Red Hat updates MRG and JBoss Application Server

Red Hat is looking to move its cloud computing efforts forward with a series of product updates and overhauls to JBoss and the Message, Realtime and Grid (MRG) platform.

The company outlined plans on Thursday to transition JBoss into an application fabric which can run on multiple platforms, and media such as mobile devices and cloud computing systems.

"We are very focused on ensuring that the portfolio of middleware technologies continues to expand from a breadth perspective, but also gets deeper," said Red Hat senior middleware director Ashesh Badani.

The first phase of the transition will be the launch of Application Server 7 in July, followed by the planned 2012 launch of the broader JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6.

The MRG 2.0 release, meanwhile, will offer improved performance and support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1, and help to facilitiate messaging and manage tasks such as distributed computing operations and the handling of workloads.

Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager of Red Hat's cloud business unit, explained that the JBoss and MRG updates are part of a larger strategy to offer platforms for large public cloud providers as well as enterprises looking to launch private clouds.

"Enterprises really want the advantages that cloud promises," he said. "They want their IT to work like the big cloud providers, and they want those capabilities from their own infrastructure."

Red Hat is also looking to improve its educational programmes to ease the deployment of private clouds, and will offer IT professionals a special training course in private cloud development and management.

The two-day CL350 course costs $1,600 (£999) and will train administrators in the management of Red Hat's infrastructure-as-a-service platforms. Red Hat hopes to add training courses covering areas such as platform-as-a-service.

"The biggest impediment to the cloud is not technology, but the availability of skilled experts who know how to build clouds," said Crenshaw.