RLC Pro AI and RLC Pro Hardened: Which variant fits your infrastructure?

When you're choosing an operating system for your enterprise organization, the decision often starts with which distribution to use: RHEL, SUSE, Ubuntu, or RLC. If you're serious about your business, you might go the RLC route, which will then lead you to yet another decision: which variant to use?

CIQ offers two different RLC Pro variants: RLC Pro AI and RLC Pro Hardened. Both of these variations offer the same RLC base, but take a slightly different direction for each.

Let's examine both of these variants, so you can understand the difference between the two and how you can benefit from each.

What is RLC Pro AI?

Since AI is all the rage, let's begin with RLC Pro AI. This CIQ-driven Enterprise Linux distribution is a commercial release built from Enterprise Linux source code and focused on AI, machine learning, and high-performance computing (HPC). Like RLC+, RLC Pro AI ships with drivers for both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs preinstalled. It also includes the networking driver stack to support RDMA and InfiniBand, enabling high-throughput data transfer across the cluster.

You get CIQ support via the CIQ portal, as well as updates and patches maintained by CIQ and up to four years of support, even for minor versions.

But let's not forget the AI portion of RLC Pro AI, which means this variant is optimized for AI and GPU-accelerated infrastructure and HPC. To reach that goal, RLC Pro AI ships with NVIDIA CUDA, DOCA-OFED, and PyTorch preinstalled, tuned and validated. For those who don't know, PyTorch is an open source framework that is used for developing and training deep learning models such as neural networks. It will be extended to include more baked-in frameworks, with vLLM, Ollama, and Llama.cpp coming next. The customizations to RLC Pro AI also make it possible for organizations to go from installation to first inference in under four minutes. And then there are the PyTorch flags, CUDA configurations, and kernel parameters that are optimized to get the most throughput from your hardware.

You also get a secure supply chain and cloud-to-edge deployment.

The possible use cases for RLC Pro AI include AI and GPU-accelerated infrastructure, high-performance computing designed for large-scale deployments and increased output (tokens per GPU-hour), day zero and cluster setup, sovereign AI and on-prem hosting, deployment in regulated environments, and high-performance networking.

What is RLC Pro Hardened?

If your organization functions within highly regulated industries, RLC Pro Hardened might be just the right variant for you. RLC Pro Hardened is also a commercial Enterprise Linux distribution that is maintained by CIQ.

RLC Pro Hardened provides protection valuable to any organization, especially in the age of AI-accelerated threats. But it is especially a fit for industries such as finance, defense, and healthcare. In other words, those industries that require more stringent security and compliance with DISA, STIG, and CIS. With RLC Pro Hardened, you get those features out of the box, along with the Linux Kernel Runtime Guard (LKRG), which provides runtime integrity checking for the Linux kernel. In addition, there are other packages strategically hardened to mitigate entire classes of vulnerabilities, such as hardened_malloc and OpenSSH. These reduce exposure for unpatched systems and make it easier to discover vulnerabilities.

RLC Pro Hardened receives four years of support (even for minor versions) from the CIQ portal, which includes updates and patches that are managed by CIQ. In addition, RLC Pro Hardened (versions .2, .4, and .10 LTS) includes compliance for certification numbers 5117, 5116, 5113, and 5095.

For use cases, RLC Pro is all about automated regulatory compliance, proactive kernel threat detections, security of large-scale distributed infrastructure, federal cryptographic standards, proactive rootkit and exploit prevention, supply chain security, and hardened server and node provisioning.

Ideal use cases and target audiences

As for which RLC Pro variant you might choose, consider the following use cases and target audiences.

RLC Pro AI

RLC Pro AI is geared toward high-volume AI inference at scale, extending GPU hardware lifecycles, enterprise and regulated environments, zero-friction AI workstation deployments, and seamless Enterprise Linux migrations.

If you need sovereign AI, you need RLC Pro AI.
If you need performant AI, you need RLC Pro AI.
If you need validated, vendor-backed AI infra, you need RLC Pro AI.

RLC Pro Hardened

RLC Pro Hardened is purpose-built for automated regulatory compliance, proactive kernel threat detection, security of large-scale distributed infrastructure, federal cryptographic standards, proactive rootkit and exploit prevention, supply chain security, and hardened server and node provisioning.

If your organization operates in finance, defense, or healthcare, you need RLC Pro Hardened.
If you're required to pass strict security audits or maintain continuous compliance, you need RLC Pro Hardened.

Getting started with RLC Pro AI and RLC Pro Hardened

To start your journey with these variants, first download and install RLC. Once you've done that, follow these steps:

1. Get your credentials: Log into the CIQ portal, go to My Products > Rocky Linux from CIQ > Deploy, and find your username and token.
2. Backup: Take a snapshot or full backup of your current server and disable any third-party repositories.
3. Run the script: Request or obtain the migrate2rlc script from CIQ Support and execute it using your credentials. The command looks like this: sudo ./migrate2rlc.sh -r -u YOUR_USERNAME -p YOUR_TOKEN -t rlc-pro
4. Reboot: Once finished, restart your system.

Conclusion

For any enterprise organization that demands more for AI or works within highly regulated industries, RLC Pro AI and RLC Pro Hardened are both excellent choices. Each variant is ready to go, out of the box, so you'll spend less time setting up and more time doing business.

And remember, don't hesitate to engage with both CIQ and the Rocky Linux community to learn more about each variant and what they can do to better serve your company.