Red Hat Virtual Experience 2009

This Wednesday December 9, 2009, Red Hat will be hosting its Red Hat Virtual Experience event focused on cloud computing.  I have a session there in the afternoon regarding MRG:

Building and Leveraging Compute Clouds with Red Hat Enterprise MRG

This presentation will cover the current state of Red Hat's cloud efforts and provide technical information that details how to build a cloud infrastructure based on Red Hat's technologies and blueprints. The presentation will also provide an overview of the capabilities and features Red Hat Enterprise MRG and Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization jointly provide and how workload scheduling and virtualization can be used as an enterprise management platform.

There's also many other great sessions.  You can see the agenda here.

The Red Hat Virtual Experience 2009 is free to attend, and you can register here.

MRG 1.2 is Available

I'm pleased to announce that Red Hat Enterprise MRG 1.2 is now available.   MRG 1.2 provides many improvements, including:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 support
• Significant messaging performance updates and benchmark data.  For example, results include over 1.5 million reliable messages/second throughput per system and under 40 microsecond latency for reliable messaging on infiniband with our RDMA drivers.  Perhaps even more impressively, we have achieved over 1 million messages per second virtualized on KVM with 10GB networks--this is within 5% of bare metal
• New and updated Realtime tools.  RTEval is a new tool that detects hardware latencies in systems and complements our realtime hardware certification program in helping customers get the best performance from their entire application platform--both hardware and operating system
  
• Grid enhancements like support for hierarchical fair share,  KVM virtual machines (the new standard in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4) and Condor 7.4
• Many more optimizations and updates
  

You can read more about the MRG 1.2 release at press.redhat.com.  You can also read MRG 1.2's release notes. 

Existing MRG customers can yum update their systems to get the new release.  Prospects can contact Red Hat for more information.

How to Forward Your Mobile Phone's Voicemail to Google Voice with a Full Google Voice Account (and Still Use Your Mobile Phone with Your Google Number)

Google recently announced the option to use Google Voice with your existing number.  By selecting this option when you sign up for Google Voice, Google Voice effectively becomes an enhanced voicemail service with capabilities like SMS alerting, archiving, and transcripts, but you lose out on many other great features like ringing multiple phones or ListenIn.  Given this, I'm not sure why anyone would want to sign up for this limited service.

Instead, you can sign up for a full Google Voice account and get Google Voice voicemail for your existing number--plus preserve the option to use all of Google Voice's other features with a new number if you like.  With this option, whether someone calls your mobile phone number or your Google number, Google Voice will handle your voicemail.

Here's how to setup your mobile phone to use Google Voice's voicemail with a full Google Voice account:

1. Sign up for a Google Voice account.  Note that you'll need an invite to join, currently
2. Select the option to create an account with a Google Number rather than a non-Google number
3. Add your mobile phone to your Google Voice account
4. Go to Settings in Google Voice and click on the "Activate Google voicemail on this phone" link
5. Follow Google Voice's popup instructions to forward your phone's voicemail to Google Voice
   
6. Go back to Settings in Google Voice and click the "Edit" link on the settings for your mobile phone
7. Click "Show advanced settings"
8. Under the "Forwarding Options" section, set "Go straight to voicemail."  This will ensure that Google Voice won't try to ring your other phones once your mobile phone has forwarded to voicemail

That's it!  Now, when someone calls your mobile phone number and you don't answer, it will go to Google Voice's voicemail--just like with Google's Google Voice With Your Own Number service.  But, you still have the option to switch to your Google number in the future and take advantage of all of Google Voice's other features.  So, for example, if someone calls your Google number, it will also ring your mobile phone.

Cloud Storage Hubbub

Why is it that the media is still writing articles about whether Microsoft and T-Mobile's Sidekick data loss issue is going to put a damper on cloud storage, but nobody is asking whether Apple's bug in Snow Leopard that deletes all personal data is going to stop people from storing data locally?  Articles reporting initially on each incident came out within a few days of each other.

Part of the reason that the Sidekick failure--and it is a catastrophic failure--is causing people to question cloud storage is because everyone is writing articles asking this question.  But, nobody is writing articles asking anything similar about Apple.

The Sidekick incident doesn't illustrate a fault of cloud storage versus local storage--it just shows that you still need to care about protecting your data, no matter where you store it.  Maybe the fact that everyone is writing about Sidekick rather than Snow Leopard illustrates that Cloud Computing is even sexier and more buzz-worthy than Apple!

