Red Hat debuts its latest heavy-duty Linux OS

Flying in the face of the recent Linux legal controversy, Red Hat last week debuted its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 product, aimed at a wide variety of enterprise server applications with a focus on data centers.

Red Hat announced that its newest Linux offering is available on seven hardware platforms, including Intel x86 and Itanium, Advanced Micro Devices 32-bit AMD and 64-bit AMD 64 chips, as well as IBM’s midrange iSeries, pSeries and S/390 mainframe platforms.

Among the beefed-up features in the newest large-enterprise Red Hat version includes native Posix threading. Red Hat says this provides a speed and reliably boost for multithreading applications, such as large order processing systems or compute-intensive graphics applications. The server also supports larger SMP configurations – up to 16 processors – and larger memory, with support for up to 64G bytes of RAM. The software is also now distributed with a single code base, which the company says will make it more stable and easier to troubleshoot and support.

Enterprise vendors were quick to pledge their allegiance to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, with such companies as BEA Systems, Dell, HP Hitachi, IBM, Fujitsu, NEC and Oracle all announcing support for their respective server hardware and software products.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 comes in three pre-configured flavors:

* Advanced Server – for large data center applications.

* Edge Server – aimed primarily at Web serving duties.

* Workstation – for high-end, multiprocessing workstation boxes.