Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 tested
Red Advance
© Lead Image © choreograph, 123RF.com
On June 10, Red Hat launched a new major release of its enterprise distribution, RHEL 7. We take a look to find out where RHEL is headed.
The antics of Linux vendors in the enterprise environment conjures up pictures of an elephant race on the highway. Inch by inch, Ubuntu, Red Hat, and SUSE slowly squeeze past one another, each trying to anchor its market position with a new major release. Don't expect any giant leaps or rapid overtaking maneuvers, though – all the market players focus instead on demonstrating their robustness and efficiency through perseverance and consistency.
The long-term support (LTS) of enterprise distributions is a curiosity in the otherwise fast-moving FLOSS world. Canonical, Red Hat, and SUSE launch a product and commit to maintaining it over a period of years. This long-term commitment means admins can plan for long maintenance cycles of five years or more, instead of having a major update every two years; even long-term support is available at a premium [1].
Focus on Stability
In contrast to desktop distributions, enterprise versions primarily focus on stability. Red Hat and SUSE have their own test labs, in the form of the community editions of Fedora and openSUSE, where new features take a test run before making their way into the company's enterprise product.
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