The world’s largest and most diverse derivatives exchange, CME Group, deploys Red Hat solutions for its critical trading platforms to produce over a quadrillion dollars in contract volume per year, according to CME Group. Its migration from Sun Solaris to Red Hat Enterprise Linux in 2003 has helped CME Group increase performance, reliability, scalability and agility of its critical systems while simultaneously reducing IT costs.

At the Red Hat Summit 2009, held in Chicago from September 1-4, CME Group invited the Summit’s onsite press core to visit its trading floor. CME Group Associate Director Vinod Kutty and Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens discussed how the companies’ long-standing technology partnership has helped the exchange to meet technical and business demands to remain on the cutting-edge. Together, the companies aim to extend CME Group’s innovative open source strategy with an ongoing migration of its middleware platform from Oracle WebLogic to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

Watch the video, live from CME Group on September 3, 2009:

For more information about CME Group’s use of Red Hat solutions, read the full case study, or check out CME Group’s Red Hat Summit presentations.

There is no doubt that Oracle OpenWorld this year has drawn extra attention with the activity and speculation about the next steps in Oracle’s pending acquisition of Sun Microsystems. With the breadth of applications based upon Oracle’s premier database, Oracle OpenWorld has also set the scene for a number of announcements around industry-leading benchmarks from the technology leaders at the event, including Red Hat.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the operating system used to establish several new benchmarks announced this week that demonstrate the performance and scalability of current x86 systems. Getting the most from multi-core systems requires an operating system, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, that can manage large thread counts and I/O throughput to deliver real application performance.

IBM announced three new results running different benchmarks in Oracle Application Standard Benchmarks. The benchmarks, which were developed by Oracle, represent typical user workloads on the E-Business Suite ERP deployment. The different scenarios focus on different types of ERP transactions such as payroll processing, or order transactions. In each case the benchmark combines batch processing and transactional workloads in a single test. Some of these steps are CPU intensive, while others stress I/O access. Data sizes and the number of users is defined as small, medium or large to assist Oracle customers in sizing their deployment.

The results are measured in transactions per hour, or throughput. IBM’s results were over 143,000 lines per hour on the order-to-cash benchmark, an increase of almost 40 percent over previous results. For the Payroll benchmarks, hourly employee throughput was measured at 207,612 on the medium database model and 364,786 on the large benchmark. The tests were performed using a single IBM System x3550 M2 with dual 4-core Intel Xeon 5500 processors on which the application server and the database instance were both deployed. The tests were run on 10 threads, oversubscribing the eight cores on the server.

The purpose of these benchmarks is to guide an Oracle customer in understanding their workload. With its broad hardware and software support, Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the operating system chosen to test these application workloads.

Also announced at Oracle OpenWorld by Oracle is a new SpecJappServer2004 result. Similar to Oracle’s application benchmarks, this industry-standard benchmark combines different activities to emulate data flow through an enterprise. Unlike Oracle Application Standards, the SpecJappServer2004 has a single size of data and results are reported in Java Operations per Second.

The tests were conducted using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 on HP DL785 with AMD 8439 processors. Deploying Oracle’s WebLogic server across 48 cores returned tremendous results. With a performance of 9,455.17 jopps/s, Oracle and HP set a new single node record, which was over 20 percent faster than the Sun Solaris on SPARC results published earlier this year.

As these benchmark results reinforce, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is an operating system leader with broad application support and the ability to contribute to record-setting performance on the workloads that our customers’ businesses rely upon.

For more information about Red Hat Enterprise Linux, visit here.

Today marks the release of the fourth update in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 family. As you would expect, the press release and our technical overview highlight what is new in this update. The advancements in virtualization technology, I/O performance and system tools are worth talking about and, at the risk of being redundant, we’ll certainly cover some of them here. However, we’re going to start with what is not new and why this release, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, fits into the way our customers manage their technology portfolio.

One item that is not new is the consistency of the ABI/API. As with all updates, the enhancements are incremental and non-disruptive to legacy hardware and all applications. Our process is designed to allow applications that ran on 5.3 to continue to run on 5.4 without modification. And, when it is time to release update 5.5, those same applications won’t be affected. This nexus of compatibility, consistency and support across a Red Hat Enterprise Linux major release contributes to a stable, long-lived platform with the potential to span multiple generations of system hardware for our customers. For ISVs, developers and production administrators, their application reliability is expected to increase as we consolidate the security alerts, fixes and enhancements to the underlying operating environment. This is one of the reasons why the number of applications developed and certified on Red Hat Enterprise Linux is expected to continue to grow.

