"Red Hat will demonstrate its coming Advanced Server
product this week at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in New York
and plans to begin selling it mid-spring, said Paul Cormier,
executive vice president of engineering at the Durham, N.C.,
company.
"As Linux is making inroads into the enterprise, we think the
days of trying to stuff everything for everyone on one distribution
are impractical at this stage," Cormier said. The new version also
won't be updated as frequently as the mainstream version, which is
refreshed every six months, he added.
Red Hat Advanced Server, in beta testing now, includes features
designed for more powerful servers, such as faster communications,
load balancing to share jobs efficiently among several servers, and
"clustering," which can let one computer take over for a crashed
comrade, Cormier said. The company this week will demonstrate
"failover," in which one server handling file-sharing duties takes
over for another."