MRG Presentations and Videos from the Summit

I'm back from Chicago from another great Red Hat Summit.  I have uploaded my two presentations from the 2009 Red Hat Summit online:

• Red Hat Enterprise MRG Update
• Building and Leveraging Compute Clouds with Red Hat Enterprise MRG

As an additional treat, you can also view videos of one of my sessions, as well as our CTO Brian Stevens' keynote, which highlighted cloud computing with MRG and other technologies.  I can't link to the videos directly, but you can find them at

• http://www.redhat.com/promo/summit/2009/highlights/ 

Brian Stevens' keynote is on the first tab.  My MRG presentation is on the Summit Sessions tab.

Finally, you can watch a demo video of cloud computing with Red Hat Enterprise MRG.  In this video, I bridge and aggregate three different clouds together (a local render cloud, an internal cloud provisioned by Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, and Amazon EC2) into one seamless render cloud for film rendering.  This video created quite a buzz at the Summit, so enjoy!

Red Hat Enterprise MRG at the Red Hat Summit

Next week is the Red Hat Summit in Chicago.  We'll be featuring Red Hat Enterprise MRG there prominently:

• Building and Leveraging Compute Clouds with Red Hat Enterprise MRG
  
• MRG Messaging: A Programmer's Overview 
• Red Hat Enterprise MRG (Messaging, Realtime, Grid) Update and Roadmap
• A booth demonstrating cloud computing with MRG
• A special demo during our CTO Brian Stevens' keynote on cloud computing

I'll be at the Summit presenting the cloud computing and MRG update sessions.  I hope to see you there!

(The direct links to the sessions at the summit web site don't load that well due to the fancy javascript on that site.  You can go to http://www.redhat.com/promo/summit/2009/agenda/tracks/ and find the tracks manually to get a much better view of the info)

The Easy Way to Install TweetDeck on Linux and Work Around Error #5100

I tried installing TweetDeck on my Fedora Linux laptop and ran into an Error #5100.  I did a Google search, and it turns out that many other people have run into this error and solved it by doing things like downloading Adobe AIR and TweetDeck, and installing these files manually as root.

I found a much easier way: run FireFox (or whatever browser you use) as root, go to http://tweetdeck.com/, and click the "Download Now" link.  Everything works!

Update:  according to smmehadi at Adobe, installing xterm first is the truly easy and recommended way to solve this issue.  http://www.adobe.com/products/air/systemreqs/

MRG In The Open Source Cloud Computing Forum

Red Hat is hosting an online event, the Open Source Cloud Computing Forum, on July 22, 2009.  Matt Farrellee from the MRG team will be presenting on how Condor, the Grid component in MRG, helps with building and adopting clouds during the 5th session at 11:30am.

The event is free also features lots of other great sessions.  Read more about it here and then register to attend!

Introducing QpidComponents.org

We've launched a new Web site, http://qpidcomponents.org.  This site features additional components and tools for enterprise AMQP messaging that we have developed for Apache Qpid.  We also ship productized and supported versions of these components and tools in Red Hat Enterprise MRG.

Notably, QPidComponents.org includes a high-speed persistence library and management tools.  Why don't we just include these components in the QPid project?  One major reason is that they're licensed under open source licenses other than the Apache license.  For example, because the persistence library tightly ties to Linux, which is licensed under the GPL, we can't license that code under the Apache license.

Check out http://qpidcomponents.org if you use QPid!

Carl Trieloff Keynote about AMQP/MRG at SIFMA 2009

SIFMA's Technology Management Conference & Exhibit is perhaps Wall St's biggest such annual event.  Carl Trieloff will deliver this morning's opening keynote, followed by Stanley Young, the CEO of NYSE Technologies.

Carl's talk is on Building Financial Use Cases Directly into Messaging Software for Better Performance and Productivity and will cover work we've done in AMQP and Red Hat Enterprise MRG to provide a leading messaging platform and ecosystem.

MRG Realtime Slides From HP Tech Forum 2009

I've posted online my slides from my presentation today at the HP Technology Forum and Expo about Realtime Performance with Red Hat Enterprise MRG and HP Systems. 

You can download them here.

Cloud, Utility, Grid and Other Mixed Metaphors

I've written a new blog post for press.redhat.com: Cloud, Utility, Grid and Other Mixed Metaphors.  It discusses three terms that people typically use together but are often unclear about how they fit: cloud computing, utility computing, and grid computing.  The post illustrates the differences between the concepts and also describes how they fit together by using Red Hat Enterprise MRG as an example of how to achieve all three. 

