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/.

STAC Benchmark Results for Red Hat Enterprise MRG Realtime

STAC Research performs a number of third-party benchmarks for the financial community.  Recently, they performed a benchmark of RMDS on top of a system running Red Hat Enterprise MRG Realtime.  Our realtime offering enhances Red Hat Enterprise Linux with deterministic latency and performance for critical applications like RMDS.

The results of this test included:

- Lowest mean latency reported to date with RMDS
Less than 1ms mean latency at up to 700,000 updates per second

- Standard deviation of latency remained below 0.5 ms through 600,000 updates per second
- In the "Producer 50/50" fanout test of a multiplexed P2PS, total output was:
7.07M updates per second with jumbo frames (MTU = 9000 bytes)
5.56M updates per second with standard frames (MTU = 1500 bytes)

You can see the entire summary and report here.

QPid Welcomes a New Member

QPid is the upstream open source project led by Apache that Red Hat participates heavily in to help develop Red Hat Enterprise MRG and to provide AMQP in Fedora.  The initial QPid proposal was submitted by a Red Hat engineer to Apache, and the QPid community has grown significantly since then to include a large set of diverse participants.

Building on the recent announcement that it has joined the AMQP working group, Microsoft has now announced that it will be joining and contributing to the open source QPid project at Apache to build its AMQP implementation.  This is also great news for the open source world and a bold new step for Microsoft. 

As we previously highlighted, Microsoft adopting the open AMQP standard will enable a new wave of innovation and interoperability—especially between Linux and Windows.  Now that Microsoft will be working on development of AMQP software in open source, we expect this  to further enhance the interoperability between Linux and Windows—they will not only speak the same protocol but share the same open source code base for that communication, offering an opportunity for Microsoft to build its relationship with the open source community.

The  Advantages of Open Source
With Qpid’s new addition, there are several highlights to point out:

• Open source provides a way for active contributors and community members to accelerate significantly the timeline in which vendors like Microsoft can provide an AMQP implementation.  By joining an established open source project, these such vendors are able to reap the benefits of all the engineering work that many of the leading messaging developers in the world have already done.  Now, these developers in the QPid project will also benefit from Microsoft's contributions.
• There are strategic benefits in joining an open source community.  QPid is distributed under an Apache license.  So, a vendor could easily just take the QPid code base, fork it for internal use, and then proceed to build its own, proprietary AMQP implementation.  By joining the QPid project, Microsoft will not have total control over the direction of the code base beneath its products, and its engineers will have to earn their commit rights and status the same way that other QPid committers have.  Still, as companies like Red Hat have shown, building products collaboratively in the open source community leads to more rapid innovation and the opportunity to create better software.
• There is value in the QPid community and implementation.  There are multiple open source projects that are implementing AMQP (this is great for making AMQP pervasive).  However, that Microsoft is joining QPid indicates that it sees significant value and leadership in QPid.  Indeed, QPid is the first open source project to achieve compliance with the latest version of AMQP (0-10).  QPid also has support for a wide variety of platforms, including .NET.  Indeed, Red Hat engineers have developed a native WCF-compliant .NET client for QPid.  Others in the community have contributed an Excel plugin for QPid and are driving the advancement of the QPid broker on Windows.
  

Red Hat welcomes new members to the QPid open source community to help
expand its technology and continue to create long-term benefits for the project, community and its members.  For more information, see here.

* Note: I have also published this blog at http://press.redhat.com.  You can see other MRG blog entries there at http://www.press.redhat.com/category/red-hat-enterprise-mrg/