Red Hat, provider of open source solutions, has unleashed the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, the latest major release of the company's flagship operating platform, setting the scene for its server operating systems for the next decade. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Red Hat defines new standards for commercial open source operating environments. Designed to support today's flexible and varied enterprise architectures, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 delivers the comprehensive foundation customers need for physical, virtualised and cloud deployments.

"For nearly eight years, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has delivered outstanding value and performance for our enterprise IT infrastructure," said Gordon Penfold, chief technology officer at British Airways. "We plan to migrate our mission-critical systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and anticipate that it will provide us with the flexibility to deploy our applications to fit our specific business needs, crossing bare metal, virtualised and cloud deployments."

"Building on our strategic use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, scaling from physical to virtual and cloud environments, we have been an active participant in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 beta program," said Motti Finkelstein, Managing Director at Citi. "The core capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, including improvements in security, performance and power management, will better enable us to scale to the largest systems on the market today while providing continued flexibility and great efficiency."

"By employing the new leading-edge features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 including improved performance and optimized resource management, we look forward to being able to provide our customers with optimal cloud services to meet their needs," said Mamoru Murakami, director of IP Technology Department, Business Network Services Division at NTT Communications.

"Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 complements broader use of Linux and open source software across a range of verticals and particularly for large service provider and enterprise datacenter users by giving customers greater flexibility," said Jay Lyman, Enterprise Software Analyst in the Commercial Adoption of Open Source (CAOS) team at The 451 Group. "The release also addresses Linux deployment at greater scale thanks to kernel and KVM performance and feature enhancements in areas such as security, scheduling, power savings, control groups, resource and system management and multi-tenancy."

Incorporating software technologies developed by Red Hat, its partners and the open source community over the past three years, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 delivers extensive new features that span the product. These combine to offer customers and solution providers a world-class platform on which to develop and deploy applications. Enhancements range from kernel improvements for resource management, RAS, performance, scalability, virtualisation and power saving, through a greatly extended and standards-compliant development environment, to a comprehensive range of updated server and desktop applications. It is designed to improve agility, lower costs and reduce IT complexity for customers.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is a compelling choice for users looking to migrate from UNIX to Linux and is a powerful alternative to Microsoft Windows Server. By setting the standard for open source computing, Red Hat Enterprise Linux also delivers industry-leading innovation for private and public cloud deployments.

"Red Hat Enterprise Linux has for years been the mission-critical platform of choice for many enterprise companies. Customers such as British Airways, Citi and NTT Communications have become trusted partners in the development of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform. We are now entering an era of enterprise computing where flexibility, portability and interoperability are more important than ever. And today, we are delivering the platform that customers need. This has always been our focus," said Paul Cormier, executive vice president and president, Products and Technologies at Red Hat. "What we are delivering is more open, more reliable and more comprehensive than other products on the market. The future is here with a platform designed to take customers into the next generation with virtualisation and cloud."