Every customer receives this update without fee. A Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriber has access to all the current releases of our operating platform. For some who may still be running a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 platform, the new virtualization technology or enhanced filesystem support may be their compelling reason to upgrade now. This release will be immediately available via Red Hat Network to be accessed when our customers need it. Since we do not tie our relationship with our customers to a particular release, when to upgrade is within our customers’ control. That hasn’t changed with this update.

Our engineering partnership with the system hardware providers remains strong. Many of our updates include incremental updates to support the latest features, or to optimize the performance of the underlying hardware. This one is no different. For example, customers who deploy on the 5.4 release will be able to take advantage of the advances in 10Gb Ethernet network interfaces. Generic Receive Offload (GRO) balances the processing of packets between the specialized NIC and the operating system to maximize performance and scalability.

We remain committed to open source development and supporting standards. When Red Hat places a technology into commercial release, we expect it to be stable and supported across generations of the operating system and the hardware. We participate in standards bodies and advocate for long-term solutions, not quick fixes that will require future patching. With this release we have added commercial support for technologies such as FCoE (Fiber Channel over Ethernet) for storage environments and SR-IOV to improve virtual I/O performance and management. We also continue to enhance our management interfaces, such as OpenIPMI, OpenHPI and libvirt. These open interfaces aim to improve the portability and functionality of third-party and our own management tools.

Of course, we’ve also enhanced the Red Hat Enterprise Linux developer environment, system tools and core technology. For example, new versions of SystemTap and blktrace allow performance diagnosis of a running applications and the application interaction with key subsystems such as networking, memory and storage.

For those technologies that are becoming mature, but which we deem not quite ready for commercial support, we designate Technology Preview. Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscribers can test and evaluate future features. In this update, we included the next generation of developer features and tools including GCC 4.4 and a new malloc(). We’ve also included clustered, high-availability filesystem to support Microsoft Windows(TM) storage needs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Finally, we’ll highlight the announcement of what’s absolutely new. The inclusion of kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) virtualization technology in this release, alongside of Xen virtualization technology, makes Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 the foundation for the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio of solutions that we first announced back in February of this year. In many ways, the introduction of commercial support for KVM, the next generation of virtualization technology, highlights what does not change in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 family, which included virtualization from the start.

Because KVM is integrated into the Linux kernel, it takes full advantage of the operating environment. This includes hardware and application support. Hardware and software certified on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 should be transparently certified for virtual guests as well. System tools, including management, SELinux security and Red Hat Network all work in both physical, virtual, host and guest deployments.

Because this is an update in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 family, Xen and KVM can both be managed via the open standard libvirt. This provides customers with their choice of virtualization technology with a common management interface. In addition, support of Xen has not ceased – it will continue to be supported through the full lifecycle of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. The scalability of the Red Hat virtualization solution has been incremented to support 192 CPUs and 1GB hugepages.

With the close cooperation of our hardware partners and the industry standard bodies, KVM takes full advantage of the latest in chip hardware advances. Performance, scalability, security and stability are enhanced by the tight linkage to Intel VT and AMD-V hardware virtualization. By following the PCI-SIG’s SR-IOV specification and delivered on AMD and Intel chipsets, virtual device enables the efficient and secure sharing of physical devices in both KVM and Xen virtualization.

As we consider the exciting news of what is new in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, it is good to know that many of the most important attributes of Red Hat Enterprise Linux remain unchanged. Our commitment is to provide our customers with the tools, technology and confidence to embrace innovation and minimize disruption.

For more information about Red Hat Enterprise Linux, visit here.

The Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite team is pleased to announce the general availability of RHN Satellite and Proxy version 5.3 today. RHN Satellite is Red Hat’s on-premises systems management solution that provides software updates, configuration management, provisioning and monitoring for Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployments. RHN Satellite 5.3 includes some of the newest features that were born directly from issue tracker tickets submitted by customers, as well as contributions from the Spacewalk community. Thanks to all, today we’re able to provide the next version of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems management platform.

RHN Satellite 5.3 contains many exciting new features that are grouped around three key themes:

• Leveraging and including cutting-edge open source systems management projects such as Cobbler.
• Easier management of larger, complex environments.
• Expanded automation and virtualization capabilities.

