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February 8, 2009

Red Hat says it has released its RH Enterprise Linux version 5.3, featuring the latest open source Linux OS designed specifically for mission-critical business applications.

Red Hat's 3rd update of its Enterprise Linux Five customers will receive a wide range of enhancements, including significantly increased virtualization scalability, expanded hardware platform support and incorporation of Open JDK Java technologies.

Business customers with a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription will receive the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 update, which is available for immediate download from the Red Hat Network.

The main new features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 include:

1) Increased scalability of virtualized x86-64 environments: This includes the industry-leading ability to support virtual servers with up to 32 virtual CPUs and 80GB of memory. Physical server limits have also been expanded to match the size of today's latest hardware systems, with up to 126 CPUs and 1 TB of main RAM. New features, such as support for Hugepage memory and Intel Extended Page Tables (EPT), dramatically improve the performance of virtual servers. For customers, these enhancements allow more and larger virtual systems to be configured on today's powerful servers, thereby reducing costs. Additionally, more devices can be allocated to each virtual server (guest), enabling the virtualization of applications with heavy I/O requirements.

2) Support for Intel Core i7 (Nehalem) processors: This quad-core, hyperthreaded 45nM processor is one of the most significant advances for Intel processor architecture since the Pentium Pro. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3. delivers exceptional performance with the new processor, and also supports features such as the power management and hyperthreading. In internal testing, the Red Hat Engineering Performance Group has measured exceptional gains with the new Nehalem processors, with unaudited results showing gains of 1.7x for commercial applications and gains up to 3.5x for high-performance technical computing applications compared to the previous generation of Intel processors.

3) Inclusion of OpenJDK: OpenJDK is a high-performance, fully open source implementation of Java SE 6. OpenJDK is based on the same code base as Sun's JDK, the most widely adopted Java implementation. OpenJDK in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 has passed the full Java SE 6 TCK and is compatible with all applications written for Java SE 6 and previous versions. OpenJDK is fully supported directly by Red Hat. With the integration of OpenJDK, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 is the the first enterprise-ready solution with a fully open source Java stack when combined with JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

Doug Fisher, v.p. of Intel Software and Services Group says "further strengthening our long-standing relationship with Red Hat, we have collaborated to make the newly available Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 operating platform run great on Intel® Xeon® processor-based platforms."

Fisher added "together, the compelling combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 and Intel's current and future Intel Xeon processor-based servers enable customers to run the most demanding, business-critical workloads on high-performance, cost-effective, reliable platforms."

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 also includes enhancements spanning many other components of the leading open source operating system, with the solution's Release Notes documenting over 150 additions and updates.

Such new features and improvements range from kernel improvements, device driver and architectural enhancements to simplified Linux desktop networking and full support of the GFS2 file system.

In combination, these many enhancements reinforce Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the industry's leading commercial-strength open source Linux operating system environment - from the desktop to the mainframe computer.

Source: Red Hat.

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