Red Hat has announced updates to its messaging, realtime and grid platform, Red Hat Enterprise MRG, with the general availability of its 2.2 release. Among many updates across all three components, highlighted enhancements include greater security with client authentication for management tools, better manageability through integration with LDAP and more boot options by allowing the realtime kernel to act as a diskless client.

Red Hat Enterprise MRG is a next-generation IT infrastructure incorporating messaging, realtime and grid functionality that offers increased performance, reliability, interoperability and faster computing for enterprise customers. In June 2011, Red Hat announced the release of Red Hat Enterprise MRG 2.0, which featured advances in performance, scalability and management. The 2.0 update added support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 and also extended the cloud readiness of the product. Enterprise MRG 2.0 was followed by the 2.1 platform update in January 2012.

With its 2.2 release, Red Hat Enterprise MRG gains even further cloud readiness, with the addition of support for Apache Deltacloud, an open source project originally initiated by Red Hat that is now hosted by the Apache Software Foundation. Deltacloud’s fundamental goal is to abstract differences across clouds using a variety of techniques that provide consistency while making it possible to leverage functionality present within different clouds to the maximum degree possible – with support for Deltacloud in Enterprise MRG 2.2, the platform gains additional flexibility to enable easy deployment of open hybrid clouds in concert with the full portfolio of Red Hat Cloud solutions.

Highlights of today’s 2.2 release include:

Red Hat Enterprise MRG Grid

• Apache Deltacloud support to the Condor Grid Universe: jobs can now be submitted to Condor to run against the Deltacloud API. In this scenario, Red Hat Enterprise MRG Grid implementations can use the open API from Deltacloud to request additional virtual instances from any service provider that implements Deltacloud service. Refer to Deltacloud for a full list of cloud service providers that provide implementations.
• Enhancements to the Enterprise MRG Management console called Cumin: to allow the use of LDAP servers for authentication.
• A new Condor Resource Agent: enabling more than one scheduler daemon instance to be run on a cluster.
• Support of named groups for Condor’s Concurrency Limits: without invoking frequent Negotiator reconfigurations.
• Ability to configure Red Hat High Availability: to run and manage multiple HA schedulers on a cluster via the configuration tool called Wallaby.

Red Hat Enterprise MRG Realtime

• Introduces the High Performance Networking (HPN) capability: setting the stage for delivering Remote Direct Memory Access over Converged Ethernet (RocE), a critical capability for shortening the network data path by enabling remote access to memory with less CPU overhead. This bypass will enable users of Enterprise MRG Realtime to take advantage of deterministic kernel and low network latency at the same time, paving the way for higher speed data processing, distributed computation and robust scalability without additional costs.
• New kernel update to 3.2: will enable upstream product innovation to be available for lead users of Enterprise MRG Realtime.
• The Enterprise MRG Realtime kernel is now able to work as a diskless client: enabling booting from PXE over a network link and can run from either a ramdisk root or an NFS root or a combination thereof.
• Better access to Enterprise MRG release string: which indicates the major, minor and errata releases of the Enterprise MRG Realtime kernel.

Red Hat Enterprise MRG Messaging

• Improved Java performance
• SSL support with client authentication (using PEM certificates) to management tools in the qpid-tools for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
• A new Apache qpid broker option that addresses a denial of service security concern.

Red Hat Enterprise MRG 2.2, including each Messaging, Realtime and Grid component, is generally available today. Please refer to the release notes for a comprehensive list of all new features and bug fixes.

Image: existentist, via Flickr (CC)

About Francis Rey Balolong

A coffee junkie who spends most of his time writing about the latest news on social media and mobile technology. I would definitely consider myself a nerd (in the coolest most hipster way possible). That being said, I love technology, music, writing, and all things mobile. Follow me: Google+ Twitter

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