Cutting-edge open source systems management projects: Satellite now includes Cobbler provisioning

With the incorporation of more mature open source Cobbler technology in the product’s underlying provisioning architecture, Red Hat provides increased flexibility and faster provisioning setups for Red Hat Network Satellite customers. Leveraging great functionally specific technologies like Cobbler offers customers powerful, feature-rich tools that now plug into a comprehensive common systems management framework, a framework that enhances the value of the subscription of any deployment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and is backed with the commercial support and commitment of Red Hat.

Improving the underlying provisioning architecture of Satellite is a major goal of the Satellite 5.3 release. Cobbler is a Linux installation server that seeks to provide rapid setup of network installation environments. Administrators can use Cobbler to store, manage and automate several aspects of system installation and provisioning, from package installation and channel subscription to DHCP and DNS configuration. We believe that it is fundamentally a better way to provision Linux systems that offers faster and easier setup and maintenance for provisioning infrastructure.

The major advantage of basing Satellite on Project Spacewalk is that the community can now fully participate in its development. Satellite is now more agile when addressing changing market needs and better able to flexibly incorporate new technologies, for example, Cobbler. Red Hat customers now have a direct ability to influence the direction and extension of the Satellite product.

Easier management of larger, complex environments

RHN Satellite includes a significant update to the Multiple Organizations feature, which allows administrators to view, create and manage multiple organizations across the Satellite.

Trust relationships between organizations are now supported, allowing Satellite Administrators to establish mutual connections between two or more organizations. Organizations within a trust can share their custom content channels with each other, provided that the Organization Administrator or Channel Administrator gives access to the custom channel in the channel sharing configuration. Organization Administrators can now migrate systems from one trusted organization to another. The system configuration history (such as entitlements, software and configuration channels and virtual guest associations) are preserved. The destination organization can then configure the system for their purposes.

The benefits from these improvements to the Multiple Organizations feature include:

• More efficient use of disk space due to less duplication, and
• Greater consistency because all shared content is the same (less risk of one organization having a different package set than the other which is particularly helpful with compliance initiative such as PCI and FISMA).

RHN Satellite now features Inter-Satellite Sync support, which allows Satellite Administrators to synchronize channel content from one master Satellite server to one or more slave Satellites, regardless of location. Some of the benefits of this include faster sharing of content between Satellite servers and fewer errors than if content is manually copied.

Expanded virtualization and automation capabilities

Satellite’s Application Programming Interface (API) has been expanded so that practically any command that can be accomplished via the web interface can now be done via the API. RHN Satellite includes virtual platform management capabilities that allow customers to create and entitle Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems on Xen and KVM Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems.

A major emphasis of this release was to complete the number of APIs so that customers can interact with Satellite outside of the web interface. While using the web interface meets the needs of the majority of customers, we do have customers that want to interact with Satellite via API. Generally these type of customers have large and complex environments, and Satellite is just one part of their systems management infrastructure. They want to call and execute certain actions within Satellite from other tools and scripts, without having to go into the web interface to manually execute these commands. With the 5.3 release of Satellite, many commands in Satellite that can be accomplished via the web interface can now be done via the API, including new calls for the multiple organizations feature, Cobbler installation server and system and errata search. Only the Monitoring module cannot be fully addressable via APIs.

Additionally, Satellite 5.3 enables customers to manage large deployments more easily and with comparable performance to smaller deployments.

With virtualization as a key requirement in many of today’s IT environments, Satellite offers one console that can update, provision and monitor both physical and virtual Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems. With virtual platform management capabilities that allow customers to create and entitle Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems with the ability to install the same systems profiles physically and virtually in a repeatable, centrally managed way, it frees up administrator’s time to focus on higher value-add projects.

So, there you have the key features available today in RHN Satellite 5.3. There are many other new capabilities that are too numerous to list in this short space. To see a complete list of everything new in Satellite 5.3, be sure to read the release notes.

For more information about systems management, take a look at the Red Hat-sponsored IDC whitepaper that examines the key functions and benefits of system management software in today’s business and enterprise environments.

For additional Satellite 5.3 product information, visit our product pages.

