Without much fanfare leading up to it - though everyone knew it was coming - Red Hat Wednesday said Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 had arrived and that it meant its position in the data center was solidified. It is the company's second-generation bid to get paid by the proverbial enterprise. It's supposed to provide stability not found in its dicier, more experimental free version, aka Fedora. Fedora is the testbed for the code that is kicked upstairs into the enterprise edition.

Like its predecessor, 3 is positioned against Sun and by default Microsoft.

In a catch-up with rival SUSE, the single operating system rev can ride on seven architectures in both client and server deployments and so Red Hat calls it a "unifying" release. The platforms include Intel x86, Itanium, AMD64, IBM mainframes (both the zSeries and S/390s) and IBM's iSeries and pSeries. It used to have piecemeal support.

The widgetry includes a Native Posix Threading Library to improve Red Hat's performance with multi-threaded apps, support for greater memory, I/O configurations and SMP. It's also supposed to run databases and Java better, Java because of its better threading skills. It is now supposed to be able to support 32,000 threads and could prove it suitable as an application server. This NPTL stuff will turn up in the next iteration of the Linux kernel, 2.6.

Red Hat has been hoping for months that Red Hat 3 would debut on the new kernel, but it didn't. The new 2.6 kernel isn't ready and probably won't be until next year.

Subscribers can update their systems for free from Red Hat 2.1 via the Red Hat Network. OEMs are supposed to deliver Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 in its AS (four-ways used for Oracle databases and clustering)), ES (one- and two-ways used for web serving or file- and-print) and WS (workstation) flavors in the next 30-60 days.

New customers can pay anywhere from $180 for a workstation to $3,000 from a server. Clustering costs an additional $500. The usual suspects will be reselling it. Dell says it'll also be selling Red Hat training first in the US and later in Japan and Europe.

Fedora, by the way, reportedly isn't run through product management and doesn't have to appear on retail shelves on a certain date. The Fedora Core is supposed to be released based on schedules set by a steering committee "that will be open and accessible to the community as well as influenced by the community," Red Hat has said.

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