On 10th June,Red Hat made official the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. The latest release of the company’s flagship platform, RHEL 7 not only lays the foundation for the open hybrid cloud and serves enterprise workloads across converged infrastructures, but it also pushes the operating system beyond today’s position as a commodity platform.
RHEL 7 is designed to provide the foundation for future application architectures while supporting deployments across bare metal systems, virtual machines, and cloud infrastructure. As Windows 8 has seen a number of enterprise customers jump ship, it seems that Linux based solutions like RHEL will be adapted by customers at a steady pace in the near future.
For more than ten years, Red Hat has been working with thousands of partners to develop a robust partner ecosystem. Within this network, partners are able to test and certify their technology in conjunction with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “There is a commitment on our side to create a rich partner ecosystem,” explained Alessandro Perilli, General Manager, Open Hybrid Cloud Program, Red Hat, during an interview at the Red Hat Forum in Dubai on 3rd June, “We want to do better than we have done in the past to reach out and support partners.”
According to Red Hat top-brass, RHEL 7 offers dramatic changes in reliability, performance and scalability. The promise of scalability is particularly relevant in the Middle East as industries in this market ramp up their virtualisation efforts. “The Middle East is moving forward with virtualisation,” said Faycal Saile, General Manager, Middle East, Turkey and Africa, also interviewed at the Red Hat Forum in Dubai, “We have seen a huge growth in public cloud in the region in the last 24 months and in the future we are expecting an increased interest in private cloud.”
In addition, RHEL 7 offers container-based isolation. In a phone interview on the day of RHEL 7’s release, Mark Coggin, Senior Director, Product Marketing, emphasised the importance of RHEL 7’s Linux container technology. “The big story here is Linux containers,” he said, “Linux containers uses tools from the Docker Project supporting Docker formatted containers. Ultimately we are bringing to market atomic host, which is part of the container strategy.”
The Docker project had not yet been started when development for REHL 7 began in 2010. Though the open-source container project began in 2013, it has fast become one of the most popular areas of enterprise virtualisation technology. As such, Docker 1.0, released on 9th June is fully supported inside of RHEL 7. “The container story is that we are delivering the flexibility to quickly respond to evolving business requirements,” said Coggin, “Responding to changing business needs requires a level of agility that containers can provide.”
The release of RHEL 7 promises to redefine the operating system, and as of its release date it seems to be doing just that. Users are pleased with updates to the Anaconda installer which allows for easy customisation as well as the update to XFS as the default file-system.
