Overview
Every technology in your IT stack needs to work together. And the workloads need to be portable and scalable across bare metal servers, virtual machines, containers, and private and public clouds. They need a modern, security-oriented operating system (OS). That OS is Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®.
With a standard OS underlying your workloads, you can easily move them across environments—where it makes sense for your business. Red Hat Enterprise Linux gives you a consistent, stable, and high-performance platform across hybrid cloud deployments, along with built-in manageability and integration with the broader Red Hat management and automation portfolio.
Red Hat is trusted by more than 90% of the companies in the Fortune 500, including Salesforce, who is migrating its complete infrastructure from CentOS Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is your foundation for innovation, offering the latest stable development tools, container technologies, hardware, and cloud advancements. A Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription provides you direct access to, and advocacy within, the open source community. It also integrates with thousands of certified cloud, software, and hardware providers.
Red Hat client data and Fortune 500 list, September 2024.
Certified in the cloud
Every cloud environment is unique. That means you need a flexible—but stable—OS. Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers the flexibility of open source code and the innovation of open source communities, along with certifications from hundreds of public cloud and service providers. We even designed a container platform, Red Hat OpenShift, so you can build, deploy, and scale cloud-native applications in public clouds—allowing you to confidently implement the cloud strategy that works for you.
With an eye to giving customers even more flexibility to use the infrastructure they have along with any new or future components, Red Hat works with AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), IBM Cloud, and others, giving users the option to standardize their cloud operations with Red Hat Enterprise Linux in a configuration that best works for them.
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Security and compliance
A more secure datacenter begins with the OS. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has built-in security features such as Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) and mandatory access controls (MAC) to help you combat intrusions and meet regulatory compliance. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is also Common Criteria and FIPS 140-2 certified, as well as being the first Linux container framework support to be Common Criteria-certified (v7.1).
Using a supported, enterprise open source OS, like Red Hat Enterprise Linux, means that thousands of developers are monitoring millions of lines of code in the Linux kernel—finding flaws and developing fixes before vulnerabilities become problems. And with Linux kernel live patching, security patches can be applied without downtime. Red Hat has dedicated teams of experts verifying those bug fixes and deploying patches without interrupting your applications, like those that helped handle Meltdown and Spectre a few years ago.
As an industry recognized platform, and the fact that Red Hat goes to great lengths to get their stuff security accredited, it makes it a lot easier for me to get applications put into production since I can point my customer security people at the work that Red Hat has done upstream.
Support for emerging open source technologies
Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides more than an OS—it also connects you to Red Hat’s extensive hardware, software, and cloud partner ecosystem, and comes with 24x7 support.
Each version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is designed for any enterprise and sets the stage for what you can do tomorrow. From containers to automation and even artificial intelligence, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is created for innovators, made for developers, and engineered for operations.
Our latest Linux release—Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9—helps achieve long-term IT success by using a common, flexible foundation to support innovation and accelerate time to market.
Streamlined migration process
Our collaboration with other major cloud providers means Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a great platform for services like Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), giving your enterprise the flexibility to utilize legacy systems while incorporating new technologies. The thought of the migration processes involved can seem daunting, but we work with you to make the process as easy as possible.
From your first steps installing, migrating, or upgrading Red Hat Enterprise Linux to eventually deploying across multiple clouds, we provide utilities to help.
Our migration tools make it easy to get started if you’re coming from CentOS Linux or another Linux distribution, like Ubuntu, Debian, or Fedora. For example, you can convert from CentOS Linux® or Oracle Linux distro to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 with the Convert2RHEL command line utility. Convert2RHEL will automatically identify and replace OS packages from your original Linux distribution with Red Hat Enterprise Linux equivalents, but Convert2RHEL is officially supported to help troubleshoot conversion variants.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 for Third Party Linux Migration is a new offering designed to assist users of CentOS Linux 7 to maintain business continuity after the end of life (EOL) date. This competitively-priced offering includes a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription and tooling to convert in-place instances of CentOS Linux 7 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. For organizations that need more time past the EOL date, this offering is also available with up to 4 years of extended lifecycle support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 so you can maintain consistency in your environment until you’re ready to upgrade to a newer version.
Simplify and streamline the process of assembling customized Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system images with the latest content and security updates for a hybrid cloud environment. You can create optimized operating system images with Red Hat Enterprise Linux image builder that can handle the details of cloud deployments when you’re ready.
Extended life cycle support
A Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription helps you maintain critical applications, with a 10 year life cycle, deployment choices of major supported versions, and a commitment to preserve app stability with each minor update. Red Hat has the resources, tools, and consulting offerings you need to upgrade to a newer version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux when the time comes.
If you’re running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 after its EOM date (June 30, 2024), you’re missing out on the latest features and capabilities–and the support and stability you need to protect your critical workloads. Extended Lifecycle Support (ELS) for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 delivers up to 4 additional years of maintenance support for certain critical-impact security fixes, selected urgent priority bug fixes, and troubleshooting for the last minor release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (7.9) until June 30, 2028.
Receive continued access to advocacy and innovation through the award-winning Red Hat Customer Portal, our expert support team, and within the global open source community.
Red Hat and open source
Red Hat is one of the leading contributors to the Linux kernel and associated technologies in the greater open source community, and has been since the beginning. This differs greatly from traditional operating systems—Unix, Microsoft Windows, and MacOS—which are proprietary and far less modifiable. Red Hat engineers help improve features, reliability, and security to make sure your infrastructure performs and remains stable—no matter your use case and workload.
Red Hat also uses Red Hat products internally to achieve faster innovation, and a more agile and responsive operating environment.
With Red Hat, you get access to the benefits of open source for the enterprise—like community-driven upstream innovation—delivered with enterprise-level support to help your organization safely use open source technology.
By adopting open source technologies like Red Hat Enterprise Linux, your company benefits from our open source development model and the principles that helped build these technologies.
Integrated analytics and management
To ensure that your Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment is operating optimally, your subscription includes access to Red Hat Insights, an end-to-end, management-as-a-service offering accessible via browser at access.redhat.com. It analyzes your environment, including the underlying server as well as applications such as SAP and Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL), and helps IT teams proactively identify and remediate security threats, performance bottlenecks, and misconfigurations that could affect security, compliance, availability, and stability. Your subscription supports add-ons such as Red Hat Satellite and Red Hat Ansible® Automation Platform.
Flexible and portable subscription model
Today’s complex infrastructure environments built from combinations of physical, virtual, and cloud deployments require a purchasing model that provides choice and flexibility. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server subscription model lets you choose the basis on which you purchase, stack subscriptions to streamline purchasing, and move subscriptions from physical to virtual to cloud and back to adapt to changing requirements.
Subscription portability gives you another degree of flexibility. It lets you transfer a physical 2-socket subscription to a 2-virtual-instance subscription without contacting Red Hat to adjust your terms. The ability to migrate between physical and virtual deployment applies to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server and its Add-Ons.
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