[rhelv6-list] Red Hat Refines Hybrid Cloud Innovation with Latest Version of the World's Leading Enterprise Linux Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6

[Engineering Partner Management]

Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), 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[1], "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[2] 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[3] 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. For more information on Red
Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6, please read the release notes[4]. Red Hat
Enterprise Linux customers can try out the latest version of the
world's leading enterprise Linux platform at
https://access.redhat.com/downloads/, with a 30-day evaluation trial
also available.

Supporting Quotes
Stefanie Chiras, vice president and general manager, Red Hat
Enterprise Linux, Red Hat
"Increasingly, hybrid cloud has been adopted as a flexible means to
deliver digital transformation and IT modernization, but enterprises
should have a stable and more secure foundation to provide this
innovation with consistency. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 is designed
to be the trusted bedrock for hybrid cloud deployments, enabling IT
organizations to deliver applications and services with more
confidence and without compromising the flexibility to embrace
emerging computing concepts, like cloud-native workloads and
automation"

[1] Gartner Market Insight: Making Lots of Money in the New World of
Hybrid Cloud and Multicloud, Sid Nag and David Ackerman, September 7,
2018
[2] https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hat-continues-lead-linux-server-market
[3] https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/management/ansible
[4] https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html-single/7.6_release_notes/