Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6, the latest version of the company’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 platform. Nearly four years since the launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 in 2010, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 provides a stable and secure foundation that enables organizations to tailor their infrastructure for the business needs of today while remaining flexible enough to prepare for the challenges of tomorrow. This flexibility enables enterprises to confidently build, deploy and manage large, complex IT projects across physical, virtual and cloud environments.

Whether you’re operating on bare metal, building out your virtual infrastructure, or leveraging the open hybrid cloud, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, with enhancements to virtualization, performance and system administration, continues to be an excellent choice for deploying and managing large and complex IT projects. Jim Totton vice president and general manager, Platform Business Unit, Red Hat

The new features and capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 are centered on three critical areas for enterprise IT:

Performance

System Administration

Virtualization

From the kernel to the network stack, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 has been tuned to optimize performance. With support for higher processor counts and memory limits as well as kernel optimizations that allow for more efficient CPU utilization on large NUMA systems, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 better accommodates dense single-server workloads. Other system performance enhancements include support for additional 40 GbE network adapters, reductions in network latency and jitter, and support for high performance, low latency applications.

Improving upon an already powerful feature set for simplifying deployment processes and system configuration, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 offers new capabilities to build and manage large, complex IT environments. In large high availability configurations, full support for HAProxy and keepalived load balancer technologies improves stability, while the improved manageability of resource lists simplifies administration. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 also includes new Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) functionality for compliance testing and Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) for better monitoring and management in distributed environments.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 improves its functionality as a virtual guest by including several enhancements to improve the overall virtual guest experience. Support for a host to feed randomness to a virtual machine increases security for cryptographic applications while multi-queue performance improvements boost guest network and storage throughput when running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 host.

Available now, the full list of capabilities and features within Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 can be viewed at https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/.

Supporting Quotes

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

"With the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6, we continue to refine the stable and secure Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 platform which provides a reliable foundation to mission-critical systems across industries and regions. Whether you’re operating on bare metal, building out your virtual infrastructure, or leveraging the open hybrid cloud, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, with enhancements to virtualization, performance and system administration, continues to be an excellent choice for deploying and managing large and complex IT projects."