RALEIGH, N.C., Dec. 4 -- Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced Red Hat Enterprise MRG (Messaging, Real-Time, Grid), offering new capabilities for deployment on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and third-party operating platforms that further strengthen Red Hat's position as the strategic supplier for critical enterprise applications in highly demanding environments, such as financial services and government agencies. Red Hat Enterprise MRG is a revolutionary distributed computing platform that provides exceptional performance through reliable enterprise messaging, real-time capabilities and advanced grid and high-throughput computing technologies.

Red Hat Enterprise MRG builds on Red Hat's Linux Automation strategy, announced last month, which focuses on enabling any application to run anywhere, at any time. This gives customers genuine competitive advantage: the ability to run transactions and applications faster, while enabling new levels of quality-of-service, reliability, interoperability, standards support and system utilization. Red Hat Enterprise MRG supports a full spectrum of distributed task requirements, including:

• High-speed, reliable or large-file messaging.

• Parallel and desktop cycle-stealing scheduling.

• High-throughput computing (HTC).

• Real-time, predictable transaction latency.

• Distributed workload management.

"As a working group member of AMQP, Cisco has been collaborating with Red Hat for over 18 months on low-latency optimization of AMQP and MRG Messaging open middleware protocols across InfiniBand compute fabrics," said Bill Erdman, marketing director for the Data Center Technology Group at Cisco. "Through this collaboration with Red Hat we are insuring that MRG is fully interoperable and offers enhanced services, including quality of service, manageability and increased delivery reliability."

The messaging and grid capabilities are deployable in multiple environments, and are specifically optimized for use with the real-time capabilities that are included for use in Red Hat Enterprise Linux configurations. This proven leadership enables Red Hat to offer customers unparalleled expertise in the development, deployment and support of real-time systems.

"Bringing real-time capabilities to mainstream Linux has been a joint effort of the IBM Linux Technology Center, Red Hat and the Linux community," said Keith Bright, program director of the Linux Technology Center at IBM Corp. "The real-time Linux solution was first developed in response to a request of IBM by Raytheon and the United States Navy for the DDG 1000 Zumwalt Class Destroyer project on IBM Blade Center technology. The resulting technology is a fine example of combining commercial opportunities and open source technology and the open source community. It is the participation of companies like Red Hat and IBM along with open source community assistance and acceptance, that adds value for everyone in the marketplace. Building a solution in this manner (though special at first) provides for a better supported solution and makes it available to everyone. It has been a great collaboration effort."

Red Hat Enterprise MRG offers revolutionary new capabilities:

• Scheduling: Red Hat Enterprise MRG enables enterprises to schedule large computing tasks across local grids, remote grids, "cloud" capacity from Amazon EC2 and idle desktop workstations.

• Messaging: Red Hat Enterprise MRG provides durable messaging technologies that can deliver 100-fold higher throughput than other solutions. Additionally, in collaboration with its counterparts in the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) Working Group, Red Hat is working to create, for the first time, an open, interoperable standard for high-performance, reliable messaging.

• Low transaction latency: Red Hat Enterprise MRG real-time capabilities enable applications to run with optimized and deterministic latency -- ensuring that transactions run predictably under all workloads. With Enterprise MRG real-time capabilities, CIOs can match compute capacity to business demands while meeting quality-of-service requirements.

• Distributed computing: Red Hat Enterprise MRG enables customers to leverage the full power of distributed computing with commercial-strength grid capabilities, based on the University of Wisconsin's highly respected Condor high-throughput computing project. These capabilities provide customers with a practical means of using their total compute capacity with maximum efficiency and flexibility, while improving the speed and availability of any application. Additionally, Red Hat and the University of Wisconsin have signed a strategic agreement to make Condor's source code available under an OSI-approved license and jointly fund ongoing co-development at the University of Wisconsin.

"The University of Wisconsin is pleased to work with Red Hat around the Condor project," said Terry Millar, associate dean for physical sciences at the University of Wisconsin Graduate School. "Red Hat and our University share a joint vision of promoting open source and collaboration. By working together on this project, we will be able to add enhanced enterprise stability and functionality to Condor and high-throughput computing capabilities to Linux."

"Enterprise MRG offers fundamentally new ways to deploy IT infrastructure," said Brian Stevens, CTO and vice president of engineering at Red Hat. "Enterprise MRG is a dramatic example of the open source model offering significant advantages over proprietary technologies. We have collaborated to provide an open messaging standard for all customers and vendors to use, coupled with an incredibly powerful application deployment infrastructure and cutting-edge real-time capabilities."

Messaging and grid technologies can be deployed across a variety of platforms such as Java, Solaris and .NET environments. Fully optimized performance is provided when they are deployed in combination with the real-time capabilities included in Red Hat Enterprise MRG running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Final product availability for Red Hat Enterprise MRG is scheduled for early 2008. For more information, or to register for the Red Hat Enterprise MRG Beta, visit www.redhat.com/mrg.

About AMQP

The AMQP specification is collectively developed by the AMQP Working Group (www.amqp.org) which is comprised of Cisco Systems, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Börse Systems, Envoy Technologies Inc., Goldman Sachs, IONA Technologies PLC, iMatix Corp., JPMorgan Chase Bank Inc. N.A, Novell, Rabbit Technologies Ltd., Red Hat Inc., TWIST Process Innovations Ltd. and 29West Inc.

About Red Hat Inc.

Red Hat, the world's leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, N.C., with over 50 satellite offices spanning the globe. CIOs have ranked Red Hat first for value in Enterprise Software for four consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value study. Red Hat provides high-quality, low-cost technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and services-oriented architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: www.redhat.com.