Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9. The latest update to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9 builds upon more than six years of enterprise-proven success, offering a more secure, stable and reliable platform for the modern enterprise and prioritizes features for critical deployments.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9 shows our continued commitment to providing a solid backbone for production deployments, adding security and stability enhancements and an updated container base image to address a variety of vital business IT needs. Jim Totton vice president and general manager, Platforms Business Unit, Red Hat

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9 delivers new hardware support developed in collaboration with Red Hat partners which helps to provide a smooth transition of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 production deployments to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 environments. Additionally, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9 adds updates to TLS 1.2 to further enhance secure communications and provide broader support for the latest PCI-DSS standards, better equipping enterprises to offer more secure online transactions.

While emphasizing stability for existing IT investments, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9 supports the next generation of cloud-native applications through an updated Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 base image. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9 base image enables customers to migrate their existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 workloads into container-based applications - suitable for deployment on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host, and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

Note that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 enters Production Phase 3 on May 10, 2017, meaning that subsequent updates to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 will be limited to qualified critical security fixes and business-impacting urgent issues. Please refer to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Life Cycle for more information.

In addition, as Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions are not tied to a particular release, existing customers may also elect to update their Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 infrastructure to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 at any time, free of charge, to take advantage of recent upstream innovations. Red Hat simplifies the upgrade to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, through the Preupgrade Assistant and Red Hat Upgrade Tool.

Availability

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9 is now available to all customers with an active Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription via the Red Hat Customer Portal.

Supporting Quote

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

"For more than six years, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 has provided enterprise IT with a more secure, stable and reliable platform for mission-critical workloads, from financial systems to national security applications. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9 shows our continued commitment to providing a solid backbone for production deployments, adding security and stability enhancements and an updated container base image to address a variety of vital business IT needs."