Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 Expands Technology Innovation

Red Hat, Inc ., a provider of open source solutions, has announced the availability of the fifth update to the Red Hat (News - Alert) Enterprise Linux 5 platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5.

The upgraded features are designed to operate across physical, virtual and cloud deployments, and offers enhanced virtualization and interoperability capabilities with support for important new hardware platforms. Like other Red Hat updates, application compatibility and certification with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 platform is fully maintained.

The upgrade provides support for new platforms being delivered by several Red Hat partners, including AMD, Dell, HP, IBM (News - Alert) and Intel. Newly supported platforms include Intel Nehalem EX, AMD Opteron  6000 Series  and IBM Power 7, allowing  Red Hat customers to access other powerful new servers.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux and AMD (News - Alert) platforms together provide our customers with compelling datacenter reliability and flexibility,” stated Margaret Lewis, director, Software Solutions Marketing at AMD.

“The latest technology enhancements in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 combined with our new 8- and 12-Core AMD Opteron 6000 Series platforms offer customers improved performance while still maintaining low power consumption, helping to lower total cost of ownership,” Lewis adds.

'Through the combination of Dell (News - Alert) PowerEdge servers and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, customers are offered a scalable, high-performance, affordable solution,” explained Sally Stevens, vice president of Enterprise Platform Marketing at Dell.

“New technology advancements in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5, coupled with Dell's 11th generation of servers, give users a robust platform for running their mission-critical applications on an industry-standard x86 architecture.”

In the fourth update to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 platform, the company introduced the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor alongside the Xen hypervisor.  Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 update provides a number of virtualization enhancements. Support for the large memory systems of new servers allows a larger number of virtual machines to be deployed on each physical server.

Anamika Singh is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Anamika's articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Stefania Viscusi