Taipei, Taiwan, December 29, 2011-- Areca Technology Corporation (ARECA), today announced that their SAS and SATA ll RAID driver has been integrated directly into the Red Hat 6.2 (and later), allowing future versions of RHEL operating systems to support Areca's entire family PCI-X and PCI-Express series of high performance SAS and SATA ll RAID controllers.

Areca drivers were officially merged in the 2.6.19 Kernel tree. It only supports Areca Intel IOP and Marvell SOC based RAID controller. Red Hat has included a back ported patch Areca 2.6.19 on the Update 1 releases of RHEL5 which is running the kernel-2.6.18-53.el5. But it can not support PPC ROC based ARC-1880/1882 and ARC-12x3 series RAID controller. The update driver for PPC ROC was officially merged in the 2.6.36 Kernel tree.Red Hat has included a back ported patch Areca 2.6.36 in the rhel 6.2, version 1.20.00.15.el6u2 2010/08/05. All new Linux distributions including Red Hat, SuSE, TurboLinux, Debian, and Mandrakethat use 2.6.36 or newer will automatically support the Areca fully family hardware.

Now, That means Areca fully series 2/4/8/12/16 24 ports SAS and SATA RAID adapter works on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 without an additional driver for the kernel. Since CentOS is a freely-available Linux distribution that is based on Red Hat's commercial product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL),Areca driver will officially merge into the CentOS 6.2.