Red
Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source
solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 7.6, a consistent hybrid cloud foundation for
enterprise IT built on open source innovation. Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7.6 is designed to enable organizations to better keep pace with
emerging cloud-native technologies while still supporting stable IT
operations across enterprise IT's four footprints.
According to Gartner,
"the landscape of cloud adoption is one of hybrid clouds and
multiclouds. By 2020, 75% of organizations will have deployed a
multicloud or hybrid cloud model." Red Hat believes that this indicates
that a common foundation, one that can handle workloads in a consistent
fashion regardless of whether they are running on bare metal or on a
public cloud instance, is a key need for enterprises as they embrace a
variety of cloud computing models.
Red
Hat Enterprise Linux 7 helps to provide this foundation, enabling
organizations to deploy applications on a footprint that can best fit
their unique needs, with the knowledge that the underlying operating
system remains the same consistent and mission-critical-ready platform.
The latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 brings enhancements
designed to address a range of IT challenges, emphasizing security and compliance, management and automation, and Linux container innovations.
Security and compliance
IT
security remains a constant, key challenge for many IT departments, and
one that does not get easier in complex hybrid and multicloud
environments. To better answer these IT security needs, Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 7.6 introduces Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0
hardware modules as part of Network Bound Disk Encryption (NBDE). This
provides two layers of security for hybrid cloud operations to help keep
information on disks physically more secure: The network-based
mechanism (NBDE) provides security across networked environments, while
TPM works on-premise to add an additional layer, tying disks to specific
physical systems.
Red
Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 also makes it easier to manage firewalls with
enhancements to nftables, simplifying the configuration of
counterintrusion measures and giving operations teams more visibility
into these mechanisms. Additionally, updated cryptographic algorithms
delivered for RSA and elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) are enabled by
default, helping organizations handling sensitive information to better
keep pace with Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS)
compliance and requirements from standards bodies like the National
Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Management and automation
As Linux becomes a default choice in
many datacenters, Linux operating systems need to become more
accessible to new administrators, both those new to the role and
sysadmins that have previously managed other operating systems like
Windows. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 is designed to help make Linux
adoption easier for these users with enhancements to the Red Hat
Enterprise Linux Web Console, which provides graphical overview of Red
Hat system health and status. These enhancements include easier to find
updates, automated configuration of single sign-on for identity
management and a firewall control interface.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 also provides support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux System Roles, a collection of Ansible modules
that are designed to provide a stable and consistent way to automate
and remotely manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployments. Each module
provides a ready-made automated workflow for handling common, complex
tasks that arise as part of the day-to-day management of Linux
environments. This automation helps to remove the human element of error
from these tasks and free up IT teams to focus on adding business value
instead of "keeping the lights on."
Linux container innovations
The
rise of cloud-native technologies as a component of enterprise digital
transformation remains a key focus area for Red Hat, with Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 7.6 addressing this through Red Hat's lightweight
container toolkit. Built with enterprise-grade security in mind, the
toolkit is comprised of Buildah, Skopeo, CRI-O and now Podman. Each of
these tools are built on fully open source, community-backed
technologies and based on open standards like the Open Container
Initiative (OCI) format.
Complementing
Buildah and Skopeo and sharing the same foundations as CRI-O, the
introduction of Podman enables users to run containers and groups of
containers (pods) from a familiar command-line interface without
requiring a daemon to do so. This helps to reduce the complexity around
container creation and makes it easier for developers to build
containers on workstations, in continuous integration/continuous
development (CI/CD) systems and even within high-performance computing
(HPC) or big data scheduling systems.
Availability
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 is available today to Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers with active subscriptions.