Seven years is a long time. Most people won't know where they are in 7 years. I'm interested to find out how many kids will be running around the house in 2016 However if you are responsible for thousands of Enterprise Linux servers, seven years may no longer be sufficient.

Red Hat today officially announced the beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 (RHEL), which in my view is a lot more than a typical point release. Sure we're all waiting for the big RHEL 6 release, but there are some major changes in RHEL 5.4.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (Tikanga) was released on March 14, 2007 and yesterday was RHEL 5's 3rd birthday. Since then we have gotten 4 update releases. Given the fact that Red Hat original plan was to have a new RHEL release every 18 - 24 months, one has to wonder where RHEL 6 is and why it is so late.

Oracle is now out with Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.5 (OEL)- a week after its base, Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 5.5 (RHEL) was released. That's pretty quick and in my view, one of the quickest turnarounds yet from Oracle with their version of RHEL. Oracle has been releasing its own version of Linux with OEL, based on RHEL since 2006 and they've been updating OEL as Red Hat updates RHEL.

While HP was slow in supporting Linux on the desktop, HP has long supported Linux on the server. HP currently supports RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), Novell's SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server), Oracle Enterprise Linux and even the community's own Linux, Debian on its server hardware. Now, HP is about to start supporting Ubuntu on its ProLiant server line.

As part of its "Extended Life Cycle Support" package, Red Hat will update selected components of RHEL for a further 3 years

Red Hat has released RHEL 5.4, a major point update of its commercial Linux distribution. This version introduces support for KVM, a significant milestone in Red Hat's evolving virtualization strategy.

Red Hat has announced the release of version 5.5 of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) a distribution aimed at enterprise customers. In addition to bug fixes released since RHEL 5.4, the latest release of RHEL includes enhancements to the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor

Linux has long been popular in the datacenter, and various Tier 1 vendors have extensive server product lines mostly based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or SUSE Enterprise Linux. There are more OEM options than ever; here is roundup of 5 distinctly different OEM Linux servers.