Red Hat has launched Enterprise Linux 7, the latest in its flagship line of open source operating systems for business.
The new release offers a better set of tools for application development and forms the base for enterprise software companies to deploy their products more easily on virtual or cloud platforms, along with other improvements.
Jay Lyman, a senior analyst at 451 Research, said: "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 helps to introduce newer technology, such as Linux Containers and related Docker software, to large enterprise environments along with the stability and certifications that enterprises demand.
"This is critical given the growing number of organisations mixing new technology and methodology – such as cloud, agile and DevOps approaches – with their existing infrastructure, processes and governance."
Docker automates the use of applications within software containers, a form of virtualisation that makes an application more flexible and portable, wherever it is being run from.
Red Hat are pushing the potential for the software within data centres, arguing that their software removes the need for many specialised tools, allowing systems administrators to manage the performance, security and processes of the centres more easily.
"Enterprises have now accepted Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a mainstream enterprise OS," said Laurent Lachal, senior analyst at Ovum. "They want to understand how it will evolve not just on its own but also in a broader virtualized and cloudified data centre context as well as in a public cloud context."
Research firm Gartner predict that by next year 95% of mainstream computing organisations will rely on open source software, despite the concerns raised by the Heartbleed OpenSSL bug earlier this year.
