Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) today announced  the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1, the first  update to the platform since the delivery of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6  in November 2010. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1, Red Hat continues  to set the standard in flexibility, performance and quality that  customers around the world rely on for their open source enterprise  environments, spanning physical, virtual and cloud deployments.
 
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 enhancements provide customers with  improvements in system reliability, scalability and performance, coupled  with support for upcoming system hardware. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1  also delivers patches and security updates, while maintaining  application compatibility and OEM/ISV certifications.
 
“With Linux adoption growing across all workloads, Red Hat Enterprise  Linux 6.1 provides more enterprise reliability, performance and control  throughout the datacenter,” said Jim Totton, vice president and general  manager, Platform Business at Red Hat. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1  continues to lead Linux innovation as we drive adoption across workloads  that include physical, virtual and cloud deployments. We’re pleased to  provide these new capabilities to our global customers today.”
 
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 is already established as a performance  leader serving both as a virtual machine guest and hypervisor host in  SPECvirt benchmarks. Red Hat and HP recently announced that the  combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with KVM running on a HP  ProLiant BL620c G7 20-core Blade server delivered a record-setting  SPECvirt_sc2010 benchmark result. Red Hat and IBM also recently  announced that the companies submitted a benchmark to SPEC in which a  combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise  Virtualization and IBM systems delivered 45% better consolidation  capability than competitors in performance tests conducted by Red Hat  and IBM. See www.spec.org for details.
 
“Building on our decade-long partnership to optimize Red Hat Enterprise  Linux for IBM platforms, our companies have collaborated closely on the  development of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1,” said Jean Staten Healy,  director, Cross-IBM Linux and Open Virtualization. “Red Hat Enterprise  Linux 6.1 combined with IBM hardware capabilities offers our customers  expanded flexibility, performance and scalability across their bare  metal, virtualized and cloud environments. Our collaboration continues  to drive innovation and leading results in the industry.”
 
In addition to performance improvements, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1  also provides numerous technology updates, including: 
* Additional configuration options for advanced storage configurations  with improvements in FCoE, Datacenter Bridging and iSCSI offload, which  allow networked storage to deliver the quality of service commonly  associated with directly connected storage
* Enhancements in virtualization, file systems, scheduler, resource  management and high availability
* New technologies that enable smoother enterprise deployments and  tighter integration with heterogeneous systems
* A technology preview of Red Hat Enterprise Identity (IPA) services,  based on the open source FreeIPA project
* Support for automatic failover for virtual machines and applications  using the Red Hat High Availability Add-On
* Integrated developer tools that provide the ability to write, debug,  profile and deploy applications without leaving the graphical environment
* Improvements to network traffic processing to leverage multi-processor  servers that are getting increasingly common
 
Industry analyst firm IDC recently conducted primary research,  commissioned by Red Hat, to determine the long-term total cost of  ownership (TCO) benefits provided by Red Hat Enterprise Linux when  compared to other strategies, such as running mixed environments or  non-paid Linux distributions. Results show that through more efficient  operations, higher ratios of servers and users per administrator and  reduced downtime, customers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions  can realize significant cost savings and price/performance improvements.  For the full report, visit  https://engage.redhat.com/forms/linux-deployment-strategies?sc_cid=70160000000TMTsAAO.
 
“IDC conducted a study that evaluated organizations that are heavily  standardized on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and compared those  organizations with others that had a mixture of Linux distributions in  use, and organizations that were heavily penetrated by non-paid Linux  distributions. The outcome of the study found that there is demonstrable  business benefit associated with having professional support for an  operating system, compared to a do-it-yourself approach,” said Al  Gillen, Program VP, System Software at IDC. “The real benefits came from  lower IT staff costs and reduced end user downtime.”
 
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 is available to subscribing Red Hat  customers today worldwide.
 
For more information about Red Hat Enterprise Linux, visit www.redhat.com/rhel.