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.

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.