INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Cloud
and application investments with emerging
digital technologies. Red Hat Enterprise
Linux 7.5 can help enterprises address
this challenge by reducing infrastructure
complexity and associated costs while easing
the management of hybrid IT environments.
Denise Dumas, vice president, Platform
Engineering, Red Hat, said: “The future of
enterprise IT doesn’t exist solely in the data
centre or in the public cloud, but rather as
a fusion of environments spread across
IT’s four footprints: physical, virtual, private
cloud and public cloud. Red Hat Enterprise
Linux serves as a scalable, flexible and
robust bridge across these footprints, and
the latest version of the world’s leading
enterprise Linux platform provides even
more capabilities, from security at scale to
increased storage efficiency, to drive hybrid
cloud forward in the enterprise.”
Enhanced hybrid cloud security
and compliance
Hybrid IT environments provide significant
new capabilities for enterprises, but can
also present unique security challenges,
as IT teams must now tackle security
challenges across multiple deployment
footprints. To better meet the varied
security needs of hybrid computing, Red
Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 provides enhanced
software security controls to mitigate risk
while also complementing, rather than
hindering, IT operations.
A major component of these controls is
security automation through the integration
of OpenSCAP with Red Hat Ansible
Automation. This is designed to enable
the creation of Ansible Playbooks directly
from OpenSCAP scans which can then be
used to implement remediations more
rapidly and consistently across a hybrid IT
environment. Sensitive data can also now be
better secured across varied environments
with enhancements to Network-Bound
Disk Encryption that support automatic
decryption of data volumes.
Improved storage performance
and efficiency
As enterprises seek to extend existing IT
investments to both support hybrid cloud
deployments and reduce overhead costs,
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storage optimisation frequently becomes
an important piece of the strategy. Red
Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 can help with the
inclusion of virtual data optimiser (VDO),
designed to reduce data storage costs in
the cloud and on-premise by up to 83%
according to Red Hat internal research. VDO
reduces data redundancy and improves
effective storage capacity through de-
duplication and compression of data before
it lands on a disk. implementations, more secure data transfers
with Microsoft Azure, and performance
improvements for complex Microsoft
Active Directory architectures. Overall, this
can help to provide a smoother transition
for organisations seeking to bridge the
scalability and flexibility of Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 7.5 implementations with
existing Windows-based IT investments.
Simplified management As containerised applications and container-
based infrastructure frequently form a
foundational component for many digital
transformation strategies, Red Hat Enterprise
Linux 7.5 emphasises Red Hat’s leadership
in making container-based technologies
production-ready. Container security has
been enhanced, adding proactive security
and compliance configuration at build, along
with finer-grained security and host layer
access controls.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 can help reduce
the overall learning curve for new Linux
systems administrators, troubleshooters,
and developers by making complex tasks,
like systems management, easier through
enhancements to the cockpit administrator
console. Provided as a simplified web
interface, these enhancements are designed
to eliminate many of the complexities
involved with managing Linux-based systems,
including network and storage set-ups.
Additionally, new functionality and
integration with Windows-based
infrastructure is offered in Red Hat Enterprise
Linux 7, including improved management
and communication with Windows Server
SERVING AS A
CONSISTENT
FOUNDATION FOR
HYBRID CLOUD
ENVIRONMENTS,
RED HAT
ENTERPRISE LINUX
7.5 PROVIDES
ENHANCED
SECURITY AND
COMPLIANCE
CONTROLS.
Production-ready Linux containers
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 also adds full
support for Buildah, an open source utility
designed to help developers create and
modify Linux container images without a
full container runtime or daemon running
in the background. This enables IT teams to
build and deploy containerised applications
more quickly without needing to run a
full container engine, reducing the attack
surface and removing the need to run a
container engine on a system not intended
to do so in production.
Availability across multiple
architectures
To further support customer choice in
computing architecture, Red Hat Enterprise
Linux 7.5 is simultaneously available across
all supported architectures, including x86,
IBM Power, IBM z Systems and 64-bit
Arm. This release also brings support for
single-host KVM virtualisation and Open
Container Initiative (OCI)-formated
runtime environment and base image to
IBM z Systems.
General availability
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 is now available
in the Red Hat Customer Portal to all
customers with an active Red Hat Enterprise
Linux subscription. n
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