Welcome Makara!

Today, we announced that Red Hat has acquired Makara.  This acquisition is going to accelerate significantly Red Hat's offerings around Platform as a Service.  Makara includes many capabilities like auto-scaling, fantastic monitoring, and self-service portals for Java and LAMP applications in the cloud.

Combined with Red Hat's Cloud Foundations offerings as well as JBoss and Red Hat middleware platforms, we will be able to deliver the leading PaaS offering with:

• Support for your choice of programming model and language, from full JEE to Spring to Ruby to LAMP and not just a proprietary or restricted API.  This means you can run the broadest set of applications with the benefits of PaaS--including existing applications
• Support for your choice of cloud--whether private or hybrid or public

Red Hat PaaS With Your Choice of Programming Model and Your Choice of Cloud

If you'd like to learn more about Makara's capabilities, you can try them out for free online.

Welcome aboard, Makara, and I look forward to working together!

MRG 1.3 is Released

I'm pleased to announce the release of Red Hat Enterprise MRG 1.3.  MRG 1.3 is a significant update that features many new enhancements, including:

Messaging

MRG 1.3 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.


Realtime
With MRG 1.3, Realtime will move to a 2.6.33-based kernel, and will include 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, which will incorporate a MRG Realtime hardware certification program that is expected to be introduced shortly for 1.3.


Grid
MRG Grid is a key component of Red Hat's Cloud Foundations and also for HPC markets.  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, centralize configuration and management and utilize cloud spill-over capabilities.


For additional information on MRG 1.3, see the official release announcement.

Red Hat Cloud Updates

Red Hat made a number of cloud announcements today:

• Red Hat Cloud Foundations Centers on Portability and Interoperability, Garners Broad Industry Support
• DreamWorks Animation to Utilize Red Hat Cloud Foundations for Future Film Releases
• Red Hat Outlines Comprehensive Platform-as-a-Service Cloud Strategy
• Deltacloud Update & Momentum
• Red Hat Makes Step Toward Common Cloud API in Partnership with DMTF
• APIwanted.org: We Want the Right Cloud APIs

Additionally, I participated in a webcast where we outlined details around these announcements and our strategy.  You can view a replay of the webcast if you missed it live.

Finally, if you'd like additional information on Red Hat's cloud solutions, check out Cloud Foundations and information on the Portable Cloud.  

Red Hat Enterprise MRG and Mellanox ConnectX-2 10GigE NICs Achieve New Performance Levels for Messaging, Realtime and Grid Applications

Red Hat and Mellanox announced today results from work that we've been doing together to enable RDMA over Ethernet with Red Hat Enterprise MRG Messaging on top of Mellanox's ConnectX-2 cards:

Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, and Mellanox® Technologies, Ltd. (NASDAQ: MLNX; TASE: MLNX), a leading supplier of high-performance, end-to-end connectivity solutions for data center servers and storage systems, today announced that Red Hat Enterprise MRG with the open Advanced Messaging Queuing Protocol (AMQP) standard and Red Hat Enterprise Linux achieved Ethernet-based data center fabric performance, delivering a 42 percent reduction in latency using Mellanox ConnectX-2 with RDMA over Ethernet (RoE), with throughputs up to 1.2 million acknowledged messages per second, with latencies in the 10 microseconds range in tests conducted by Red Hat.

We'll also be presenting details of these results at the Red Hat Summit this week in the sessions:

• Red Hat Enterprise MRG Messaging Performance Seminar
• Red Hat Enterprise MRG Update & Roadmap

Additionally, Mellanox will be highlighting these results this week at their booth at SIFMA.

Red Hat Summit 2010 This Week

The Red Hat Summit is taking place this week in my hometown of Boston.  The conference kicks off tomorrow, and I'll be presenting three sessions there:

• Cloud with Red Hat: What, Where, and How
• Red Hat Enterprise MRG Update & Roadmap
• Next-Generation Red Hat Management Tools for the Datacenter & Cloud

I'll also be meeting customers and partners at our Systems Management VIP lounge and other events.  I'm looking forward to seeing some of you at the Summit this week!

Condor Week 2010 Presentations

This week is Condor Week, and this is always a big event for the Condor project, from which we build MRG Grid.  Red Hat has a strong partnership with the University of Wisconsin, and we are happy to participate in this year's event with two presentations today.

In case you're not able to attend the sessions in person, here are links to them:

• Red Hat MRG by Matthew Farrellee
• Improving Condor Configuration Management with  Wallaby by Will Benton and Rob Rati

New IBM Cloud Built on Red Hat

Today, IBM is introducing their new enterprise cloud, and they are building that cloud on top of Red Hat offerings, including Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.  This is yet another example of the growing number of public clouds built on and certified with Red Hat (Amazon EC2 was the pioneer in our Certified Cloud provider program).

Here's a quote from the press release:

Our decade-long partnership with Red Hat has always been focused on customer value and innovation.  Today, we are extending this partnership to include cloud computing – broadening our reach and answering the strong customer demand for cloud computing services," said Maria Azua, vice president of Cloud Computing Enablement at IBM.  "Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is an optimal hypervisor technology for the infrastructure offerings on the IBM cloud."

Virtualization is one of the foundational technologies of cloud computing, so it's great to see that when it came to building its own cloud, IBM chose Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as the optimal solution amongst all the available possibilities in the market.

Deutsche Börse Customer Case Study for MRG

Today, Red Hat published an announcement and a case study on how Deutsche Börse, the German Stock Exchange, is using Red Hat Enterprise MRG for their new risk management system as well as their upcoming trading platform:

"We decided to implement Red Hat Enterprise MRG Messaging with AMQP because we wanted to make it as easy as possible for our client banks to access the relevant risk data. Using the open standard AMQP helps us to avoid complex and time-consuming development of customized adaptors," said Gerhard Lessmann, member of the executive board at Deutsche Börse Systems.

Furthermore,

“In addition to the risk management system, we are in the process of building an entirely new trading platform for Deutsche Börse Group, based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise MRG,” said Gerhard Lessmann, DBS. “In this context it was a logical decision to work with Red Hat also for our risk management project. We always work to keep our IT operations focused on their core tasks and to minimise support workload on the team. Having Red Hat support readily available as a single point of contact is an excellent way to achieve just that.”

As a leading exchange, Deutsche Börse, has extremely high requirements for their software infrastructure.  So, we're glad to have such a positive endorsement from them.  We're also happy to be working with Deutsche Börse on the AMQP specification itself as part of the AMQP working group.

You can read the full case study here.

Open Source Energy Savings with Condor

Forbes has an article today on Open Source Energy Savings using Condor.  In addition to highlighting how Condor can help with saving energy in a data center, the article features Red Hat  and our work around Condor with Red Hat Enterprise MRG a couple times:

Two years ago Red Hat  worked out a partnership deal with the university to make Condor open source using the Apache Foundation license.

and

Paul Cormier, president of products and technologies at Red Hat, is working on combining a large collection of open source projects into a cloud provisioning and management suite. "The move to cloud computing as the next generation architecture has only been possible by integrating many of these open source projects, such as Condor," says Cormier. "It is only natural that the software for creating and managing these virtual environments come from the world of open source as well."

The energy savings policies you can implement with Condor are nice, but we see these features as truly beneficial for most enterprises as part of a cloud solution.  For example, we have added virtualization support to Condor, which can further improve power management in a cloud deployment.  Let's say you had two servers each running at 50% capacity with one virtual machine job on each of them.  You could have a Condor job which moved one of the virtual machine jobs to the other server, consolidating all work on one machine.   Then, you could have a Condor job turn off the other machine.