Red Hat Advanced Server Takes on Unix, Microsoft Advanced Server

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The Linux 2.4 kernel, which has been available for about a year, was hailed as the first release of Linux to scale beyond four processors in SMP servers up to eight-way machines. Linux 2.2, the prior release of the Linux kernel (there was no Linux 2.3), could scale well to two-way servers, but didn't do a very good job of scaling to four-way machines.

Red Hat's Linux Advanced Server is based on its Linux 7.2 editions, and it includes built-in, two-way server clustering and failover capabilities, just like Microsoft's Windows 2000 Advanced Server has. The Red Hat Advanced Server will run on the same server iron, using 32-bit Intel processors, with up to eight processors in a single-system image--just like Microsoft's Advanced Server. Clustering support is expected to be a key feature in Linux 2.5, the next release of the Linux kernel, as is support for asynchronous I/O and a workload manager (which the Linux crowd calls a "scheduler") that is part of Red Hat's Advanced Server.

The Linux 2.5 release is intended as a development kernel, with Linux 2.6 intended for production. Linux 2.5.7 is currently in beta. With Advanced Server, Red Hat is effectively jumping the gun on the Linux community, putting into production, in big-bang fashion, some of the enhancements that will be available to companies with Linux 2.6. Incidentally, Linux 2.5 is expected to include I/O enhancements that are more akin to those in high-end Unix operating systems that deal with block I/O, large-memory pages, and other advancements that allow database performance to scale with the number of processors and physical memory in midrange and enterprise servers.

Red Hat is reportedly preparing a version of its Linux Advanced Server to support 64-bit Intel Itanium servers, but exactly when this support will be available in unknown. Red Hat is probably trying to have such support ready along side the "McKinley" Itanium announcements from Intel, slated for around the middle of this year. Linux 2.4 already runs on Itanium, but that is not the same thing as having Red Hat officially support the servers.

A license for Red Hat Advanced Server will start at $800 per server, which starts shipping sometime this month, and will include a one-year subscription to the Red Hat Network, which is the company's way of providing remote-server management, secure reconfiguration, asset management, and proactive maintenance to Red Hat customers. Advanced Server pricing will scale up with additional services.

Red Hat intends to keep Advanced Server on a 12 to 18 month release cycle, giving customers a stable platform on which to deploy applications and databases. (Unix operating systems are refreshed about every 18 to 24 months these days, after seeing a flurry of upgrades throughout the 1990s as mainframe-class features were added to Unixes of all flavors.) Companies do not like having to upgrade their servers very often, and this long upgrade cycle is a reflection of this. The Advanced Server edition of Red Hat Linux 7.2 includes Red Hat's Cluster Manager interface, and has a Java-based console to allow Web-based system administration of cluster nodes, server security, and server performance. Compaq, Dell, and IBM are among the early supporters of Red Hat Advanced Server, which they say they will offer on their machines.