Red Hat Enterprise MRG 1.3 includes updates to the product’s Messaging, Realtime and Grid technologies, which provide a key technology base for Red Hat Cloud Foundations, a solution set that offers a set of tools to build and manage a private cloud, the company said in its release announcement.

Red Hat Enterprise MRG provides an integrated platform for high-performance distributing computing. First released in June 2008, Enterprise MRG has since enabled customers around the world to meet their messaging, realtime and grid computing needs, offering: interoperable open standard messaging, low-latency realtime kernel, and a high-performance and throughput computing grid scheduler for distributed workloads and cloud computing.

Enterprise MRG 1.3 includes: upport for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.8, improved messaging APIs, new management capabilities, enhanced performance and scalability, and additional platform support.

Enterprise MRG’s Grid functionality, based on the Condor Project created and hosted by the University of Wisconsin, Madison, brings the advantages of flexible deployment to a range of applications and workloads. It provides the ability to scale out applications with real-time or high-performance needs and offers better asset utilisation, allowing applications to more effectively exploit all available computing resources.

With Grid, customers can build cloud infrastructures to aggregate multiple clouds. It provides integrated support for virtualisation and public clouds and easier aggregation of multiple cloud resources into one compute pool. In addition, it provides more streamlined and flexible computing across remote grids with servers, clusters and cycle-harvesting from desktop PCs as well as across private, public and hybrid clouds. MRG Grid is a key base component of Red Hat Cloud Foundations.

With Enterprise MRG 1.3, Grid is now fully supported for customers in North America without a technical account manager (TAM) and extended coverage is provided to customers throughout Europe. The release includes new user tools, Windows Execute Node support, enhanced workflow management, resource restriction capabilities, update configuration management and new admin tools. With these updates, customers will gain the ability to scale to tens of thousands of devices, be able to provision virtual machines, centralise configuration and management and utilize cloud spill-over capabilities.

Enterprise MRG 1.3 also includes several updates to its Messaging component. It offers updated clients with improved performance, new protocol version independent C++ and Python clients, Windows C++ client and additional QMF APIs. Clustering enhancements include durable stores to provide optimized performance in clustered environments and stability improvements.

The update also enables MRG Messaging to be recognized as a supported messaging transport for JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform, and offers security improvements such as SASL support for Python, including Kerberos support.

With Enterprise MRG 1.3, Realtime moves to a 2.6.33-based kernel, and includes the new Performance Counter subsystem in the kernel and the new associated perf performance tool to enable greater performance capabilities for customers. The update also features new hardware enablement and certifications designed to incorporate a new MRG Realtime hardware self-certification programme that is expected to be introduced shortly for 1.3.