Red Hat Ships Enterprise Linux 3

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Enterprise Linux 3, which is available immediately, offers enhanced scalability and performance characteristics that narrow the gap between the company's Linux operating system and rival Unix operating system, executives said.

The product set, which includes enterprise and departmental servers as well as an enterprise workstation, signals the launch of Red Hat's Open Source Architecture, which was detailed last month and will be highlighted at Enterprise Linux Forum on Wednesday.

Open Source Architecture is designed as a modular, standard-based Linux infrastructure that incorporates the operating system, enterprise application deployment and management, virtualization, and clustering services.

On Tuesday, Red Hat product executives acknowledged during a briefing with CRN that Enterprise Linux 3 lacks some of the high-end capabilities of Unix systems such as dynamic partitioning and workload management but catches up with other major scalability and performance improvements.

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The Linux distribution, which is based on the Linux 2.421 kernel, supports seven architectures including Intel and AMD 32-bit x86 processors, Intel IA-64 and AMD 64-bit processors, IBM's iSeries and pSeries servers, and IBM's 31-bit and 64-bit mainframe operating systems.

The Enterprise Linux 3 Workstation, moreover, will incorporate the company's BlueCurve graphical user interface for the first time, executives added.

"This is closing the need for Unix in enterprise accounts," said Brian Stevens, vice president of operating systems at Red Hat in Westford, Mass. "Our customers are treating this as on par with Solaris."

For instance, version 3 offers enhanced multi-threading support, POSIX compliance, multinode clustering and support for 32-way systems. The previous version, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1, offered support for eight-CPU multiprocessing systems only.

Stevens said the software will help database performance by offering load balancing of incoming IP traffic and highly available "failover-style" clustering offers support for multiple nodes in a cluster.

The multithreading support, up to 30,000 threads, will vastly improve the performance of Java applications, Stevens noted. In addition, the upgrade offers support for 64 Gbytes of memory on 32-bit servers.

He said more advanced features now in Unix, such as clustered file system and workload management, will be served up with the next version, Enterprise Linux 4. Virtualization services will be offered in the future. Red Hat currently partners with VMware to enable server consolidation.

Red Hat also unveiled OEM deals with NEC and Hitachi, which will preload Enterprise Linux 3 on their servers.