Software Collections
Intro
Software Collections are for installing multiple (newer) versions of software like Python or Perl than the version distributed with the RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution you have.
Software Collections is like the virtualenv system for Python. So if you want Python 2.7 on your RHEL 6.x box, you can choose to use virtualenv for Python, or you can use Software Collections for Python and more (like Postgres, Nodejs, MariaDB, etc.).
With Software Collections, you can build and concurrently install multiple versions of the same software components on your system. Software Collections have no impact on the system versions of the packages installed by any of the conventional RPM package management utilities.
Example
Following this article, I installed Python 2.7 on an old RHEL 6.7 box.
sudo sh -c 'wget -qO- http://people.redhat.com/bkabrda/scl_python27.repo >> /etc/yum.repos.d/scl.repo'
sudo yum install python27
scl enable python27 bash
python -V
For whatever reason, I wasn't getting a 'new' python in my bash shell, so I su'd to root where python 2.7 and 2.7.5 were available??
More
This is a part of the Python deployments series