High Reliability

Availability: Red Flag Server 4 Series enhances its support for clusters, and improves its availability. As for critical business application deployment, clustering is indispensable, because clustering improves availability and scalability greatly for applications, and helps to avoid single point of failure. In Red Flag Server 4 Series, the deployment cluster technology becomes much easier, it provides more fail-over capabilities and longer system running time. Red Flag Server 4 Series supports up to 16-node of clustering service, if some node in the cluster is down due to failure or maintenance, other nodes in the cluster will automatically take over, so called fail-over.

Reliability: Red Flag Server 4 Series undertake large-scale, high-load and long-time stress testing, its reliability is improved based on the practical testing. A robust enterprise-level operation system must operate under massive peak load stress without any error or failure; moreover, as an enterprise-level system, when the user load is beyond the system design capabilities, its performance should go down  smoothly. Red Flag Server 4  Series are tuned  in  many areas such as  kernel,  I/O, memory management, networking and process scheduling, which ensures system reliability in both centralized and clustering system.

Scalability: The scalability of Red Flag Server 4 Series is achieved by its  SMP support for vertical scaling and its clustering support for horizontal scaling. Red Flag Server 4 series supports up to 32-way CPU and 64G physical memory, it can also provide enterprise computing by acting as a large virtual computing node through the clustering technology,  such cluster can improve its performance and achieve high scalability by adding more internal nodes with any limits.

Security: As customers connect their internal network, external network and internet, Red Flag Server 4 Series pay special attention to its design of security. Currently Red Flag Server 4 Series provides many important new features and improvements in security, it has passed the GB17859-1999 3rd level Standard of the Ministry of Public Security of China  (equivalent to B1 standard of U.S.)

High Performance

Kernel: Red Flag Server 4 Series is based on monolithic kernel, however both flexibility and high-performance are achieved by its adoption of module mechanism, file system, device drivers, network protocols etc. are all able to be made as modules. All GUI applications of Red Flag Server 4 Series are based on X-Window system, which is just a normal user process and not part of kernel, thus its crash will not affect the stability of the whole system. User can choose not to use X-Window to lower the resource usage and improve the system stability.

File System: Red Flag Server 4 Series support more file systems (even including NTFS) than other operating systems. Currently many log file systems supported, including ext3, ReiserFS, IBM's JFS, SGI's XFS, among them, JFS and XFS are ported from mature file system of commercial UNIX, offer high-stability, high-performance and high-reliability, they all go through long-time usage and testing in industrial environment, have ACL capability, and optimizes in difference areas, so customers can choose the most suitable file system for its requirement. Red Flag also develops file system encryption module independent to specific file system, which carries out fine-grind/high-stress encryption for all file systems with high flexibility and usability.

Asynchronous I/O: Red Flag Server 4 Series support asynchronous I/O, which helps applications like database to achieve improve its I/O performance. applications using POSIX asynchronous I/O API are highly portable among other UNIX flavors. Red Flag Server 4 Series also support Multi-path I/O (through device drivers).

High Usability

Manageability: Red Flag Server 4 Series have built-in integrated system management tools. Red Flag offers a whole set of system management API, based on which two types of management tools are developed: one is local system management tools running on X-Windows, the other is web-based remote system management tools. System administrators can use these tools to manage hardware, users, system log,  network services, system configurations and system status, etc.

Inter-connection and Communications: The inter-connection capability is one of the key factors of server operating system. Red Flag Server 4 Series make many optimizations for networking, especially in the area of device drivers and network services, extensive testing are also made. It is essential for the customers to be able to connect to network anywhere, using any device. Partners, suppliers and other organizations outside of the network also need to interact efficiently with all kinds of enterprise resources, thus inter-connection becomes extremely important. Red Flag Server 5 Series have built-in support for many kinds of networking devices, including traditional networking devices as well as wireless devices such as 802.11, blue tooth and IR.

High Cost-effectiveness

Due to its openness, PC technology becomes the most cost-effective information system platform, thus the more attractive choice for most companies to lower their management cost. Red Flag Server 4 Series, with its superb stability, reliability, security, scalability and cost-effectiveness, enables enterprise customers to lower information system cost by a wide margin, it thus becomes one of the best operating system platform for enterprise customers.

Purchase Cost: Red Flag Server 4 Series enables you to build reliable network, while you only need to pay a few thousands RMB (about a few hundreds U.S. dollars) for a single node. Compared with 30-40 thousands  even millions of RMB cost of other networking operating systems, Red Flag Server 4 Series have big price advantage. Under usual circumstances, when a medium business decide to deploy platform system, it will never only deploy a single server, when several servers are deployed, the whole purchase cost will be decreased significantly if Red Flag Server 4 Series is used.

Software Maintenance Cost: the major difference between enterprise application and personal application is, in enterprise IT system, under the precondition of security and robustness, the less modification, the better. Enterprise wants a robust and reliable computing platform. Frequent system upgrading and modifications may not only damage the ability to serve, but also increase the maintenance cost significantly. Red Flag Server 4 Series have good records on security, availability and scalability., its design and architecture ensures to provide a reliable, secure, highly available and highly scalable computing platform for enterprise applications with lower cost, so its maintenance cost is also very low.