Partners Work with Red Hat to Deliver Red Hat Enterprise MRG

Today we announced the availability of version one of Red Hat Enterprise MRG, delivering on the announcement of the MRG beta made in December 2007. Our partners have made large contributions that, coupled with the innovation delivered by our beta customers, have helped us deliver on MRG today. AMD, Cisco, IBM, SUN, Intel, Amazon, University of Wisconsin, Madison and HP have all made significant contributions today.

IBM and Sun have worked closely with Red Hat on Realtime. Both are certifying their realtime Java solutions on MRG – IBM is doing so exclusively. Additionally, Red Hat and IBM have been working together over the past several years on the development of a realtime platform for the DDG 1000 Zumwalt Class Destroyer program. IBM and Raytheon are winners in this year’s Red Hat Innovation Awards for this development work.

Cisco and Red Hat have collaborated closely on both the AMQP specification and MRG Messaging. For example, at the Red Hat Summit, Cisco is debuting an update to its AON platform to provide native support for Red Hat Enterprise MRG Messaging and AMQP. Red Hat and Cisco are also partnering together on a number of other messaging-related initiatives. Ultimately, partnerships like this will lead to a broader ecosystem in the messaging space.

Performance is critical to many messaging and realtime deployments. Red Hat is partnering with chip manufacturers like AMD and Intel to optimize and characterize the performance of Red Hat Enterprise MRG on their respective platforms. Over the next several months, we will be publishing performance benchmarks and reference architectures together, and we will also be working with third-party benchmarking organizations to provide performance data for our customers. At launch, we are making available the first of these reports in a paper detailing exceptional MRG Messaging throughput on Intel quad-core Xeon processors and gigabit Ethernet.

The Realtime Linux Kernel in MRG does not require any application changes - applications that are certified to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 will continue to run without modification with the MRG Realtime kernel. However, the MRG Realtime component does require additional hardware certifications beyond the standard Enterprise Linux hardware certifications since it does provide an updated kernel. Customers are using MRG Realtime in high-end deployments, so Red Hat has been working with the OEMs that customers request around realtime hardware certification. To date, customers have been demanding HP and IBM hardware for realtime deployments. So, both HP and IBM have partnered with Red Hat to certify their systems for Red Hat Enterprise MRG Realtime.

The MRG Grid component in Red Hat Enterprise MRG is currently available as a technology preview. But, Red Hat has been just as busy partnering with various others around Grid. Most notably, Red Hat has a strategic partnership with the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the creator of the Condor Scheduler in MRG Grid. This partnership makes Condor available under an OSI-approved open source license, and it also makes Red Hat a co-developer for the Condor project. For example, Red Hat has built an engineering team on-campus at the University of Wisconsin to work with the Condor researchers there. Red Hat has also been partnering around MRG Grid with cloud infrastructure providers like Amazon. MRG Grid will be able to add capacity dynamically at Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and schedule workloads from grids in local data centers to ones in the cloud.