Open source software vendor Red Hat held a half-day web-based virtual event focused on its middleware solutions. The event, which was heavily targeted at admins and developers, gave Red Hat an opportunity to announce a new version of its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP), a brand new distributed in-memory NoSQL database and the latest changes to its OpenShift platform-as-a-service (PaaS). One thing was clear at the event – Red Hat is now all about the cloud.

After more than two years of development, Red Hat shipped a new release of its open source enterprise application server, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6. According to Craig Muzilla, vice president and general manager for Red Hat, in his virtual keynote, the company designed JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 from the ground up to be ready for public and private cloud deployment. The company based on the new version on the same Java EE engine embedded in OpenShift. He continued by saying Red Has made JBoss simpler to use whether customers are targeting the cloud, a multicore server or virtualized environment.

JBoss EAP 6 features a component-based design that dynamically allocates services based on the needs of the application. The release also isolates each application to prevent issues in one application from impacting other solutions running on a server. Red Hat made things easier for developers by making it easier to integrate with popular tools and frameworks like Maven, Hudson, Hibernate and Struts. Beyond the improvements in the application server, Red Hat also released new courses, training, consulting services and a JBoss EAP 6 Application Administrator certification. Additional details about new features in the release are available on the product page. JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6 is available for download now.

In addition to the new JBoss release, Red Hat followed vendors like SAP (HANA) and Oracle (TimesTen and Exalytics) into the in-memory big data market with its new JBoss Data Grid 6. This isn’t Red Hat’s first foray into big data. Last year the company introduced a big data storage solution after its acquisition of Gluster. Red Hat also has a partnership with 10gen, which offers value-added products and services for NoSQL repository MongoDB. Now, Red Hat has its own big data solution based the community driven, open source Infinispan project that launched in 2009. In his keynote at the virtual event, Muzilla said JBoss Data Grid would enable companies to scale their applications without adding to their relational database sprawl. According to Muzilla, the company designed its new repository for applications and processes that must access large volumes of data and require fast responses.

JBoss Data Grid 6 stores data in-memory in a key-value structure similar to a hashtable. Users can add multiple nodes to support high availability and fault tolerance. JBoss Data Grid 6 automatically distributes data across its available nodes as changes occur to the data grid. In addition, the database supports access using REST, memcache API and its own proprietary Java API, HotRod. JBoss Data Grid 6 is available immediately, and Red Hat is offering a free 90-day trial.

Red Hat also spent a little time within the admin track of its virtual event discussing the latest changes to OpenShift, which the company finally open sourced earlier this year. Red Hat made its latest round of enhancements to its PaaS earlier this month adding:

• Instant Application – allows users to deploy common applications and frameworks like Drupal and Ruby on Rails with a couple of clicks
• Windows Client Tool – upgraded Windows command line tools and new wizard that helps Windows users run the tools for the first time
• Support for package.json and node.js Javascript frameworks and MongoDB
• Ability to view usage quotas

Red Hat is holding another virtual event on June 28 to specifically discuss the recent enhancements and the future of OpenShift.

Although it was not mentioned at the middleware focused event, Red Hat also released a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.3 this week. According to Red Hat, RHEL 6.3 is the largest update release to date. The company also positioned the release as specifically designed for cloud scale deployments.  RHEL 6.3 features new storage, virtualization, security, scalability and performance capabilities and is available now.