Open-source software company Red Hat Inc. is stepping up its game around Microsoft Windows integration, hybrid cloud environments and software containers in the latest version of its enterprise Linux distribution.

Red Hat Tuesday announced its latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 release, touting improvements it says enables the platform to become “a consistent foundation for hybrid cloud environments.” The release also tightens “integration with Microsoft Windows infrastructure” in both on-premises deployments and on Microsoft Azure, the company said.

The updates are intended to push Red Hat further along the path towards becoming a cloud company, rather than just a builder of operating systems. Red Hat’s ambitions were most recently laid bare with its acquisition of the software container startup CoreOS Inc., though that company’s technology has yet to be integrated with RHEL.

Instead, Red Hat has focused much of its development work on furthering RHEL’s integration with Microsoft Azure and Windows Server. The new release offers more secure data transfers to the former, and better management and communication capabilities for the latter. The company also said performance improvements have been made for complex Microsoft Active Directory architectures, which should bring about a “smoother transition” for companies wish to deploy RHEL alongside Windows on their networks.

On the hybrid cloud front, Red Hat has done quite a few things. First, it’s improving storage optimization with a new virtual data optimizer feature that helps customers extend existing data storage resources to hybrid cloud deployments. VDO works by reducing data redundancy and compressing and deduplicating data before it’s stored. Red Hat cites its own research that found the VDO can reduce cloud data storage costs by up to 83 percent.

In addition, Red Hat said its new Network-Bound Disk Encryption feature for sensitive data now supports automatic decryption.

We also have a new security automation feature made possible by integrating Red Hat Ansible Automation with OpenSCAP, which is open-source software that helps with the assessment, measurement and enforcement of security baselines. This allows admins to implement changes rapidly in a consistent fashion across hybrid information technology environments, Red Hat said.

“The future of enterprise IT doesn’t exist solely in the datacenter or in the public cloud, but rather as a fusion of environments spread across IT’s four footprints: physical, virtual, private cloud and public cloud,” said Denise Dumas, vice president of platform engineering at Red Hat.

Finally, RHEL 7.5 adds support for Buildah, which is open-source software that allows developers to create and edit container images without any daemon or runtimes running in the background. That means DevOps teams can build and deploy containerized images faster because there’s no need for a full container engine.

The release is a “good one with lots of features,” said Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research Inc. In particular, Mueller said he was impressed with the new hybrid cloud features of the platform. “This is a key step forward given RHEL’s prominence in corporate data centers,” he said.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 is available to download now.

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