Linux giant Red Hat moved to solidify its place in the enterprise Linux market Tuesday with the addition of carrier-grade capabilities to Red Hat Linux Advanced Server and a new enterprise workstation.
Red Hat unveiled the two new offerings at the Jupitermedia Enterprise Linux Forum Conference & Expo 2002 in Boston.
The latest version of Red Hat’s Advanced Server operating system aims to capitalize on the inroads Linux has made in the telecommunications market with the help of Red Hat partners like IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Oracle.
Red Hat said it is basing the new enhancements on recommendations from the OSDL Carrier Grade Linux Working Group, a specification forum which includes Red Hat, Intel, IBM, HP and other industry leaders. The new features include improved application portability and performance, support for POSIX compliant threading, diskless blade systems, improved system responsiveness, advanced debugging and systems analysis, and additional high availability clustering capabilities.
“The growing adoption of standards-based modular communications platforms provides a revolutionary model for new solutions in telecom,” said Scott Richardson, general manager, Marketing and Platform Programs, Intel Network Processing Group. The new version of Advanced Server, scheduled for release in mid-2003, will focus on Intel-based servers and platforms.
The company cited evidence of increased demand for Linux client environments as its reason for the new workstation release, which it said will be 100 percent compatible with Advanced Server.
“The next natural step in completing our enterprise roadmap was to create a stable, high performance workstation solution to complement Red Hat Linux Advanced Server,” said Paul Cormier, executive vice president of engineering at Red Hat. “With our workstation release, customers will be able to deploy client-server solutions that have been engineered from the ground up to work together.”
That sort of engineering, Red Hat said, will allow its customers to reduce costs through faster deployments, common application support, and easier system administration.
Red Hat is also positioning the new workstation as the perfect environment for developing applications for deployment on Advanced Server, and also as a design workstation for electronic design automation (EDA) and digital content creation (DCC).