Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, has announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5, the latest version of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform. Serving as a consistent foundation for hybrid cloud environments, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 provides enhanced security and compliance controls, tools to reduce storage costs and improved usability, as well as further integration with Microsoft Windows infrastructure both on-premise and in Microsoft Azure.
As enterprise IT footprints expand to encompass a spectrum of environments, from bare metal to private and public clouds, organisations are frequently seeking to pair existing infrastructure and application investments with emerging digital technologies. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 can help enterprises address this challenge by reducing infrastructure complexity and associated costs while easing the management of hybrid IT environments.
Enhanced hybrid cloud security and compliance
Hybrid IT environments provide significant new capabilities for enterprises but can also present unique security challenges as IT teams must now tackle security challenges across multiple deployment footprints. To better meet the varied security needs of hybrid computing, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 provides enhanced software security controls to mitigate risk while also complementing, rather than hindering, IT operations.
A major component of these controls is security automation through the integration of OpenSCAP with Red Hat Ansible Automation. This is designed to enable the creation of Ansible Playbooks directly from OpenSCAP scans which can then be used to implement remediations more rapidly and consistently across a hybrid IT environment. Sensitive data can now also be better secured across varied environments with enhancements to Network-Bound Disk Encryption that support automatic decryption of data volumes.
Improved storage performance and efficiency
As enterprises seek to extend existing IT investments to both support hybrid cloud deployments and reduce overhead costs, storage optimisation frequently becomes an important piece of the strategy. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 can help with the inclusion of virtual data optimiser (VDO), designed to reduce data storage costs in the cloud and on-premise by up to 83% according to Red Hat internal research. VDO reduces data redundancy and improves effective storage capacity through de-duplication and compression of data before it lands on a disk.
Simplified management
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 can help reduce the overall learning curve for new Linux systems administrators, troubleshooters and developers by making complex tasks like systems management easier through enhancements to the cockpit administrator console. Provided as a simplified web interface, these enhancements are designed to eliminate many of the complexities involved with managing Linux-based systems, including network and storage set-ups.
Additionally, new functionality and integration with Windows-based infrastructure is offered in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, including improved management and communication with Windows Server implementations, more secure data transfers with Microsoft Azure and performance improvements for complex Microsoft Active Directory architectures. Overall, this can help to provide a smoother transition for organisations seeking to bridge the scalability and flexibility of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 implementations with existing Windows-based IT investments.
Production-ready Linux containers
As containerised applications and container-based infrastructure frequently form a foundational component for many digital transformation strategies, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 emphasises Red Hat’s leadership in making container-based technologies production-ready. Container security has been enhanced, adding proactive security and compliance configuration that build along with finer-grained security and host layer access controls.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 also adds full support for Buildah, an open-source utility designed to help developers create and modify Linux container images without a full container runtime or daemon running in the background. This enables IT teams to build and deploy containerised applications more quickly without needing to run a full container engine, reducing the attack surface and removing the need to run a container engine on a system not intended to do so in production.
Availability across multiple architectures
To further support customer choice in computing architecture, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 is simultaneously available across all supported architectures, including x86, IBM Power, IBM z Systems, and 64-bit Arm. This release also brings support for single-host KVM virtualisation and Open Container Initiative (OCI)-formatted runtime environment and base image to IBM z Systems.
Denise Dumas, Vice President, Platform Engineering, Red Hat, commented: “The future of enterprise IT doesn’t exist solely in the data centre or in the public cloud, but rather as a fusion of environments spread across IT’s four footprints: physical, virtual, private cloud and public cloud. Red Hat Enterprise Linux serves as a scalable, flexible, and robust bridge across these footprints and the latest version of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform provides even more capabilities, from security at scale to increased storage efficiency, to drive hybrid cloud forward in the enterprise.”
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