Check out the post at http://press.redhat.com/2009/06/18/cloud-utility-grid-and-other-mixed-metaphors/.

MRG at the HP Technology Forum 2009

I'm at the HP Technology Forum and Expo 2009 in Las Vegas right now.  On Thursday morning, I'll be speaking on Realtime Performance with Red Hat Enterprise MRG and HP Systems.  The session is first thing after breakfast, so it's early--but it will be worth it!  Also, we are demonstrating MRG Messaging and Realtime at the Red Hat Booth in the Expo center.  So, stop by to see MRG in action (and also to pick up a free red hat).

Simultaneously Charging the Novatel MiFi 2200 via USB and using Wifi, and Other MiFi Thoughts

Updated 7/27/2009

I recently upgraded my wireless USB modem from a Sprint Novatel Ovation U727 to a Sprint Novatel MiFi 2200.  The MiFi 2200 is a great, tiny device that integrates a 3G modem with a wireless router so that you can connect multiple wifi-enabled devices to your 3G modem.  There are all sorts of reviews of the MiFi 2200 on the Web already, so I won't add an in-depth review.  I will say, though, that:

• The Sprint version of the MiFi 2200 doesn't come with an included USB Micro data cable, so you'll need to get one if you want to tether or charge from your computer.  On the other hand, unlike the Verizon version which does come with a cable, the Sprint version doesn't require being connected to a Windows PC for activation, so it's easy to setup
• The Sprint version of the MiFi 2200 includes GPS, but it's pretty useless.  You have to go to a Web page on the router and go to linked searches from that specific interface for local resources

If you connect the MiFi 2200 to your computer via a USB Micro cable, it acts as a tethered modem.  The instructions I wrote for using a Novatel Ovation U727 modem on Fedora work for the MiFi 2200 as a tethered modem as well.

One of the limitations of the MiFi 2200 is that if you connect it to your computer with a USB Micro, it won't work as a wifi router.  This creates problems if you want to charge your MiFi 2200 via USB while also sharing your connection or using an operating system/laptop without adequate drivers for using the MiFi 2200 as a tethered modem.  I've worked around this limitation in two ways:

• Purchase a Belkin Mini Surge 3OUT.  This is a fanstastic, travel-sized power strip with 3 outlets and 2 USB jacks.  You can use this to power your MiFi 2200 via USB and also share a power outlet with other devices, like your laptop.  The Belkin Mini Surge is great if you want to use a power outlet in public, but it's already full.  By plugging in the Mini Surge, you can share that power outlet with other people
  
• Purchase an iPhone USB Charging Adapter. 
  Even though this adapter says its for iPhones, what it really does is take a USB cable and strip out the data across it, leaving only power.  By plugging this adapter to a USB Micro cable, you can then attach your MiFi 2200 to your laptop's USB port to charge it but still have the MiFi 2200 function as a wireless router

Update 7/27/2009
One important thing to note is that the MiFi 2200 requires a lot of power to charge, and many off-the-shelf USB micro cables won't be able to send enough power to the MiFi 2200 to charge it from a USB port.  In fact, I've tried several different USB micro cables with my MiFi with varying degrees of successful charging.  So, if you buy an iPhone USB Charging Adapter or try using the Belkin Mini Surge but aren't able to charge your MiFi, the chances are that it's your USB Micro cable which is the problem.

I've recently purchased a Tekkeon TekCharge MP1800, which is a portable battery back that can power and charge the MiFi 2200 as well as other power-hugry devices (like my iPhone). 

The TekCharge comes with a retractable cable that is able to charge the MiFi from a computer's USB port, and it also provides a compact battery for giving your other electronic gadgets additional runtime and charge.  Since purchasing the TekCharge, I just use the cable that came with it and no longer need the iPhone USB charger.

MRG/AMQP Keynote at STAC Performance Summit in NYC on June 4, 2009

I'll be at the STAC Performance Summit this Thursday, June 4, in New York City.  Carl Trieloff from my team will be delivering a keynote there and discussing new developments around AMQP and MRG as well as industry changes that we see coming as a result.  He'll also be highlighting some interesting performance data and work that we're doing with STAC.

The STAC Performance Summit is free to attend for end-user firms--you can find more information and register at http://www.stacresearch.com/node/4904.

