Red Hat Enterprise MRG FAQ

Red Hat Enterprise MRG is a high performance distributed computing platform. Red Hat Enterprise MRG integrates technologies like MRG Messaging, MRG Realtime, and MRG Grid to deliver new levels of performance, and provide reliability, predictable latency, and significantly better hardware utilization and peak computing power.

Red Hat Enterprise MRG establishes a new category of products to provide a fundamentally better way to deploy IT infrastructure. Previously, enterprises had to purchase specialized products for reliable messaging, fast messaging, large file messaging, high performance computing, high throughput computing, and other distributed computing tasks; deploy these specialized products in architectural silos; and manage them separately. Red Hat Enterprise MRG provides a more flexible, powerful, and easy-to-mange solution: With one platform, enterprises can leverage their entire IT infrastructure, from cycle-scavenging from desktop workstations, to local grids, to remote grids, to rented cloud infrastructures for a full spectrum of the most demanding distributed computing tasks. And, they can manage, monitor, and deploy all of these with one set of management tools.

Red Hat Enterprise MRG offers an integrated set of powerful distributed computing capabilities that span messaging, low-latency computing, high throughput computing, and high performance computing. Red Hat Enterprise MRG offers unprecedented levels of performance with capabilities like durable messaging throughputs orders of magnitude higher than other solutions, highly deterministic and low latency, and grid pools of tens of thousands of nodes. Additionally, Red Hat Enterprise MRG provides the flexibility to execute tasks with resources ranging from cycle-scavenging from desktop workstations, to local grids, to remote grids, to rented cloud infrastructures. And, Red Hat Enterprise MRG provides compatibility with a large range of operating systems, languages, and platforms while offering unified management tools.

For additional information, see Red Hat Enterprise MRG Overview and Red Hat Enterprise MRG Benefits.

Red Hat Enterprise MRG aims to provide a fundamentally new and better way to deploy IT infrastructure - not just provide point capabilities. Although there are various products that have some of the capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise MRG (reliable messaging products, grid scheduling products, fast messaging products, etc), there are none that provide the integrated capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise MRG. For example, Red Hat is deeply integrating the AMQP messaging and grid capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise MRG. This will enable capabilities like having a standardized messaging API from any platform and language to schedule tasks onto a grid that spans from local and idle workstations to remote clouds. Furthermore, MRG's grid capabilities will be able to leverage MRG's large messaging capabilities to transport entire virtual machines efficiently so that machines can execute any task regardless of their host environments. Although Red Hat Enterprise MRG is highly competitive from a performance and feature standpoint with specialized point products, it also provides advanced capabilities and unified management that only comes from integrating these technologies.

Red Hat's Linux Automation strategy enables enterprises to run any application, anywhere, at any time. Red Hat Enterprise MRG extends this capability to large scales and with high performance by offering a fundamentally better way to deploy IT infrastructure, running any task, at any scale, with any resource. Whereas Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides the flexibility to run a certified application in environments ranging from a local server to a virtualized environment to a cloud, Red Hat Enterprise MRG provides the ability to provide significant computational power, deterministic low latency, and high performance to applications and workloads, leveraging resources like bare-metal servers, virtualized environments, idle workstations, and remote clouds.

Yes, Red Hat will support customers that have specialized needs around specific technologies in MRG.

Red Hat Enterprise MRG is highly optimized to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 and later. However, Red Hat Enterprise MRG will also run on other platforms, including Windows and Solaris, without the full performance benefits from running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For example, Red Hat Enterprise MRG's realtime kernel technology only runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Other platforms will not have the deterministic low latency that MRG provides on Enterprise Linux. As another example, Red Hat Enterprise MRG includes a high performance journal that is tightly coupled to Red Hat Enterprise Linux's native IO system. This high performance journal enables Red Hat Enterprise MRG to deliver incredibly high durable messaging rates on Red Hat Enterprise Linux as it takes advantage of key capabilities found only in Linux.

Red Hat Enterprise MRG also can serve as a foundation for Red Hat's JBoss platforms. Red Hat and IBM have collaborated on developing and certifying the industry-leading WebSphere RT realtime JVM exclusively on Red Hat Enterprise MRG. This realtime JVM provides capabilities like guaranteed sub-millisecond garbage collection times and can run JBoss platforms deterministically and reliably. Additionally, Red Hat Enterprise MRG will provide a high-end messaging foundation for upcoming SOA offerings from JBoss.

No, Red Hat Enterprise MRG will run on a variety of platforms in addition to Linux, including Windows and Solaris. Red Hat Enterprise MRG provides additional capabilities and performance on Linux since Red Hat is able to engineer both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise MRG to provide synergistic capabilities. For example, MRG's realtime kernel capabilities only run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

For a full list of supported platforms, see Red Hat Enterprise MRG Supported Hardware and Platforms.

MRG is pronounced "Merge."