Datasheet
RED HAT EnTERPRISE LInux 6
3
www.redhat.com
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
powers many of the
world’s most demanding
financial institutions
“
Our technology
partnership with
Red Hat is key to us
staying competitive
in the market. We
look to Red Hat for
technology leadership
through updates and
support that help us to
improve our tuning so
that we can give our
customers the best
possible experience.
Joe Panfil,
managing director of
Enterprise Technology Services
at CME Group
http://customers.
redhat.com/?s=CME
Integrated virtualization
Red Hat is a driving force behind the development of open source virtualization technology.
Red Hat’s approach to virtualization is easy to adopt because it is delivered as an integral
part of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform. Based upon kernel-based virtual machine (KVM)
technology, Red Hat’s virtualization capabilities are integrated into Red Hat Enterprise Linux
and leverage the latest hardware virtualization capabilities provided by Intel
®
and AMD
®
processor platforms. The modular design of Red Hat Enterprise Linux allows customers to
choose when and where to use virtualization. For additional flexibility, customers can deploy
both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft
®
Windows
®
as fully supported guests in a Red Hat
Enterprise Linux virtualized environment. Red Hat Enterprise Linux also supports multiple
virtualization use cases, from hardware abstraction for existing software stacks, to datacenter
consolidation, to virtualized clusters and private clouds.
Beyond core virtualization, Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers leading support for advanced
virtualized I/O capabilities through SR-IOV and nPIV standards. A standard virtualization
management infrastructure, libvirt, developed by Red Hat and adopted by other operating
systems, provides a flexible interface for defining, managing, and monitoring virtual machines.
Scalability and performance
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 has been designed to deliver performance and scalability without
sacrificing data integrity. It allows scaling to 4,096 CPUs and 64 terabytes of RAM, providing
a solid foundation for supporting upcoming generations of hardware. Within this broad frame-
work, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 provides support for a variety of networking infrastructures,
such as Infiniband and Ethernet, and for storage infrastructures, such as FCoE and iSCSI, as
well as for traditional nAS, SAn, and DAS devices.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux also offers high performance and scales from desktops to worksta-
tions, from blades to rack environments, from single CPu systems to the largest SMP servers
and mainframes. As hardware upgrades continue to offer additional processing and storage
capabilities, Red Hat Enterprise Linux allows customers to take advantage of those advances
by selecting those scale-up and scale-out strategies and platform architectures that meet their
business requirements.
Red Hat continues to collaborate with its partners to deliver advanced functionality to custom-
ers. For example, improvements in virtualization performance make it practical to deploy any
application workload, even I/O-bound applications, on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 platform.
The most dramatic improvements in recent virtual machine performance are made possible by
I/O optimizations, including support for new hardware capabilities, such as 10-gigabit SR-IOV
adapters and NPIV. These have reduced overhead for I/O-bound environments to less than five
percent, which opens the door to a whole new class of applications, such as database, transac-
tion processing, and file servers.
Red Hat, in cooperation with its hardware partners, is enabling reliability, availability, service-
ability (RAS), and scalability features that have been recently introduced to mainstream archi-
tectures, and which minimize down time, increase availability, and protect data.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux-powered systems have achieved leading results on industry-
standard benchmarks as diverse as SpecWeb, which measures web serving; TPC-H for large-
scale data warehouses; and SpecVirt for server consolidation. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is
a foundation for getting the most from new server hardware on diverse workloads and across
the IT infrastructure.