How to Upgrade a Thinkpad T60 with a Full Disk Encryption (FDE) Hard Drive and Fedora

I recently upgraded my Lenovo Thinkpad T60 with a Full Disk Encryption (FDE) hard drive, a Seagate Momentus 7200 FDE.  The Momentus 7200 FDE provides encryption directly built into the hard drive: all data written to the hard drive is automatically encrypted with a key that is generated by and stored directly in the hard drive itself and cannot be retrieved.  FDE is probably the easiest and most transparent way to protect your data in case you happen to lose or have your laptop stolen.     

I boot multiple operating systems on my laptop, and I wanted a form of encryption that was secure but would also allow me to create symbolic links between different partitions and operating systems.  So, for example, both Fedora 10 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 support encrypted disks via software.  But, using a FDE hard drive allows me to ensure that the entire hard drive is encrypted, while still enabling me to access transparently the different operating system partitions from each other.

I also was running out of space on my existing hard drive and wanted a solution which would allow me to migrate all of my data from my old hard drive to my new hard drive easily.  Using FDE enables that without requiring re-installation of any software in the process.

For more information on FDE with Thinkpads, see Lenovo's FAQ.

Here's how I upgraded to FDE:

Preparation Steps

1. Backup your data in case anything goes wrong!
2. Purchase a Seagate Momentus 7200 FDE hard drive.  Make sure its capacity is at least as large as your existing hard drive
   
3. Purchase a 2.5" SATA hard disk enclosure with a USB 2.0 interface.  This should cost around $15-30 and will enable you to transfer information from your old hard drive to your new hard drive.  Amazon or your local compute store should sell a lot of these
   
4. Download Fedora and create a Fedora Live CD/USB.  You will boot into this to copy data from your old hard drive to your new hard drive

Installation and Migration Steps

1. Remove your old hard drive from your laptop.  If you have a Lenovo Thinkpad T60, you can follow Lenovo's instructions for how to do this
2. Install your new Seagate Momentus 7200 FDE hard drive into your computer
   
3. Install your old hard drive into the hard disk enclosure.  Don't plug your USB hard drive enclosure into your laptop yet
4. Insert your Fedora Live CD/USB into your laptop and boot into Fedora. 
   
5. Login into Fedora and open a terminal window.  In the terminal, type  "su -" to become the root user
6. Type "fdisk -l" and note how your new hard drive is mapped as a device.  For example, on my system, this is /dev/sda
7. Plug your the USB hard drive enclosure into your laptop.  Fedora should automatically recognize and mount your old hard drive
8. Type "fdisk -l." Both hard drives should now appear.  Note how your old hard drive is mapped as a device.  For example, on my system, it is /dev/sdb
9. Directly copy all the contents of your old hard drive to your new hard drive by executing: dd if=[your old hard drive device] of=[your new hard drive device].  For example, on my system, I did dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda.  This process will likely take several hours
10. Once your copying is done, reboot your laptop.  Make sure to remove your Fedora LiveCD/USB.  You can also unplug your USB hard drive enclosure
11. Verify that you can boot into your laptop and that your operating system(s) and data are intact on your new FDE hard drive

Final Security Steps
Now that your laptop has a FDE hard drive installed, you need to finish securing it by configuring your BIOS to require a password for accessing your hard drive:

1. Reboot your laptop and enter your BIOS settings menu.  On a T60, you can do this by hitting the Blue ThinkVantage button immediately and then entering your BIOS settings
2. Go to the security settings section and enable requiring a user password for accessing your hard drive.  Type in a new user password and make sure to remember it.  From now on, when you turn on your computer, you'll have to enter this password before you can boot into your hard drive or access data on it
3. Save your settings and reboot your laptop
4. Attach your USB hard drive enclosure and delete all your old, unsecure information from your old hard drive
   

Congratulations!  You now have a fully secure, encrypted hard drive with all your data and operating system(s) on it!

Optional: Using Your Extra Space
If your FDE hard drive is bigger than your old hard drive, you will have empty space that you can use.  You have a variety of options available to you, from creating a new partition to extending existing partitions with this space.  If you use Fedora or Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you can use the graphical tool, GParted, to help with this.

If you happen to use LVM, GParted doesn't work with LVM yet.  In that case, you can read the Red Hat Magazine article, Tips and tricks: What is the procedure to resize an LVM2 logical volume and the ext2 or ext3 filesystem?, for how to increase the size of an LVM partition.  Note that the end of the article discusses using the command, ext2online.  That command has since been replaced by resize2fs.

