years it has taken on a much broader meaning," explained Bozman.
"The task now is to address more and more customer scenarios, it has to cover a wider range of workloads."