Today Red Hat released the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 Beta (kernel-2.6.18-155.el5), with versions for x86, x86/64, Itanium, IBM POWER and System z. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 Beta release includes a variety of new features and capabilities, combined with enhancements in virtualization, storage/filesystem, security and developer tools. As with any Beta, our goal is to provide customers and partners with the opportunity to sample and test new features of the release before it’s finalized.

The most exciting new capability in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 Beta is the incorporation of KVM-based virtualization, in addition to existing Xen-based virtualization. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 provides the first commercial-strength implementation of KVM, which is developed as part of the upstream Linux kernel. Xen-based virtualization, of course, remains fully supported for the life of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 family. In addition to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 Beta release today, last week Red Hat also announced the availability of the Beta release of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio, which includes Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops and the standalone, KVM-based Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor.

An important feature of any Red Hat Enterprise Linux update is that kernel and user APIs are unchanged, so that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 applications do not need to be rebuilt or re-certified. This situation extends to virtualized environments: with a fully integrated hypervisor, the application binary interface (ABI) consistency offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux means that applications certified to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on physical machines are also certified when run in virtual machines. So the portfolio of thousands of certified applications for Red Hat Enterprise Linux applies to both environments.

While KVM virtualization is a major theme for this Beta release, customers will also benefit from advances in performance, security and developer tools to benefit both virtual and physical environments.

For full details on the new features in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 Beta release, please see the release notes. Here are some additional highlights:

Virtualization enhancements.

• KVM hypervisor
• Hardware support (SRIOV, IOMMU, VT-d):
  With this release Red Hat is introducing support for SRIOV (Single Root I/O for Virtualization). This feature aims to improve transaction throughput performance in virtual environments by taking advantage of PCI cards that can be shared by multiple virtual machines at one time without creating a throughput bottleneck. These throughput improvements combine with previous CPU and memory performance enhancements to allow customers to further consolidate workloads to lower their costs. SRIOV works with either IOMMU or VT-d in AMD and Intel platforms respectively.
• VDI SPICE protocol enablers:
  This software, unique to Red Hat, offers better response times for graphic/screen rendering by adaptively taking advantage of either client or host capabilities. This leads to better CPU utilization, enabling improved VDI consolidation ratios, without the need for expensive special hardware.
• Libvirt:
  perl interface for libvirt (new)
• kernel:
  Improved clock management when Red Hat Enterprise Linux is deployed on a VMware platform.

Storage / FileSystem

• New Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) utilities for management of FC instances on Ethernet
• Clustered Samba (Technology Preview)

Security

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 is a FIPS-140 certification target

Developer/Sysadmin

• Kernel tracepoints (Technology Preview), coupled with tracepoint support in SystemTap. This release provides user-space backtrace support, complementing kernel-space backtracing that was provided in previous releases. SystemTap provides a powerful, comprehensive performance troubleshooting tool.
• New CIM support for DHCP services.

Getting involved
We maintain a public mailing list for communication during Beta. You are welcome to subscribe to these lists and keep up-to-date with latest developments. Announcements for Red Hat Enterprise Linux are posted to rhelv5-announce. Public discussions on the Beta occur on rhelv5-beta-list.

All subscribing Red Hat customers can download the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 beta via Red Hat Network today.

Network Products Guide, an industry publication on information technologies and solutions, named the winners of its 2009 Product Innovation Awards this week, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 achieved top honors in the Operating Systems category.

The annual Product Innovation awards program “recognizes and honors worldwide vendors for their innovative and groundbreaking products that are bringing essential and incremental changes and are setting the bar higher for others in all areas of information technology,” according to Network Products Guide.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux released the third upgrade to its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 platform in January 2009, driving innovation through increased virtualization scalability, expanded hardware platform support, including support to Intel’s new Nehalem architecture, and incorporation of Java technologies with OpenJDK, a high-performance, fully open source implementation of Java Server Edition 6. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 release also included over 150 other additions and updates. The platform is developed using the open source development model, an approach which drives rapid innovation, and is sold by subscription to deliver continuous value to customers. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 was the first open source solution to deliver commercial-quality virtualization fully integrated into the operating system.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has achieved a number of recent accolades, including:

• 2009 Datamation Product of the Year for the second consecutive year in the Enterprise Linux category
• SYS-CON Virtualization Conference & Expo Show Awards:
  • Best Overall Virtualization Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform
  • Best Server Virtualization Solution: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform
  • Best Greener IT Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

See more on these awards here.

