Red Hat 6.2 scales up on multicore platforms Dec. 07, 2011



Red Hat revised its enterprise-focused Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution with claims for greater performance and scalability on multicore platforms. RHEL 6.2 also offers enhancements in resource management, high availability, storage and file system performance, and identity management, says the company.



While recent RHEL releases have focused on cloud computing and virtualization, the big story with RHEL 6.2 instead relates to the distro's appeal as a fast server operating system, especially in enterprise storage. The distro is said to be faster and more scalable than ever on multicore systems.



On a Dec. 2 measurement using the latest two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) standard application benchmark, RHEL 6.2 was able to serve more than 22,000 SAP SD benchmark users on a single system, claims Red Hat. According to the company, this is the largest Linux result submitted to SAP to date.



In addition, RHEL 6.2 improves network throughput by up to 30 percent, says Red Hat. The new release is also said to offer file system enhancements that reduce read-write times and boost overall system utilization.



RHEL 6.2 also provides new system resource management features. For example, customers that deliver applications or hosted services via multi-tenant environments can now set maximums for CPU time assigned to a given application, business process, or virtual machine, says Red Hat.



Virtualization improvements are said to include high availability (HA) Add-Ons for applications that run in a RHEL guest deployment hosted by VMware. Storage and file system enhancements include support of iSCSI extension for RDMA (iSER), which lets users run the iSCSI storage protocol on standard storage area networks (SANs) with the same RDMA scheme used on pricier Infiniband networks.



New identity management features, meanwhile, let customers quickly install, configure, and manage server authentication and authorization in Linux/Unix enterprise environments, says the company.



For the full story, see our RHEL 6.2 coverage on LinuxDevices .



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