I’m a big believer in “It’s not broke, then don’t fix it.” So is leading Linux company, Red Hat. The company has just announced that it is extending the production lifecycle of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
5 and 6 from seven to 10 years in response to enterprise customer
demand and Red Hat’s hardware original equipment manufacturer (OEM)
partners.
For any company, upgrading to a new version of an operating system
requires detailed advance planning. Red Hat has extended the Red Hat
Enterprise Linux lifecycle so customers can remain on their current
version longer. With the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux lifecycle,
customers will benefit from continued feature enhancements while Red
Hat’s application binary interface (ABI) and application programming
interface (API) compatibility for their existing application.
In addition, quite a few RHEL customers have only relatively recently
adopted the Linux operating system. For many business users, RHEL 5 was
the first Linux product that they had deployed in their infrastructure.
According to Red Hat, “the market adoption of Red Hat Enterprise
Linux 5 and 6 has accelerated over the past two years. For example, many
of our customers have adopted Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 well into its
previous 7 year life cycle (i.e., first deploying Red Hat Enterprise
Linux 5.4 in March 2010, or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 in January
2011).” Had Red Hat stuck with its original seven-years of support, a
customer adopting RHEL 5.6 in 2011 would have to upgrade to a newer RHEL
in 2014. For an enterprise, that’s much too fast for comfort.
With the new plan, RHEL 5 customers will have full support until
March 2017. RHEL 6 customers will be fully supported until November
2020. Specifically, the former ten-year life cycle for RHEL was
comprised of 7 years of a regular life cycle, and three years of an
extended life cycle. For RHEL 5 and 6, the regular life cycle is being
pushed out to ten years.
The RHEL Add-Ons programs–High Availability Add-On (or Red Hat
Cluster Suite), Scalable File System Add-On (or XFS), Load Balancer
Add-On, and Resilient Storage Add-On (or GFS)–are also being supported
with the new 10-year life cycle.
This new plan is also for all of RHEL’s supported hardware platforms.
So, in addition to the Intel 32 and 64-bit families, Itanium, IBM
System z, IBM POWER, HPC, and SA P Business Applications are all being
supported for ten years.
Still on RHEL 4? Red Hat already has a 10-year life cycle available
for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. For customers who require a 10-year life
cycle to include software maintenance, Red Hat recommends the Extended Life Cycle Support (ELS) Add-On. This extends RHEL 4’s life cycle until February 28, 2015.
“Enterprise customers require flexibility when planning strategic,
long-term technology deployments,” said Jim Totton, vice president and
general manager of Red Hat’s Platform Business Unit in a statement.
“Many of our customers have come to realize that standardizing on RHEL
improves efficiency and helps lower costs. With a ten-year lifecycle,
customers now have additional choices when planning their RHEL
deployment and overall IT strategy. We are pleased that customers are
looking far into the future with Red Hat.”
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