First Anniversary of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Ushered in with Second Wave of Enhancements and Top Marks in Benchmark Performance Results

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 Now Available; Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Achieves Large-scale Linux Configuration Results Certified on Two-tier SAP® SD Standard Application Benchmark

RALEIGH, N.C.--()--Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2. With this milestone, Red Hat includes many enhancements that deliver benefits spanning multiple areas, including performance and scalability. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 operating system achieved the largest multi-core Linux configuration results certified to-date on the two-tier SAP® Sales and Distribution (SD) standard application benchmark.1 Proven to perform and scale, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 effectively supports large, mission-critical enterprise computing environments.

Jim Totton, Vice President and General Manager, Platform Business Unit at Red Hat, said, “The exciting features in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 with new impressive SAP® benchmark results allow our enterprise customers to have increased confidence that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 can run their enterprise workloads with high performance across physical, virtual and cloud computing environments.”

Enterprises can confidently migrate to the latest multi-core technology with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. On the latest two-tier SAP SD standard application benchmark, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 achieved more than 22,000 SAP SD benchmark users on a single system. On this same benchmark, the HP DL980 G7 system running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 fully utilized all 80 cores and 160 threads in the 8-processor system running MaxDB 7.8 and the SAP enhancement package 4 for the SAP ERP 6.0 application. This is the largest Linux result submitted to SAP to-date. The results demonstrate the capabilities of the HP ProLiant DL980 G7 8-processor system’s PREMA architecture and smart CPU caching technology. Results are as of December 2, 2011, certification number 2011052.

“Clients need solutions to automate, scale-up or virtualize their environments to best fit their business requirements,” said Martin Whittaker, vice president, Systems and Solutions Engineering, Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking at HP. “Optimizing Red Hat Enterprise Linux on HP ProLiant DL980 systems extends the power of open source to HP Converged Infrastructure, delivering uptime, increased capacity and faster processing speeds.”

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 delivers significant improvements in resource management and high availability, as well as new features aimed at storage and file system performance and identity management.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 provides additional capabilities to manage system resources. For service providers or internal IT organizations that deliver applications or hosted services via multi-tenant environments, maximums can be set for CPU time associated with a given application, business process or a virtual machine. This allows for more efficient management of SLAs and enables the ability to implement service priorities, similar to those associated with network Quality of Service (QoS).

When an enterprise deploys its applications to run in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 guest hosted by VMware, the applications can now be utilized for High Availability (HA) Add-Ons. This also includes full support for use of GFS2 shared storage file system by the virtual machines. The result is additional deployment flexibility for customers requiring HA within a portion of their virtualized environment, as well as full support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the VMware hypervisor.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 adds enhancements to storage and file system features including full support of iSCSI extension for RDMA. Now, benefits of low latency and high throughput through a standard SAN implementation based on 10Gb Ethernet are available to even the most demanding storage environments. This allows customers to opt out of expensive Infiniband hardware or other dedicated interconnect fabrics. Other enhancements around file system include delayed meta data logging, asynchronous and parallel file system writes, as well as support for multiple active instances of Samba in a cluster which improves overall throughput and increases availability for large Samba clustered deployments.

Identity Management in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 provides the administrative tools to quickly install, configure and manage server authentication and authorization in Linux/Unix enterprise environments, while still providing the option to interoperate with Microsoft Active Directory. This enables enterprises to manage Linux infrastructure easily and cost-effectively. Centralized identity management and host-based access control can reduce administrative overhead, streamlines provisioning and improves security.

Performance is key to all customers. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 continues to put an emphasis on accelerating I/O such as network traffic steering to improve network throughput by as much as 30 percent in performance tests conducted by Red Hat and delivering numerous file system enhancements that reduce read-write times and boost overall system utilization.

Red Hat expects to deliver the beta for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.8 later this month. Also fully underway is development for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, the next major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat received an outstanding response from all Red Hat subscribers – users and partners – for requested features coming from the recent Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Ideas discussion group posted on the Red Hat customer portal. This important feedback allows Red Hat to continue to make Red Hat Enterprise Linux a computing foundation for the next generation of operating system platforms.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 is available to subscription customers today and is accessible online using Red Hat Network and/or by using the Subscription Manager feature. For additional technical information about the new features in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2, please visit here, For more information about Red Hat Enterprise Linux, visit here.

For more information about Red Hat, visit www.redhat.com. For more news, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com.

About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions and an S&P 500 company, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with more than 70 offices spanning the globe. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with cloud, virtualization, applications, management, storage and service-oriented architecture (SOA) solutions, including Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to delays or reductions in information technology spending; the effects of industry consolidation; the ability of the Company to compete effectively; uncertainty and adverse results in litigation and related settlements; the integration of acquisitions and the ability to market successfully acquired technologies and products; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; the ability to deliver and stimulate demand for new products and technological innovations on a timely basis; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company's growth and international operations; fluctuations in exchange rates; and changes in and a dependence on key personnel, as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission's website at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions "Risk Factors" and "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations". In addition to these factors, actual future performance, outcomes, and results may differ materially because of more general factors including (without limitation) general industry and market conditions and growth rates, economic and political conditions, governmental and public policy changes and the impact of natural disasters such as the earthquakes and floods, including Japan. The forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company's views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company's views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release.

1Results of the HP ProLiant DL980 (2.40GHz Intel Xeon Processor E7-4870, 8 processors, 80 cores, 160 threads) on the two-tier SAP SD standard application benchmark running SAP enhancement package 4 for SAP ERP 6.0, MaxDB 7.8 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6: 22,713 SAP SD benchmark users. Certification number 2011052 as of December 2, 2011.

Red Hat, Inc. Red Hat, the Shadowman logo and JBoss are registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. SAP and all SAP logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries. All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective owners.

Contacts

Red Hat, Inc.
Karin Bakis, 978-392-1096
kbakis@redhat.com

Contacts

Red Hat, Inc.
Karin Bakis, 978-392-1096
kbakis@redhat.com