| Red Hat prepares for the very top end of enterprise servers |
Dec. 04, 2007
On Dec. 4, Red Hat announced the first public beta of Red Hat Enterprise Messaging, Real-time, Grid. The company claims that MRG will offer new capabilities for financial services and government agencies that need exceptional performance through reliable enterprise messaging, real-time capabilities and advanced grid and high-throughput computing technologies for deployment on RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and other operating systems.
Red Hat claims that Red Hat Enterprise MRG (pronounced merge) is a revolutionary distributed computing platform that will provide record-break grid performance through revolutionary new techniques in scheduling, messaging, real-time, low-transaction latency and distributed computing.
Specifically, MRG will do this by enabling enterprises to schedule large computing tasks across local grids, remote grids, "cloud" capacity from Amazon EC2 and idle desktop workstations. So, for example, according to Bryan Che, MRG's product manager, MRG will be able to make use not just of RHEL servers on the network or in the cloud but on idle Windows workstations. With support for multiple versions of Linux, Solaris and Windows, if you can find an idle cycle on a computer, you'll find a computer that MRG can use for its work.
For messaging: Red Hat Enterprise MRG provides reliable messaging technologies. Scott Crenshaw, Red Hat's vice president of enterprise Linux, claims that it can deliver message performance up to 100 times faster than such propritary approaches as Tibco's TIBCO Enterprise Message Service. This capability comes from messaging technology developed with the open standard AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Performance) Working Group. Che specifically claimed that MRG's AMQP will be capable of delivering 500,000 messages per second.
AMQP is an attempt to create an open standard for high-performance, reliable messaging. It is supported by hardware network vendors, Cisco; operating system companies, Red Hat and Novell; and middleware company, Iona. AMQP, however, started out as a customer-driven initiative by JPMorgan. JPMogan and other high-end financial companies such as Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs wanted an open-standard for messaging both to foster innovation in message-driven financial middleware and applications and to drive down software prices.
Red Hat Enterprise MRG real-time capabilities also incorporate what Crenshaw calls low-transaction latency. This enables applications to run with optimized and deterministic latency. In other words, besides helping provide HPC (high-performance computing), it also ensures that transactions run predictably under all workloads. Crenshaw called this HTC (high-throughput computing). With Enterprise MRG real-time capabilities, CIOs can match compute capacity to business demands while meeting QoS (Quality-of-Service) requirements.
Last, but not least, Red Hat Enterprise MRG enables customers to leverage the full power of distributed computing with grid capabilities, based on the University of Wisconsin's Condor high-throughput computing project. Red Hat claims that these capabilities provide customers with a practical means of using their total compute capacity with maximum efficiency and flexibility, while improving the speed and availability of any application. Additionally, Red Hat and the University of Wisconsin have signed a strategic agreement to make Condor's source code available under several OSI-approved licenses and jointly fund ongoing co-development at the University of Wisconsin.
According to Che, the Apache license will be used for some of the code. Other licenses will be used on some sections of Condor depending on their existing IP (intellectual property) obligations. Red Hat will also be providing engineering help with Condor at Wisconsin.
"The University of Wisconsin is pleased to work with Red Hat around the Condor project," said Terry Millar, associate dean for Physical Sciences at the University of Wisconsin, Madison Graduate School, in a statement "Red Hat and our university share a joint vision of promoting open source and collaboration. By working together on this project, we will be able to add enhanced enterprise stability and functionality to Condor and high-throughput computing capabilities to Linux."
Red Hat Enterprise MRG builds on Red Hat's newly announced Linux Automation strategy, which focuses on enabling any application to run anywhere, at any time. The Raleigh, N.C.-based company claims that this gives customers genuine competitive advantage: the ability to run transactions and applications faster, while enabling new levels of quality-of-service, reliability, interoperability, standards support and system utilization.
"Bringing real-time capabilities to mainstream Linux has been a joint effort of the IBM Linux Technology Center, Red Hat and the Linux community," said Keith Bright, program director of IBM's Linux Technology Center, in a statement. "Red Hat's real-time solution was first developed in response to a request by Raytheon and the United States Navy for the DDG 1000 Zumwalt Class Destroyer project on IBM Blade Center technology. The resulting technology is a fine example of combining commercial opportunities and open-source technology and the open-source community. Building a solution in this manner provides for a better supported solution and makes it available to everyone. It has been a great collaboration effort."
"Enterprise MRG offers fundamentally new ways to deploy IT infrastructure," said Brian Stevens, Red Hat's CTO and vice president of engineering. "Enterprise MRG is a dramatic example of the open-source model offering significant advantages over proprietary technologies. We have collaborated to provide an open-messaging standard for all customers and vendors to use, coupled with an incredibly powerful application deployment infrastructure and cutting-edge, real-time capabilities."
Messaging and Grid technologies can be deployed across a variety of platforms such as Java, Solaris and .Net environments. Fully optimized performance is provided when they are deployed in combination with the real-time capabilities included in Red Hat Enterprise MRG running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Red Hat Enterprise MRG is available in Beta in early December, with final product availability scheduled for early 2008. Pricing, according to Che, will be based on a subscription model. Charges for MRG will be in addition to RHEL subscription fees. For more information on Red Hat Enterprise MRG, please visit the Red Hat MRG site.
—Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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