[rhelv6-list] Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 Beta Now Available

[Engineering Partner Management]

Today, we’re pleased to announce the latest update to the world’s
leading enterprise Linux platform with the  beta availability of Red
Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5.

Powering business applications with control, confidence, and freedom,
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 Beta provides a consistent foundation
across the hybrid cloud and offers key new and enhanced features
around security and compliance, platform efficiency, and
manageability. Additionally, the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise
Linux 7 continues to support alternative architectures, with variants
available for IBM Power, IBM System z, and Arm deployments as well as
x86.

Security and compliance
Red Hat Enterprise Linux delivers controls for enhanced security and
compliance built into the operating system, with Red Hat Enterprise
Linux 7.5 Beta bolstering organizational-wide IT security efforts
with:
 * Security improvements and usability enhancements for cloud and
remotely hosted systems that can more securely unlock Network Bound
Disk Encrypted devices at boot-time, designed to eliminate the need
for manual intervention in an often inconveniently-timed boot process.
 * The integration of Red Hat Ansible Automation with OpenSCAP, which
enhances the ease of automating the remediation of compliance issues
and enables administrators to more efficiently scale policies across
their environment.
 * Compliance improvements for accurate timestamping and
synchronization needs with the addition of failover with bonding
interfaces for Precision Time Protocol (PTP) and Network Time Protocol
(NTP).

Performance and efficiency
Modern enterprise applications can require extensive amounts of
bandwidth and resources to handle the increasing quantities of data
produced by organizations, a problem that is compounded as businesses
drive towards digital transformation. Much of this data is the same,
which can limit efficiency and increase resource costs for IT. Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 7.5 Beta introduces virtual data optimizer (VDO), a
technology derived from Red Hat’s acquisition of Permabit[1] assets
and designed to reduce data redundancy through inline deduplication
and compression.

In a primary storage environment delivered on top of Red Hat
Enterprise Linux, VDO can increase effective capacity by up to 6x,
helping to free up existing storage and reduce the costs associated
with offsite data replication. These savings, extended to block
storage in the public cloud, can reduce storage footprints by up to 83
percent, helping to reduce the hourly cost for active storage and the
monthly costs of storing snapshots. This enhances the ability of
organizations to get the most out of their existing storage
configurations across a common, open standards-based platform in Red
Hat Enterprise Linux.

Platform manageability
As part of a digital transformation strategy, enterprises should
emphasize delivering new, innovative services and products while
limiting the amount of time their IT teams spend manually managing
underlying infrastructure components, including the operating system.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 Beta enhances usability for Linux
administrators, Windows administrators new to the platform, and
developers seeking self-service capabilities alike with:
 * An easier to use cockpit administrator console, which is designed
to simplify the interface for managing storage, networking,
containers, services, and more for individual systems.
 * The automated creation of a “known-good” bootable snapshot to help
speed recovery and rollback after patching, helping IT teams feel more
confident that their systems are in working order.

To review a full list of new features and capabilities as included
with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 Beta, please visit:
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/

RED HAT ENTERPRISE LINUX 7.5 BETA AVAILABILITY
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 Beta is now available in the Red Hat
Customer Portal to all customers with active Red Hat Enterprise Linux
subscriptions. To access and download Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5
Beta, please visit: https://access.redhat.com/downloads/

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
To access documentation for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, visit:
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/

For the latest information on Red Hat's IT infrastructure products,
offerings, and solutions - including greater insight into the beta
release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 - visit and subscribe to the
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Blog at http://rhelblog.redhat.com/.

Sincerely,
The Red Hat Enterprise Linux Team

[1] https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-acquires-permabit-assets-eases-barriers-cloud-portability-data-deduplication-technology