Red Hat Linux Advanced Server is the powerful new enterprise platform for mission-critical IT deployments. Businesses will benefit from the fast rate of innovation inherent in the Open Source environment, while enjoying the enterprise-strength reliabiliy, performance, availability and security that Red Hat Linux Advanced Server provides.

Red Hat Linux Advanced Server has been specifically designed for IT solutions that require the highest levels of application availability and performance. It provides significant new functionality to meet the needs of these environments.

Performance and Scalability Enhancements

Red Hat Linux Advanced Server kernel enhancements provide dramatic new "scale-up" capabilities - allowing you to realize the full performance from today's modern servers.

	Asynchronous I/O support - applications no longer need to pause after issuing read I/Os until they are complete.
	Increased SMP granularity - particularly in the SCSI I/O subsystem, permitting increased I/O throughput in SMP systems with multiple I/O adapters.
	SMP Scheduler enhancements - support process-CPU affinity, which improves performance by increasing the CPU cache hit-rate and greatly reducing spinlock contention in SMP systems.
	Bounce Buffer Elimination - greatly reduces I/O-related memory copy operations in large memory systems (>1GB memory).

High Availability Enhancements

Red Hat Linux Advanced Server provides a sophisticated high availability clustering technology, called Cluster Manager. With Cluster Manager you can make your existing Linux applications highly available, today!

Cluster Manager delivers application failover for a wide range of applications, including:

	Most custom and mainstream commercial applications
	File and print serving (e.g. NFS and Samba)
	Database application (e.g. Oracle, MySQL)
	Messaging application (e.g. sendmail)
	Internet and Open Source application (e.g. Apache)

With Cluster Manager, these applications can be deployed in high availability configurations, so your applications are always available - increasing user satisfaction and keeping your business running. Clustering technology brings "scale-out" capabilities to enterprise Linux deployments.

Cluster Manager features include:

	NFS/CIFS Failover - supports highly available file serving in Unix and Windows environments.
	Fully Shared Storage Subsystem - all cluster members have access to the same storage.
	Comprehensive Data Integrity guarantees - using the latest I/O barrier technology, such as programmable power switches and watchdog timers.
	SCSI and Fibre Channel support - Cluster Manager configurations can be deployed using latest SCSI and Fibre Channel technology. Multi-terabyte configurations can readily be made highly available!
	Service failover - Cluster Manager will not only ensure that hardware shutdowns or failures are detected and recovered from automatically. It will also monitor your applications to ensure that they are running correctly, and will restart them automatically if they fail.