RALEIGH, USA: Red Hat, Inc., provider of open source solutions has announced the global availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3, featuring the latest open source, commercial-strength technology innovations.

In the third update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, customers will receive a wide range of enhancements, including significantly increased virtualization scalability, expanded hardware platform support and incorporation of OpenJDK Java technologies.

The primary new features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 includes Increased scalability of virtualized x86-64 environments, Support for Intel Core i7 (Nehalem) processors and Inclusion of OpenJDK.

"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," said Doug Fisher, vice president, Intel Software and Services Group, and general manager, Systems Software Division. "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. These new features and improvements range from general kernel, device driver and architectural enhancements to simplified 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 operating system environment from the desktop to the mainframe.

"With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3, Red Hat has once again delivered a rich set of features, developed through rapid innovation with the open source community, that can increase the capability and drive down the cost of customers' Information Technology," said Scott Crenshaw, vice president, Platform Business Unit at Red Hat. "With the challenge to carve costs out of IT budgets, the flexibility, reliability and simplicity of an Enterprise Linux subscription has more value to customers than ever. Our customers have access to all the features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 today."