Red Hat has announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 (RHEL 6.1). The release updates last Novembers release of RHEL 6.0 with a variety of performance enhancements which Red Hat say allowed it to deliver a record-setting SPECvirt_sc2010 benchmark running on a HP Proliant 20-core Blade server.

Red Hat also highlight enhancements in RHEL 6.1 such as new configuration options for advanced storage such as Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), Datacenter Bridging and iSCSI and improvements in virtualisation, file systems, scheduling, resource management and high availability functionality. Support has been added to the Red Hat High Availability add-on to enable automatic failover for virtual machines and applications which should enable finer granularity in availability management. There are also improvements in the network traffic processing which make use of the capabilities of multi-processor servers.

A technology preview of FreeIPA based Red Hat Enterprise Identity (IPA) services is also included in RHEL 6.1 and there are new additions which make enterprise deployments simpler and improve integration with other platforms. There are also, of course, patches and security updates for the operating system. "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 continues to lead Linux innovation as we drive adoption across workloads that include physical, virtual and cloud deployments" said Red Hat's VP and GM of Platform Business, Jim Totton, explaining why the new release was suitable across the new generation enterprise computing. Release notes and technical notes are available for full details of the changes in RHEL 6.1.

(djwm)