Top telco benefits of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 comes with a host of enhancements to help digital service providers (DSPs) build a foundation for responding to customer requirements and seize new opportunities, particularly as they deploy 5G and edge services. From cloud portability to performance improvements and more, there are significant advantages for DSPs to explore. 

• Freedom to deploy anywhere: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 delivers a consistent operating environment for your private or public cloud deployments, easier upgrades from previous releases, and new support across multiple architectures. This continuity can give DSPs the flexibility and agility to adapt more rapidly to changing business priorities in increasingly competitive and dynamic global markets. It can help them deliver new offers, optimize business processes, or elastically scale services to match demand fluctuations.

• Intelligent OS security and compliance benefits: Red Hat Insights, now included with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, delivers operational, and internal audit benefits through Red Hat Insights to improve how DSPs mitigate and remediate risk. Using predictive analytics Red Hat Insights provides tailored resolution steps to help proactively identify and remediate threats affecting security, performance, availability, and stability across physical, virtual, and cloud environments, as well as container deployments. 

• Built-in automation and management: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 also includes built-in automation and management to create and enforce systems and security policies. Meeting security and regulatory compliance requirements can prove challenging due to the sheer number of individual devices DSPs must manage. Included tools allow for standardized configurations, upgrades, compliance enforcement, and centralized control of system changes. Read our recent blog post to learn more about the importance of automation for telecommunications service providers. 

• Improved performance: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 accelerates web-scale and media applications for over-the-top (OTT) providers. They can take advantage of better congestion control, reduced latency on long haul links, and higher performance for video streaming on mobile networks. Better performance also gives providers opportunities to deploy next-generation networking apps that can improve security and availability. 

• Flexible and durable system support: Service providers have a diverse infrastructure of hardware and applications, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux has a broad ecosystem of certified applications, containers and compute platforms, maximizing flexibility and choice for their businesses as they evolve. There’s also built-in device support for next-generation SmartNICs (network interface controllers), flow offload processors, crypto engines, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and graphics processing units (GPUs) to support line-rate encryption for internet traffic, intelligent routing and switching in the NIC, 5G/radio access network (RAN) packet processing, and customized artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML). 

In addition, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 supports accelerated cloud-native development and improved capabilities for SELinux security, as well as compliance for encryption standards. 

Red Hat works closely with our customers and partners to understand the challenges service providers face, so we can deliver products like Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 that are ready for global, scalable production. 

Here’s a TelecomTV interview with Red Hat’s Chris Wells, director of product marketing for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, who shares some behind-the-scenes information about the patches, support calls, updates, ecosystem certifications and other activities we cover in a six-month period, so our customers don't have to. And watch this TelecomTV interview with Red Hat’s Stefanie Chiras, VP and general manager, RHEL Business Unit, to learn how we support the telecommunications ecosystem.