Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1, the first minor release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, which launched in June 2014. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 delivers key enhancements to Red Hat’s next-generation flagship platform, furthering the company’s mission to redefine the enterprise operating system.

The enhancements to the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1, as well as the new offerings based on the update, deliver a flexible, reliable, secure and performant platform that works across nearly every industry use case, from container adoption and rapid application development to time-sensitive trading applications and systems based on IBM Power Systems architecture. Jim Totton vice president and general manager, Platforms Business Unit, Red Hat

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 offers improved development and deployment tools, enhanced interoperability and manageability, and additional security and performance features. As with all releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, these enhancements are delivered over a stable, secure, 10-year lifecycle backed by Red Hat’s award-winning global support.

Manageability and Interoperability

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 delivers significant functionality improvements for heterogeneous operating system environments, particularly for infrastructure that uses Active Directory. By integrating the Common Internet File System (CIFS) with SSSD, users can now gain native access to Microsoft Windows file and print services without having to rely on winbind. Logical Volume Management (LVM) now includes additional OpenLMI-based hooks to manage volume groups and thinly provisioned volumes. This release also includes integrated client-side functionality to communicate with Ceph block storage.

Security and Access Management

Improvements to Identity Management (IdM) now provide the ability to implement strong one-time password (OTP) authentication through LDAP and Kerberos using software tokens (e.g. FreeOTP) and hardware tokens from leading third-party vendors. Additionally, the IdM access control framework has been enhanced for better control over read/write permissions and a new Certificate Authority (CA) management tool streamlines changes to CA certificates and trust chains.

Development, Deployment and Performance

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 delivers new developer tools, including several related to Linux containers. The latest docker package is now included along with orchestration tooling through Kubernetes; also available are Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 base images, which provide certified, stable foundations upon which to build enterprise-grade containerized applications. Beyond containers, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 also includes OpenJDK 8, the latest version of the open source Java SE 8 platform.

From a performance perspective, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 supports higher processor and memory limits, as well as additional features to improve the performance of applications and virtual machines, especially those running memory-intensive workloads. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 further enhances performance through the inclusion of an MCS locking mechanism to improve processor efficiency for large systems with sizable non-uniform memory access (NUMA) nodes.

Additional Red Hat Enterprise Linux Offerings

Red Hat understands the needs of enterprise IT, from delivering applications faster through containerization to running time-sensitive workloads to gaining efficiency by standardizing across architectures. To better meet these requirements, the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 coincides with the launch of three specialized Red Hat Enterprise Linux offerings designed to address industry use cases or specific architectures. These are:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host is also generally available today, using the tools and frameworks as delivered by Project Atomic. Created specifically with container-based workloads in mind, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host offers a minimal-footprint, streamlined platform perfect for running Linux containers in an enterprise environment.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Real Time is Red Hat’s real-time computing platform for deadline-oriented and time-sensitive applications. Using a specialized version of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 kernel that has been tuned to deliver consistent low-latency response times, Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Real Time retains the reliability, scalability, and performance of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, little endian brings Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 to enterprises using the IBM Power Systems platform with support for POWER8 on IBM Power Systems based on little endian. Running on POWER8 offers higher performance especially for big data applications through multi-threading, more cache and greater data bandwidth, while little endian mode removes an application portability barrier and allows datacenters running Power Systems to leverage Red Hat’s vast ecosystem of certified applications originally developed for x86 architecture. This also means that these certified applications can be more easily migrated between x86-based and POWER processor-based systems, giving customers the advantages of both architectures.

Supporting Quotes

Jim Totton, vice president and general manager, Platforms Business Unit, Red Hat

"With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, Red Hat redefined the operating system into a platform designed to facilitate innovation. The enhancements to the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1, as well as the new offerings based on the update, deliver a flexible, reliable, secure and performant platform that works across nearly every industry use case, from container adoption and rapid application development to time-sensitive trading applications and systems based on IBM Power Systems architecture."

Doug Balog, general manager, IBM Power Systems

"Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 for Power Systems in little endian mode is a huge opportunity for developers and users, providing access to a larger ecosystem of Linux applications and allowing for easier porting and migration. As organizations adapt to manage compute and data-intensive workloads from Big Data to cloud, mobile and even social, infrastructure must also meet the challenge by providing higher performance and new workload optimization."