Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

Red Hat is known worldwide as a reliable provider of open source technology that consistently performs at an exceptional level. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 combines the cutting edge functionality and stability found in open source projects with the solid performance of a real enterprise-class platform.

Because of its famous security and stability, Red Hat is an excellent web-hosting platform. That’s why Vault Networks loads servers with a hardened version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 specifically configured for Internet applications.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is the best platform to translate current and future technology innovations into the best value and scale for IT solutions. Each release delivers important new capabilities that advance that vision.

When you choose to employ Red Hat Linux Enterprise 6, you’ll be able to confidently deploy solutions because you’ll know that the Red Hat software applications and the hardware you use are fully certified. In addition, because Red Hat supports all of its releases for a minimum of seven years, you’ll know that your Red Hat Linux server is backed by the support you deserve. With a Red Hat dedicated Linux server, you can be sure you’ll receive the latest bug fixes and security errata because Red Hat uses its own Red Hat Network for automated software delivery and updates.

Red Hat annual subscriptions are also available through Vault Networks. Choosing an annual subscription enables:

• Efficient Scheduling: A new kernel task scheduler algorithm allows all tasks to get their fair share of CPU time, and reduces the amount of time that the kernel needs to schedule tasks.
• Power Management: Software optimizations mean that idle systems and I/O subsystems will consume less power than ever before, and that active systems will not waste power.
• Scalability: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 supports more sockets, cores, threads and memory.
• File Systems: File System updates provide a range of capabilities and scale to give users choices that match their workloads.
  1. The new default file system – ext4 – is faster, more robust, and scales to 16TB.
  2. The Scalable File System Add-On contains the XFS file system which scales to 100TB.
  3. The Resilient Storage Add-On includes the high availability GFS2 file system.
  4. NFSv4 is significantly improved over NFSv3, and backwards compatible.
  5. Fuse allows filesystems to run in user space, allowing testing and development on newer fused-based filesystems (such as cloud filesystems).
• Reliability, Availability, Serviceability (RAS): RAS features allow systems to continue operating when they require hardware changes or encounter failures that would have halted previous generations of system.
• High Availability: Clustering provides high availability solutions that keep your systems operating in the face of localized failures, and isolates unresponsive applications and nodes
• System Resource Allocation: Cgroups, and their associated controller system services, allow groups of system tasks to use a constrained set of system resources.
• Storage:New and flexible storage capacities include:
  1. support for transactional use of a logical volume, particularly roll-back
  2. high availability of LVMs by mirroring synchronization metadata
  3. better management of large memory allocations with significant performance increases when allocating virtualized guest memory
  4. better dynamic control of DM-multipathing for improved performance
  5. support for very large SAN-based storage
  6. support for thin provisioning, simplifying administration
  7. better tuning and performance for SCSI and ATA I/O.
• Networking: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 features performance improvements, leverages multi-core CPUs for efficient I/O, adds support for new multi-media RFCs, and is IPv6-ready.
• Access Control:SELinux features new and improved security capabilities such as:
  1. Greater coverage of system services by SELinux policies makes RHEL 6 more secure and resistant to security exploits, protecting system operation and data.
  2. SELinux sandboxing allows users to run untrusted applications safely and securely.
  3. File and process permissions have been systematically reduced whenever possible to reduce the risk of privilege escalation.
  4. New utilities and system libraries provide more control over process privileges for easily managing reduced capabilities.
• Enforcement and Verification of Security Policies: Standardization of information concerning the security of enterprise systems will lead to more accurate and timely information, minimizing the window of security vulnerability.
• Virtual Private Network (VPN): The Openswan VPN provides secure communications using a general implementation of IPsec that works with Cisco Ipsec.
• Identity and Authentication: The new System Security Services Daemon (SSSD) provides centralized access to identity and authentication resources, and enables caching and offline support.
• Web Infrastructure: New releases of Apache, the world’s most popular web server, and Squid, a high-performance web proxy, continue to provide the most capable and secure web server tools available.  Memcached is a highly scalable and flexible object caching system that meets a broad range of database needs, from applications that run on small systems to very large systems that reside in the cloud.
• Development: A thorough updating of a wide range of web application development languages and tools (Ruby, gcc / gdb, PHP, Perl, and TurboGears) reinforces Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s role as the best stack for your web applications.
• Kernel-Based Virtualization: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 features virtualization, based on the KVM hypervisor, fully integrated into the kernel. This approach delivers kernel improvements to all virtualized applications, and ensures that the application environment is consistent for physical and virtual systems, simplifying the adoption of virtualization.

Red Hat is compatible with Plesk Dedicated Servers and cPanel Dedicated Servers.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Variants

RHEL is available in three variants:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server (RHEL AS) – used for large systems.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Edge Server or Entry-level Server (RHEL ES) – used for medium systems.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation (RHEL WS) – used for personal power-user desktops.

Red Hat Technical support is an optional extra with Web support also available based on the number of customer contacts.