Do we really need a feature-laden, monolithic operating system? The release of the feature-laden Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 operating system has renewed the debate about whether the days of the monolithic operating system are numbered.

Red Hat executive vice president Paul Cormier says the company’s latest enterprise Linux release isn’t just an operating system – it’s a platform with virtualization and other features lumped in.

Enterprise Linux 5 comes in two versions: the Advanced Platform for server deployments, and an Enterprise Desktop.

The Advanced Platform which is aimed at larger businesses includes much broader virtualization capabilities, including an unlimited number of virtual guests limited only by the hardware it’s running on. It also includes storage virtualization capabilities, helping companies to cut storage costs.

The Enterprise Desktop includes new hardware support such as quad-core CPUs and what the company called improved interoperability with both Unix and with Microsoft. It will also allow users to create up to four virtualized “guest” servers on one box and is aimed at smaller companies.

Along with the released, Red Hat introduced a variety of services, including consulting and training for companies that want to use Enterprise Linux 5. Red Hat also launched Red Hat Exchange as “open-source marketplace” for partners’ products.

The debate over whether the size of operating systems is getting out of hand arose recently around the launch of Microsoft’s Windows Vista. In a report published in 2006, Gartner analysts predicted that Windows will one day be broken up into modular components as the increasing complexity of Windows makes it “unsustainable.”

Adam Jollans, director of worldwide strategy for Linux and open source at IBM told IDG News Service, “At a time when IT administrators want to get more out of their existing hardware, isolating software applications and running them only with small pieces of code seems counterproductive”.

He added, “Many more people want to run multiple applications and do many different things. … so I think we need the generic operating system to support all the different things people want to do.”

Jay Lyman, an analyst with The 451 Group, also told IDG News Service that “Software appliances may have a place in some niche environments in which a customer needs to run just a few pieces of software. But a larger business would probably still need the various programs that are bundled into an OS”.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 at 6:00 pm under Linux, Open source, Software, Technology.

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