RHEL 7 is based on the Fedora 19 community Linux release and the Linux 3.10 kernel, both of which first debuted in July. Red Hat has been hardening the Fedora 19 base over the last several months to ensure enterprise-grade stability, Ron Pacheco, senior manager of Platform Product Management at Red Hat, told eWEEK.
One of the big changes coming in RHEL 7 is the move from Ext4 to XFS as the default file system. Ext4 and its predecessor Ext3 have long been the default file systems in Red Hat’s Linux distributions. However, Pacheco said, across all industries, Red Hat’s customers are dealing with a data explosion—which shouldn’t surprise anyone involved in the technology industry given the buzz around big data. “This enormous data growth requires a scalable, performance file system, which is provided by XFS— hence the move to it as the default file system,” he said.
XFS can support systems of up to 500TB in size; in contrast, Ext4 scales to a maximum stand-alone file system of 50TB.
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Enters Beta
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.