For more information on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, visit here.

Visit the Red Hat booth #857 at Interop in Las Vegas, Nev. this week to hear more about Red Hat’s enterprise-class solutions.

Unless you’ve been stuck on a time-traveling island for the past few years, you can’t fail to have noticed that the hype behind such “next-generation” approaches as SOA, Web Services and REST has been simplified under the banner of cloud computing. The danger is that those who have traveled the well-worn Hype Cycle will simply discard this latest set of buzzwords (e.g., Platform As a Service and Infrastructure as a Service) as just another example of analyst-driven or vendor-driven marketing. However, the reality is significantly different. As with the other “hype-driven” terms mentioned previously, cloud has been incubating within the industry and academia for many years. Its roots can be traced back beyond grid computing (data grids as well as process grids) through ubiquitous computing and beyond. For example, in the early 1990s the European Union was funding research projects into utilizing a network of PlayStation One’s as a cheap pool of processors that could host services (typically ones needed graphical processing capabilities) on demand.

So just what is cloud and why is Red Hat a key player? To answer the first question it sometimes seems easier to try to catch a cloud! Because of its background, there tend to be several different definitions of cloud computing. But in general we shall assume that cloud represents a way to provision an array of Web-based services aimed at allowing users to access a range of capabilities on a pay-as-you-go basis, where the hardware and administrative investment is met by the cloud provider. This is in stark contrast to the traditional methods, where the end user had to provision and manage the hardware and software required to execute these services. With cloud comes the ability to give to end users across the world the illusion of low-entry-barrier, virtually infinite compute power at a fraction of the cost (in fact they only pay when they use this power and no longer need to be concerned about hardware investments languishing idle for most of the time.)

From an IT perspective, this is incredibly important. Very few companies can afford to buy all of the hardware they need, let alone administer it 24×7, especially as they grow. Peaks and troughs in usage make it difficult to know precisely what hardware is required to obtain an optimal level: buy too much and it remains unused a lot of the time; buy not enough and you cannot cope with additional demand. Cloud offers a solution to this that allows IT to invest in their own hardware and “plug in” to the cloud for additional on-demand requirements. In fact when people talk about the cloud today they are typically referring to public clouds or external clouds, i.e., those that exist outside of the corporate firewall. However, private clouds or internal clouds (within the firewall) are more likely to be the biggest users of cloud services for very important reasons: security and trustworthiness (where your data resides is often more important than how you access it). That’s not to suggest public clouds are not useful: far from it as has already been mentioned. But cloud users who are only interested in public clouds are likely to be the minority as adoption grows. The integration of public and private clouds is inevitable.

As with real (weather) clouds, clouds don’t just pop into existence like some exotic particle in physics. They need the right set of circumstances to come together in order for them to exist. At a minimum they need the right low-level infrastructure (VM and operating system) to support clustering of machines that have to be able to cope with arbitrary service requirements (this is often called Infrastructure-As-A-Service). Then of course you’ll need a way of developing applications for the cloud (Platform-As-A-Service). From a Red Hat/JBoss perspective we are working with many others in driving the understanding, adoption, interoperability and standardization of cloud computing at all of these levels. When you deploy on a Linux-based cloud, chances are that you’re using Red Hat Enterprise Linux. When you deploy your POJO’s into a cloud, you may well be using JBoss Application Server. As with SOA, open source is rapidly becoming key to opening up the cloud to everyone and not simply keeping it as the domain of the select few. Furthermore open source infrastructure technologies for cloud computing offer transparency and view of code and APIs in an effort to ensure strong interoperability from the start – no hidden APIs, no traps. Red Hat is uniquely positioned to help drive this adoption, with components that are needed at all levels of the cloud. For example, the work we’re doing around cloud-based data caching with Infinispan, or the high-performance messaging with Red Hat Enterprise MRG (of which JBoss Messaging is now a key element). In the future we expect to make more cloud announcements as we expand our vision and continue to develop these components into solutions in collaboration with our partners. Open source is a natural fit for this new growing market area.

Additionally, we expect that other open source projects and suppliers will continue to develop cloud technologies to break down the industry’s current barriers. We are inviting participants across the industry to join us in presenting new ideas and emerging open source cloud technologies at the Open Source Cloud Computing Forum that Red Hat will host on July 22, 2009. Submit ideas to present here.