RHEL 7: An Infrastructure Solution That Gives You Sustainability With The Power of Open Source
There have been many misconceptions about open source. Sifting through some interviews, I’ve come across an excerpt by Joe Dickman from Vizuri – a reseller of Red Hat – and he says that “Open Source gives people choice. What Red Hat provides to my customers, is sustainability.”
For a long time, Red Hat has been taking the best projects in their open source communities – Fedora and JBoss.org – and compiling the best of these into one complete enterprise offering of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. RHEL 7 is a shining testament to the success of the projects, with new features that are designed to “meet both modern datacenter and next-generation IT requirements for cloud, Linux Containers and big data.”
It’s been four years since the release of Red Hat 6 – and though this took a year longer to release than it (RHEL 7) did for RHEL 6 from RHEL 5 – Red Hat has taken a great step to ensure a system that is to remain the leader in “Business OS Flexibility and value”.
So What’s So Sustainable and Powerful About the New RHEL 7?
After reading through a number of articles to give an understanding on the new features of RHEL 7, I found the most interesting was a Podlet by Universal Conflicts. This video takes a first look into RHEL 7 and is very informative – with commentary and in-screen chuckle notes but informative information about certain steps taken in the review.
Here`s a brief paraphrased summary view from Infoworld.com with the most noteworthy features to look out for.
1. Docker
The biggest new addition to RHEL 7 is tight integration of Docker, the explosively popular application-virtualization technology. With Docker itself hitting 1.0 status, the timing on RHEL 7 couldn’t be more fitting.
Apps packaged by Docker are isolated from the system and from each other, so they can be moved between systems and still run as expected. RHEL 7 is meant to be able to use Docker as efficiently as possible so that apps don’t contend for resources or get confused about which edition of a runtime to use.
2. System
The inclusion of the system process manager may spark controversy among system administrators and Linux mavens. System was developed to replace the init system in use since the days of proprietary Unix, and it allows, for example, more efficient loading of services during the boot process.
3. XFS By Default
A third major change, though not likely to raise nearly as many eyebrows, applies to the default file system used by RHEL to XFS.
Originally created by Silicon Graphics International, XFS has long been in production use with Linux systems, and on RHEL 7 it’ll support file systems of up to 500TB in size.
Unfortunately, there’s no real way to migrate from other file systems currently in use on RHEL — such as ext4 or btrfs– other than backing up and restoring.
4. Microsoft-Compatible Identity Management
Even admins who aren’t fans of Microsoft Windows have a grudging respect for Microsoft Active Directory. RHEL 7 improves the way RHEL deals with AD by adding two key new features. Cross-realm trusts can now be established between RHEL 7 and AD, so AD users can access resources on the Linux side without having to go through another sign-on step. The other big AD-related addition to RHEL 7, realmd, automates both the discovery of AD (or other Red Hat identity services) based on DNS information and the process of joining to it.
5. Performance Co-Pilot
Performance tuning without live statistics is like driving with the windshield painted over, so RHEL 7 introduces a new performance-monitoring system PCP Performance Co-Pilot, originally created by Silicon Graphics International but now available as part of RHEL 7. In addition to monitoring and recording system stats, PCP sports APIs and a tool set for making that data available to other subsystems, such as — you guessed it — the newly introduced system.
Another minor addition in this vein: new performance profiles. RHEL 6 already had performance profiles, which are ways to tune RHEL overall to meet specific usage scenarios. RHEL 7 not only defaults to a new profile that emphasizes maximum throughput performance, but includes another new default profile for balancing performance against energy savings.
For a more detailed overview of Red Hat’s new features, you can get some documentation here:
What this means for your organization:
With these features, an IT environment that is scalable, flexible, manageable and highly performance-tuned is available to you today. As far as businesses go: your organization can scale up and have its IT infrastructure scale along with it.
This means you can deploy new or upon existing infrastructure faster, scale the features of your existing RHEL subscriptions, and even manage all your infrastructure from great management tools offered by Red Hat.
This means that not only is it possible to have the best out of your infrastructure, but it’s necessary.
It’s necessary that you have it, that you work on it, that you develop it, and go for what’s a great open source solution for your infrastructure. It’s the solution that will make you look at your existing infrastructure and make you say: “I’m not going to settle for this.”
So how can you get your hands on the latest RHEL?
For a quote, you can contact DcData – and through our channel of resellers – we’ll help you choose the best solution for your environment and supply you with a quote.
Contact DcData:
DcData Sales HERE
0860-1-LINUX