Red Hat Delivers on RHEL 7 Management Promise

Study Finds Network Admins Juggling Multiple Initiatives

One of the knocks against Linux has been that it has always been more challenging to manage than a Windows environment. With the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7, Red Hat is moving to make Linux one of the most advanced enterprise-IT platforms in all respects.

As I discussed in a previous blog post, the latest version of RHEL includes support for systemd and the OpenLMI systems management framework, which together modernize the management of configuration and administration. It also streamlines the management of processes, services, security and other resources.

In addition, RHEL 7 makes it easier to isolate applications and, perhaps most significantly from an IT administrator perspective, provides much tighter integrations with Microsoft Active Directory.

Of course, RHEL 7 is not without new IT capabilities. While providing support for Docker containers, which provide a lightweight alternative to virtual machines, the latest Red Hat platform also sports an XFS default file system that can scale to 500TB.

Mark Coggin, senior director of product marketing for Red Hat, says that with new application development runtime and troubleshooting tools, the platform can scale up or out to support almost any type of application environment.

While there may be some shift of share between Linux and Windows as the result of one upgrade or another, the simple fact is that most IT organizations will be managing both these environments alongside each other for years to come. The degree to which vendors enable that is the deciding factor that dictates the pace at which internal IT organizations feel compelled to take on the pain of upgrading to the latest version.

As such, when it comes to IT platforms, the primary issue is to find a way to make it easier to live with both Linux and Windows platforms while IT administrators are managing more application workloads than ever.