Red Hat Linux: The business OS for flexibility and value

Ecosystem

Another critical value of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux family of solutions is the huge partner ecosystem that customers can draw on to complete their deployment. Red Hat's ecosystem of certified applications is by far the largest in the open-source market, and its size creates a powerful halo effect, attracting new ISVs that are looking to support Linux. To date, nearly 3,000 applications have been certified on Red Hat's Enterprise Linux and JBoss product families. Systems and peripherals from all the leading hardware vendors are certified with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and are available from the industry's leading distributors. Applications available today for version 5 cover many different markets from leading vendors including BEA, EMC, Ingres, Opsware, Oracle, Platform Computing, SAP, Sybase, Symantec and VMware.

Support

Red Hat also offers the world's most comprehensive open-source services and support capabilities, ranging from onsite consulting, to developer support, to extensive training courses for administrators, users and developers.

Kernel and performance

• Based on the Linux 2.6.18 kernel
• Support for multicore processors
• Broad range of new hardware support
• Updated crash dump capability provided by Kexec/Kdump
• Support for Intel Network Accelerator Technology
• Numerous enhancements for large SMP systems
• Enhanced pipe buffering
• IPv4/IPv6 fragmentation offload and buffer management
• Dynamically switchable per-queue I/O schedulers
• Kernel buffer splice capability for improved I/O buffer operations

Networking and interoperability

• Network storage enhancements include Autofs, FS-Cache and iSCSI support
• IPv6 support and conformance enhancements
• Improved Microsoft file/print and Active Directory integration

Community participation

Red Hat's development model starts with the community and with customers. A key part of a Red Hat subscription is the ability to work with us to define what our products will be. So, when we sat down with our customers to define Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, many had already started using the key features, available through our free Fedora distribution. This direct experience guided their input and allowed us to design Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 to meet their specific needs. They worked through the trade-offs between simplicity and complexity, flexibility and manageability, and so on. It engendered a level of participation unobtainable in the proprietary software world.

Other benefits

Red Hat Enterprise Linux also includes flexibility, improved resource management, scalability, advances in the application development environment and more.

In summary, we've built our solutions to reduce operating costs and provide a reliable, scalable, performance-enhancing solution for customers.

Brian Stevens, CTO and vice president of engineering at Red Hat, has more than 20 years of enterprise engineering experience in Unix and Linux technologies, including work as a developer on the first commercial release of the X Window System. Stevens now leads the emerging technologies group.