The latest Red Hat

By Scott Lowe MCSE, Special to ZDNet Asia
Tuesday, March 02, 2004 11:30 AM

It seems like everywhere you look, there's an article about Linux and its place in the enterprise. Does it really have a lower TCO than Windows? Does SCO really own Linux IP? Is Linux going to take over the desktop through an all-out assault on Windows XP?

It’s going to be an interesting couple of years to watch all of this play out!

In the meantime, there continue to be interesting technical and business developments in Linux-land. One of the newest enterprise versions of Linux on the scene is Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux 3—the latest version of Red Hat’s industrial strength open source server. After reading about the controversies regarding Linux, how about a refreshingly calm look at a most impressive product? Read on.

Red Hat’s history
Until recently, Red Hat maintained two distinctly separate product lines. The most well known product line—now discontinued, at least in its old form—was called Red Hat Linux and was the consumer and home user oriented product. The second product line that continues to be maintained is its high end server line: Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

The old Red Hat Linux product has been incorporated into a new service called the Fedora project and is now a more community-influenced effort, although Red Hat continues to contribute significant resources to the project and has control over the product.

How does this fit in with RHEL? The Fedora project will become the testing ground for new technologies that might eventually make their way into RHEL. The goal of RHEL is to provide a stable, consistent, and robust platform upon which enterprise-class applications can be deployed. The Fedora project, in contrast, will focus more on the “latest and greatest” technologies and will likely not be as consistent as RHEL.

About Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux product line is comprised of three separate editions: The WS, AS, and ES editions (see Table A). The WS edition is aimed primarily at the high end technical desktop; the AS edition is targeted for small office or departmental servers, while the big-iron ES edition is intended for large, mission-critical database servers.
Table A

	AS	ES	WS
Kernel	2.4.21 enhanced	2.4.21 enhanced	2.4.21 enhanced
X86 (except AMD K6)	•	•	•
Intel Itanium2	•		•
AMD64	•		•
IBM z, i, p, S/390	•
Maximum CPUs	16	2	2
Maximum RAM (x86)	64GB	8 GB	64GB
Maximum RAM (Itanium2)	32GB	N/A	32GB
Maximum RAM (AMD64)	16GB	N/A	16GB

Table A - Red Hat Enterprise Linux editions comparison

All editions include packages you would expect including Apache, Samba 3, NFS, and other server applications. All editions also include desktop applications such as OpenOffice, which is very appropriate for the WS edition and might be useful in the AS and ES versions.

What’s so good about it?
A very common question about Red Hat Enterprise Linux is “Why should I buy and pay for RHEL when I can just download Red Hat Linux 9 or Fedora Core and use it for free?” It’s an excellent question. There are certainly many instances in which the “free” product is more than sufficient. For example, for a small Web server, a DHCP/DNS, or other infrastructure server for testing, Red Hat Linux or Fedora Core will do. There are two primary benefits in RHEL, however: stability and support. RHEL features a 12-18 month cycle between major releases while RHL and Fedora Core have 4-8 months between releases. For a company that operates dozens or hundreds of servers, the longer release cycle allows ample time for testing and implementation on a reasonable schedule before the next major release hits. A 4-8 month release cycle is simply too fast for many organizations.

Furthermore, except in the event that a security problem warrants a change, the ABIs and APIs in each RHEL major release will not change, meaning that you won’t need to make modifications because of a change to these components. An ABI is a binary interface while an API is a programming interface.

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