1. What is Red Hat Enterprise MRG?

Red Hat Enterprise MRG is a high-performance distributed computing platform. Red Hat Enterprise MRG integrates technologies like MRG Messaging, MRG Realtime, and MRG Grid to deliver new levels of performance, and provide reliability, predictable latency, and significantly better hardware utilization and peak computing power.

2. In what category of products does Red Hat Enterprise MRG fall?

Red Hat Enterprise MRG establishes a new category of products to provide a fundamentally better way to deploy IT infrastructure. Previously, enterprises had to purchase specialized products for reliable messaging, fast messaging, large file messaging, high performance computing, high throughput computing, and other distributed computing tasks; deploy these specialized products in architectural silos; and manage them separately.

Red Hat Enterprise MRG provides a more flexible, powerful, and easy-to-mange solution: with one platform, enterprises can leverage their entire IT infrastructure, from cycle-scavenging from desktop workstations, to local grids, to remote grids, to rented cloud infrastructures for a full spectrum of the most demanding distributed computing tasks. And, they can manage, monitor, and deploy all of these with one set of management tools.

3. What benefits and features does Red Hat Enterprise MRG provide?

Red Hat Enterprise MRG offers an integrated set of powerful distributed computing capabilities that span messaging, low-latency computing, High Throughput Computing (HTC), and High Performance Computing (HPC). Red Hat Enterprise MRG offers unprecedented levels of performance with capabilities like durable messaging throughputs orders of magnitude higher than other solutions, highly deterministic performance and low latency, and grid pools of tens of thousands of nodes.

Additionally, Red Hat Enterprise MRG provides the flexibility to execute tasks with resources ranging from cycle-scavenging from desktop workstations, to local grids, to remote grids, to rented cloud infrastructures. And, Red Hat Enterprise MRG provides compatibility with a large range of operating systems, languages, and platforms -- all while offering unified management tools.

For additional information, see Red Hat Enterprise MRG Overview and Red Hat Enterprise MRG Benefits.

4. Why is Red Hat integrating Messaging, Realtime, and Grid into one product rather than distributing these technologies individually?

Red Hat Enterprise MRG aims to provide a fundamentally new and better way to deploy IT infrastructure -- not just provide joint capabilities. Although there are various products that have some of the capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise MRG (reliable messaging products, grid scheduling products, fast messaging products, etc.), there are none that provide the integrated capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise MRG.

For example, Red Hat Enterprise MRG's low-latency scheduling capabilities -- being able to schedule and execute sub-second calculations consistently -- comes from the integration of Messaging, Realtime, and Grid technologies. MRG leverages its high-speed messaging bus to message jobs directly onto the grid and to message results directly off the grid rapidly, and its realtime kernel ensures that this fast scheduling remains consistently fast. Although Red Hat Enterprise MRG is highly competitive from a performance and feature standpoint with specialized point products, it also provides advanced capabilities and unified management that only comes from integrating these technologies.

5. Will I be able to use Messaging, Realtime, or Grid technologies individually?

Yes, Red Hat will support customers that have specialized needs around specific technologies in MRG.

6. How can I use Red Hat Enterprise MRG with virtualization?

Most - if not all - workloads and environments can benefit from virtualization. But, how do you leverage virtualization if:

• You have thousands or tens of thousands of heterogeneous servers running different applications?
• You have high variability or seasonality in your workloads?
• You want to utilize additional resources that aren't in your data center?
• You want to treat your data center as a computing utility or "internal cloud?"

MRG Grid's integrated support for virtualization enables enterprises to manage virtualization in large-scale deployments and integrate them with non-virtualized workloads and cloud infrastructure. MRG's grid scheduler can automatically handle virtualization management tasks, such as starting, stopping, or live-migrating a virtual machine. MRG Grid's support for features like prioritization and backfill can also further optimize utilization when deploying virtualization technologies.

7. How can I use Red Hat Enterprise MRG with cloud computing?

MRG Grid includes integrated support for scheduling jobs to Amazon EC2. MRG Grid's scheduler can automatically:

• instantiate capacity in the cloud,
• send jobs and data to the newly available capacity in the cloud,
• execute and monitor the jobs in the cloud,
• retrieve and handle job results, and
• tear down the capacity in the cloud when the job has finished.

This capability allows enterprises to add capacity dynamically to existing data centers when they need additional processing power. Alternatively, companies that might not be able to utilize fully a local grid can leverage MRG to instantiate dynmically a grid on-the-fly in the cloud for the times that they do need access to a grid. Finally, MRG Grid enables enterprises to blend seamlessly cloud-based infrastructure with local infrastructure.

8. How does Red Hat Enterprise MRG relate to Red Hat's Linux Automation Strategy?

Red Hat's Linux Automation strategy enables enterprises to run any application, anywhere, at any time. Red Hat Enterprise MRG extends this capability to large scales and with high performance by offering a fundamentally better way to deploy IT infrastructure, running any task, at any scale, with any resource. Whereas Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides the flexibility to run a certified application in environments ranging from a local server to a virtualized environment to a cloud, Red Hat Enterprise MRG provides the ability to provide significant computational power, deterministic low latency, and high performance to applications and workloads, leveraging resources like bare-metal servers, virtualized environments, idle workstations, and remote clouds.

9. How does Red Hat Enterprise MRG relate to other Red Hat products?

Red Hat Enterprise MRG is highly optimized to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. However, Red Hat Enterprise MRG will also run on other platforms, including Windows and Solaris, without the full performance benefits from running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For example, Red Hat Enterprise MRG's realtime kernel technology only runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Other platforms will not have the deterministic low latency that MRG provides on Enterprise Linux. As another example, Red Hat Enterprise MRG includes a high performance journal that is tightly coupled to Red Hat Enterprise Linux's native IO system. This high performance journal enables Red Hat Enterprise MRG to deliver incredibly high durable messaging rates on Red Hat Enterprise Linux as it takes advantage of key capabilities found only in Linux.

Red Hat Enterprise MRG also can serve as a foundation for Red Hat's JBoss Enterprise Middleware platforms. Red Hat has collaborated with both IBM and Sun on developing and certifying industry-leading realtime JVMs on Red Hat Enterprise MRG. Thees realtime JVM sprovide capabilities like guaranteed sub-millisecond garbage collection times and can run Java applications deterministically and reliably. Additionally, Red Hat Enterprise MRG will provide a high-end messaging foundation for upcoming SOA offerings from JBoss.

10. Does Red Hat Enterprise MRG only run on Linux?

No, Red Hat Enterprise MRG will run on a variety of platforms in addition to Linux, including Windows and Solaris. Red Hat Enterprise MRG provides additional capabilities and performance on Linux since Red Hat is able to engineer both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise MRG to provide synergistic capabilities. For example, MRG's realtime kernel capabilities only run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

For a full list of supported platforms, see Red Hat Enterprise MRG Supported Hardware and Platforms.

11. How do you pronounce "MRG?"

MRG is pronounced "Merge."