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Dec. 8, 2009

Overall, Red Hat's new MRG 1.2 (Messaging, Real-Time, Grid) release includes new Linux developer tools and improved technology designed to better enhance the operating system's value for users who rely on real-time performance and zero-downtime on servers.

A real-time OS differs from other operating systems in that its overall latency is lower, and system actions occur at predetermined intervals. Providing real-time performance is all about enabling actions to occur within the same amount of time, every time -- a feature that is critical for Red Hat's U.S military, financial services and telco customers.

"On average, for both the throughput rates and the underlying latency results we've been seeing somewhere on the order of about 50 percent increases in throughput and a corresponding reduction in latency compared to some of the previous benchmarks published by Red Hat," says Bryan Che, product manager for the company's MRG program.

It's Red Hat's latest set of enhancements for MRG since the Linux company formally began work on the initial MRG 1.0 release exactly two years ago to this date. In February 2009, Red Hat updated MRG to version 1.1.

What's more, real time also gets a boost on virtualized instances in the new MRG 1.2 release. Che added that on a 10 Gigabit Ethernet connection with a KVM virtualization hypervisor, MRG 1.2 is able to achieve performance of over one million messages per second throughput.

At that speed, Che said that real-time virtualization performance is within just five percent of the bare-metal performance attained less than 6 months ago.

Red Hat has been concentrating on the KVM technology as part of its Red Hat Enterprise 5.4 release -- and as part of its drive away from relying on the Xen hypervisor.

Che also noted that with Xen, he'd expect to see real-time virtualization performance that is in the double-digit percentages. That is significantly worse than what KVM is currently providing.

As part of the MRG 1.2 release, Red Hat is also providing a new open source tool called R-Teval, which is a hardware latency identifier. Previous versions of MRG have had software tools that discovered some areas of application latency.

"How close we're able to get to bare-metal performance (ie: running completely virtualized) is pretty impressive compared to what you typically see with virtualization overhead," Che added.

"With Red Hat customers that run mission-critical, real-time applications, a big source of latency is not just from the operating system or from the network itself, but also from certified hardware," Che said.

With MRG 1.2, now Linux users can pinpoint exactly where latency comes from in hardware and servers, helping them troubleshoot system bottlenecks and correct them to improve the overall performance of their MRG deployment.

Che closed by saying that Red Hat's objective is to have at least two updates every year for its MRG tool.

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Source: Red Hat.

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