Corporate, Customer, and Academic Open Source Communities for Next Generation Software

I submitted a paper for the NSF's Cyberinfrastructure Software Sustainability & Reusability Workshop.  I discuss some of the innovative open source models we've used to develop Red Hat Enterprise MRG:

The NSF is looking both at models of how to build sustainable cyberinfrastructure software as well as specific software that will benefit its goals like providing communities with access to a “world class high performance computing (HPC) environment.” Red Hat Enterprise MRG, a high performance distributed computing platform which integrates Messaging, Realtime, and Grid capabilities, provides both an open source model of how academic researchers, customers, and corporations can collaborate as well as powerful software infrastructure which can help the NSF meet its next-generation cyberinfrastructure goals.

For example, I discuss the partnership we have with the University of Wisconsin around Condor for Grid scheduling:

This partnership between UW and Red Hat is adding many innovative capabilities to Condor and also expanding significantly Condor's reach from research environments to enterprises. For example, Red Hat has focused on adding many capabilities which enterprises require for deployment but which are not paramount for academia. These enhancements range from new graphical management tools to enterprise maintainability to concurrency limits on scarce resources like software licenses. Furthermore, Red Hat has also focused on advancing Condor towards utility and cloud models of computing by adding capabilities like libvirt virtualization support and Amazon EC2 integration. Many enterprises are now looking at MRG and Condor for building private clouds and moving to cloud computing.

The paper also discusses how we're feeding back developments from the enterprise into academia, how we've collaborated with customers and users around AMQP and messaging, how the technologies in MRG can help the NSF meet its software goals around sustainable HPC, and so on.

You can see the submission at the NSF's site for papers.

You can also directly download a pdf of the paper from the NSF's site: Corporate, Customer, and Academic Open Source Communities for Next Generation Software.

Software is Low Latency's Weakest Link...Unless You're Running Red Hat Enterprise MRG

There's an article in today's Wall St and Technology, Software is Low Latency's Weakest Link.  The article states:

The weakest link in the low-latency value chain is older software or poorly written code, not market data feeds, lack of ultra-fast processors or older networks, according to experts at Wall Street & Technology's Accelerating Wall Street 2009 conference.

Furthermore,

"Within the applications, we see the greatest opportunity to improve latency," said Rob Wallos, global head of market data architecture at Citi during the session The Complete Low Latency Value Chain. "Hardware can give you a generic 20 percent improvement in performance, but there is only so far you can go with hardware. "

This is certainly true in general.  We have found that even moving up to exotic hardware like infiniband only provides incremental gains in performance unless you optimize your application to take advantage of that hardware.  That's why we've been working with hardware manufacturers and optimizing Red Hat Enterprise MRG for the latest hardware as well as for Linux.


For example, MRG includes RDMA drivers to achieve extremely low latency on infiniband.  Compare the results of MRG Messaging running on infiniband with standard TCP versus with our RDMA drivers:

This chart illustrates latency using 1K messages at a sustained throughput of 50,000 messages/second using MRG Messaging.  This is for fully reliable application-level latency between three peers: a producer is sending a message through a broker to a client, and that message is acknowledged back.  So, there are four network hops in this case.  As you can see with standard TCP (the red line), the latency is nothing ground-breaking at around 1 millsecond, even though we're using infiniband.  In other words, moving the application to infiniband doesn't automatically improve latency significantly.

With our RDMA drivers , however, MRG can achieve latencies an order of magnitude better--about 70 microseconds on this same particular hardware.  And, remember, this is for 1K message sizes and 4 network hops!  So, yes, it is true that in general, low latency bottlenecks are in software.  However, we have been developing MRG to take full advantage of modern hardware and also Linux, so we've pushed the bottlenecks back to the hardware domain in many cases.

I should also note that our next release of MRG will include a cross-memory driver for co-locating our messaging broker with an application client.  This would remove one of the network links for latency and should allow us to halve our latency performance.

QCon Presentation Slides For Download

I presented Next-Generation AMQP Messaging Performance, Architectures, and Ecosystems with Red Hat Enterprise MRG last week at QCon London, along with Carl Trieloff.  The talk included a detailed use case of work we've been doing with customers to build financial trading systems and stock exchanges with MRG.  Messaging deployments don't get any higher end than this, so it's an interesting study. 

In particular, we've added capabilities in MRG like LVQ, Ring Queue, and TTL so that companies can build market caches or provide updated streaming quotes directly from the messaging broker rather than build these capabilities themselves.  We've also done a lot of work to get some pretty impressive performance (e.g. fully reliable latency across three peers in around 60 microseconds).  And, of course, we support capabilities like active/active clustering for high availability and federation for disaster recovery.

