Red Hat Enterprise Linux: The Leading Platform for Top-Tier Performance

Since its introduction more than a decade ago, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has become the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform. Along the way it has set the industry standard for performance as most recently demonstrated by Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 delivering multiple world record-breaking benchmark results at launch. These results showcased close collaboration between Red Hat and our ecosystem of partners.

With history as a backdrop, it should come as no surprise that many of our partners rely on Red Hat Enterprise Linux to support their ongoing benchmarking efforts. Red Hat and Intel have enjoyed a long history of collaboration across a full spectrum of all that is enterprise IT - covering everything from applications running on physical servers to virtualized and cloud-based deployments. In fact, during yesterday’s launch of the Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 processor family

several new world record industry-standard benchmarks were announced with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Source: http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/benchmarks/server/xeon-e5-2600-v3/xeon-e5-2600-v3-summary.html

Looking over the details behind the aforementioned world record benchmarks, it was nice to see that Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the platform of choice for several Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). We’re extremely pleased that Red Hat Enterprise Linux has once again demonstrated how an OS platform can handle the rigors of highly multi-threaded processing and on-demand scaling by setting nine world record results on the Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 processor family.

And while it may seem that we are revisiting this topic relatively often, talking about how Red Hat Enterprise Linux fuels top benchmark results on the latest generation of Intel Xeon processors, we believe that the combination of stellar performance and support of the latest features and innovations positions Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a top choice for demanding enterprise workloads across physical, virtual, or cloud installations.

Our partners seem to agree as they have bet on a stable platform to deliver their top performance results for this new hardware. As compared to other operating systems used to produce these records, Red Hat Enterprise Linux was used in nearly one-third of all publications. Out of 28 world record benchmark results posted by nine different OEM partners, Red Hat Enterprise Linux was used in nine, surpassing both Microsoft and SUSE. The following chart visualizes this adoption:

Moreover, the industry adoption of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for running and publishing standard benchmarks, such as those from SPEC and TPC, continues to grow.

As the chart above demonstrates, Red Hat Enterprise Linux was used in at least half of all TPC-H, SPEC CPU2006, SPECjbb2013 and SPECvirt_sc2013 benchmark publications during the last two years⁽¹⁾. These benchmarks cover a broad spectrum of workloads ranging from compute-intensive technical computing problems and decision support databases to enterprise Java applications and virtualization.

Regardless of workload type, Red Hat Enterprise Linux distinguished itself by showing industry-leading capability and excellent performance. Looking beyond percentages, the use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux in these benchmarks demonstrates that OEMs building systems based on the x86 architecture trust the industry’s leading enterprise Linux platform to deliver the performance that they need while running their most critical workloads.

Enterprises and customers place increasing demands on their infrastructure. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has proven that it excels at handling massive workloads and thrives in ever-changing environments.  Click here to learn more about building your infrastructure on a platform without boundaries.

All results as of September 8, 2014. SPEC and the benchmark names SPEC CPU, SPECjbb and SPEC VIRT_SC are trademarks or registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. For more information about SPEC and its benchmarks see: www.spec.org. TPC is a trademark of the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC). For more information about the TPC and its benchmarks see www.tpc.org. SAP and all SAP logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries. Sybase and Adaptive Server are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sybase, Inc. or its subsidiaries/affiliates. (R) indicates registration in the United States. Sybase is an SAP company.

⁽¹⁾Results as of August 25th, 2014. Based on the data collected for two calendar years (from 08/2012 to 08/2014) using the following public resources:

SPEC CPU2006: http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/

SPECvirt_sc2013: http://www.spec.org/virt_sc2013/results/

SPECjbb2013: http://www.spec.org/jbb2013/results/

TPC-H: http://www.tpc.org/tpch