Red Hat tips Solaris eclipse

Red Hat has unveiled its first Linux 2.6 kernel-based commercial distribution at US expo LinuxWorld, claiming its new release will finally nail rival Solaris.

The unveiling of Red Hat Enterprise Linux v.4 signified a maturing of the leading Linux distribution and an arrow through the heart of its chief Unix rival, one Red Hat executive said. 

"It is a defining milestone in the evolution of Linux into the enterprise. This is the defining moment," said Paul Cormier, executive vice-president of engineering at Red Hat.

"It's the beginning of the end of Solaris in the enterprise."

RHEL v.4 enterprise, advanced, entry/mid-server and desktop would be available within a week, Cormier said.

The company also said it would extend Red Hat Network management services to support Sun Solaris.

That support, designed to ease customer migrations from Solaris Unix to Red Hat Linux, would be available within a month, he added.

Red Hat said the US Department of Energy deployed enterprise Linux globally, and he said two other US customers -- Orbitz and the Chicago Mercantile -- had deployed Red Hat across their organisations.

Red Hat chief executive Matthew Szulik missed the launch of v.4 due to his weekend return from India, where the company opened a support centre last week.

The company claimed that missing pieces in the Linux distribution had been addressed in version 4, making it enterprise-ready.

Significant new features included integration of the year-old Linux 2.6 kernel, faster file access and I/O performance, support for open source security known as Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) and for open source Firefox as the default browser.

Also, 64-bit support for Intel Xeon and Itanium processors and support for AMD64, IBM Power, zSeries and s/390 and other x86 systems were included.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 4 had also been enhanced for mainstream use with new wireless capabilities via support for Intel Centrino, support for the GNOME 2.8 interface, support for plug-and-play devices and out-of-the box integration with Microsoft Active Directory authentication and Microsoft Exchange connector, Cormier said.

Partners IBM, HP, Dell, Oracle, Intel and AMD, were on hand to celebrate the launch.

Intel said it had begun shipping its upgraded 64-bit Xeon processor code-named Irwindale. RHEL4 would support Intel 32-bit x86, Itanium 2 (64-bit) and Intel Xeon with EM64T support as well as AMD64 processors.

Shane Wall, vice-president and general manager of Intel's channel software operations, said Red Hat's newest distribution supported its existing 64-bit technology and Red Hat had pledged support for multi-core and forthcoming "Vanderpool" virtualisation capabilities.

"RHEL4 support is critical on the server side with Xeon," said Wall. "But 64-bit will only be a niche, for a long time."

Cormier said virtualisation would be implemented across hardware, storage and operating systems and Red Hat would explore all of those "pieces" before moving forward.

Red Hat would put into pilot testing a virtualisation solution for Red Hat Enterprise Linux in 2005 but there was no final date for availability.

"It's a big area, a very big area," Cormier said, noting the growing importance of virtualisation to scale up the data centre. Red Hat views version 4 as a milestone for the Linux distribution and a desktop-to-data centre solution for enterprise customers.

Yet one financial analyst said it would probably have little impact on the company's finances because of Red Hat's business model.

"The official launch of RHEL4 is a mild positive in our view in that many of The more important features in the 2.6 kernel have already been back ported into [v.3]," said Dion Cornett, managing director of Decatur Jones Equity Partners.

"Given Red Hat's subscription model, new product releases are not as material to revenue as they are for the typical perpetual license software company."