SCIENCE

Red Hat announced the delivery of Red Hat Enterprise MRG 2.0, including expanded capabilities spanning the product's Messaging, Realtime and Grid components. Red Hat Enterprise MRG 2.0 includes significant advances in performance, scalability and management, and also adds support for the latest version of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux enterprise operating platform, enabling customers to gain the advances made in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1.

Red Hat Enterprise MRG delivers high-speed/low latency, open-standard application messaging; a deterministic low-latency realtime kernel; and a high-performance computing grid scheduler for distributed workloads and cloud computing. Today's release of Red Hat Enterprise MRG 2.0 expands upon the Enterprise MRG functionality with the following enhancements:

-- Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1: Enterprise MRG 2.0 applies the advancements delivered in the enterprise operating system platform to the Enterprise MRG product. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 delivers leading price/performance and Enterprise MRG 2.0's close integration with the underlying infrastructure allows critical enterprise applications, such as messaging, to exploit the power of the platform, which has achieved performance leadership in recent SPECvirt benchmarks(1). This support also paves the way for Enterprise MRG Grid to harness new features not available in previous kernels.

-- Significantly improved performance : For high-throughput, low-latency applications, Enterprise MRG 2.0 expands existing support for RDMA Infiniband to include iWarp 10G Ethernet via new optimized drivers. Using these new drivers enables Enterprise MRG Messaging to achieve up to a 100 percent improvement in performance when running on 10G Ethernet. For applications deployed across a grid, Enterprise MRG Grid now features enhanced scheduling performance, with the ability to schedule and complete over 100 jobs/second with a single scheduler. This performance enhances the ability to deliver the scale needed for cloud deployments at a compelling price point. Additionally, the management console improves its ability to reach load demands of large deployments, hundreds of users and millions of jobs. Finally, Enterprise MRG's Realtime kernel has been optimized on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 to bring deterministic low-latency performance for mission-critical applications.

-- Expanded management capabilities: The QMF management console within the Enterprise MRG Messaging platform adds additional, lower-level control to application environments that include Windows, Java and Python. Enterprise MRG Messaging is based upon the advanced message queuing protocol, AMQP, a business messaging specification being developed by a working group of major vendors and end-user organizations(2). New support for priority queues and alert thresholds is designed to allow systems architects to implement new QoS capabilities within their distributed applications, complete with proactive monitoring of message queue levels. Enterprise MRG 2.0 also includes new capabilities to monitor, diagnose and report on grid jobs. Enterprise MRG Grid also includes a new set of APIs that supports automated management, as well as integration with other management tools. Finally, Enterprise MRG Grid also brings more energy-efficient computing features to the enterprise, enabling users to automatically turn off unused servers and concentrate workloads on a smaller number of physical systems.

-- Extended cloud readiness: Enterprise MRG has been an important element in Red Hat's cloud strategy with its scalable, flexible messaging and grid infrastructures. Enterprise MRG Messaging 2.0 services as a foundational layer of infrastructure in Red Hat's OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution, introduced in May 2011. With Enterprise MRG 2.0, OpenShift gains a reliable, scalable mechanism for transferring data in the cloud, as well as the interoperability of the AMQP open standard. Enterprise MRG Grid is also a key component for existing cloud deployments and is expected to be foundational in Red Hat's cloud offerings going forward.

"Red Hat Enterprise MRG 2.0, with its support of 10GbE and InfiniBand, provides customers with new levels of performance and fabric flexibility," said Motti Beck, director of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. "We've collaborated with Red Hat on performance testing and have witnessed first-hand the increased performance capabilities of the 2.0 platform."

"The UW-Madison Center for High Throughput Computing has collaborated very closely with Red Hat since 2007 on the open source Condor Project, which Red Hat incorporates into its Red Hat Enterprise MRG product. Recently, we've extended our partnership to jointly drive innovation in cloud computing through Condor technologies," said Miron Livny, professor of computer science at University of Wisconsin, director of the Center of High Throughput Computing and CTO of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery. "Red Hat Enterprise MRG 2.0, leverages our latest Condor innovations, to offer a new level of performance and scalability to an ever-growing range of users and applications."

"Red Hat Enterprise MRG has been providing a solid foundation for our enterprise customers' messaging, realtime, grid and cloud computing infrastructures for three years," said Bryan Che, senior director, Product Management and Marketing at Red Hat. "Enterprise MRG has been a key technology base throughout the evolution of Red Hat's cloud strategy, first with Red Hat Cloud Foundations and today with OpenShift. The expansive new capabilities of Enterprise MRG 2.0 are designed to provide customers with new capability levels across their deployments with improvements in performance, scalability and manageability."