Beyond the case study, we also talked about the new ecosystems that are forming around AMQP and MRG as well as new types of messaging-oriented applications people are building now.

You can download our slides from the talk here.

QCon London

I'll be at QCon London next week.  Red Hat is sponsoring a booth, and we'll be giving two talks:

• AMQP in Action
• Next-Generation AMQP Messaging Performance, Architectures, and Ecosystems with Red Hat Enterprise MRG

We've got a good customer case study and some pretty interesting features, use cases, and performance data that we'll be presenting around messaging.  Come to our talks and stop by our booth if you're attending the show.

QPid is a Top-Level Apache Project

The Apache Software Foundation announced today that it has elevated QPid to a top-level project, based on the accomplishments it has made in developing a community and software.  We did the initial submission of QPid to Apache, so it's gratifying to see that it has come such a long way now and has developed such a large community and following--including some surprising members.

"On the heels of its recent graduation, Qpid has also reached the completion of the major Qpid M4 release. We're thrilled to have our project's growth and maturity recognized by the Apache Software Foundation," said Carl Trieloff, Chair of the Apache Qpid Project Management Committee (PMC) and Senior Consulting Software Engineer at Red Hat. "With the promotion to an Apache Top-Level Project, Qpid is recognized for outstanding development based on our vibrant, rapidly expanding community, infrastructure, and for collaborative development."

John O'Hara, Chairman of the AMQP Working Group and Executive Director at JPMorgan said, "I am delighted that the Apache Software Foundation has graduated the Qpid project. AMQP is an open infrastructure for business messaging over the Internet. Apache Qpid developers have been active participants in the AMQP Working Group working in partnership with other AMQP solution developers and end-users. The ASF's provision of Qpid as its AMQP implementation adds to the range of AMQP solutions businesses can choose from to improve their efficiency." 

Read more in the full press release from Apache.

Check out QPid's new home: http://qpid.apache.org

Introduction to Realtime Linux Slides From SCALE 7x

I presented Introduction to Realtime Linux at SCALE 7x this past weekend.  The event was great, and our Red Hat and Fedora booths both received a lot of traffic--we ran out of almost all of our give-aways the first morning!

You can download the slides I presented here.

Upcoming Events: JBoss Virtual Experience and SCALE 2009

I'll be at a pair of events in the next couple weeks: the JBoss Virtual Experience and the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) 2009. 

At the JBoss Virtual Experience, I'll be manning a virtual booth to talk about Red Hat Enterprise MRG and Cloud Computing.  MRG Grid's support for virtualization and also integration with Amazon EC2 makes it a powerful tool for companies that either want to leverage the cloud or build their own cloud.  If you're attending the JBoss Virtual Experience, stop by the booth!

At SCALE, I'll be giving a talk, Introduction to Realtime Linux.    If you've wondered about Realtime Linux's benefits, performance characetristics, state, or just what it is, this will be a useful session to attend.  You can read about the rest of Red Hat and Fedora's presence at SCALE as well.

Red Hat Enterprise MRG 1.1 is Released

I'm pleased to announce that we released Red Hat Enterprise MRG 1.1 today.  This is a significant release that adds many new capabilities and performance enhancements.  It also introduces formal support around
the Grid component and entire MRG platform for the first time (Grid was Technology Preview in v1.0).  Some of the highlights of MRG 1.1 include:

• Messaging
• Native infiniband and RDMA driver for dramatically better
  latency
• Active/Active Clustering
• Enhanced security
• Queue semantics like Last Value Queue and Ring Queue
• Native .NET client
• Improved management tools
• Increased performance
• Realtime
• Improved performance, especially on boxes with higher CPU-counts
• Improved performance tools. For example, Tuna now has the ability to write tunings to an init script once you've found an optimal tuning for your system
• Grid
• New GUI management tools
• Low latency scheduling via MRG's messaging bus
  
• Amazon EC2 support for adding capacity on-the-fly in the cloud
• Concurrency limits on any scarce resource like software licenses or database handles
• Dynamic provisioning, which enables you to mark slots as partitionable and sub-divide them dynamically so that more than one job can occupy a slot at once

You can find out more about MRG at http://redhat.com/mrg.  Also, you can read the press announcement for MRG 1.1 at http://www.press.redhat.com/2009/02/04/red-hat-debuts-enterprise-mrg-11/.