Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 launched

MUMBAI, INDIA:After a gap of almost three years, Red Hat Inc., announced the launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6 version in Mumbai. According to Red Hat, its latest version is designed to suit the flexible and varied enterprise architectures and provides a comprehensive foundation to customers needs for physical, virtualized and cloud deployments.

“The RHEL 6 is based on major themes such as optimized for today’s IT developments which includes scale performance, security resources and control manageability. It focuses on Green IT through dynamic power adjustments and reduction in power consumption by 20 percent,” said Joel Burman, Red Hat’s vice president — Global Field Marketing.

“More over it provides a platform for virtualization and cloud computing with a two level of security with various business benefits such as IT flexibility, high return on software and hardware investments, along lower opex through Green IT,” Burman said.

According to Burman, the RHEL 6 is at the heart of IT with integrated virtualization and cloud infrastructure support, which will enable Red Hat to drive Linux deeper and stronger into organizations against all other operating systems. 

Though the New York Stock Exchange listed company had released the RHEL6 beta version some six months earlier this year, it took almost three years for the final release to hit the markets.

“It took some time as we were developing new kernels specific for virtualization and cloud requirements and also the hardware supports from vendors like Intel and others wasn’t ready,” explained Burman.

RHEL 6 comes with 14,631 resolved issues addressed by partners, customers and community reports, has 85 percent more packages than RHEL 5 along with 3,900 additional kernel enhancement.

In terms of kernel development for Linux operating system, Red Hat contributes around 10-12 percent while Oracle shares some 2 percent only. Burman said, since Red Hat has a subscription and not license model, it reduces overhead cost of software licenses.

“For proprietary software vendors, the release of versions is a way for new revenues and sales but for Red Hat it is the subscription that generates revenues and doesn’t depend on versions,” Andy Karandikar, Red Hat’s head of Marketing commented.

According to Nandu Pradhan, Red Hat India’s president and managing director the Asia Pacific and Japan region contributes around 18-20 percent of sales and revenues to the global business.