In my last post, I walked you through my quest of understanding IT optimization and why there is a need to pursue it. I also hinted at how Red Hat products and solutions can help you both optimize and innovate. Before we dive into the specifics of optimization, let’s start where we left off last time--infrastructure. Now, there are a lot of different ways to slice and dice your It infrastructure, but, it’s elementary, my dear Watson (I guess that makes me the ITO Sherlock)! The first slice is the platform, which is the foundation of your entire infrastructure. The second is the storage, which hosts all your data and applications. The final slice is the deployment footprint of choice, which determines how your infrastructure is utilized and managed. In this post, I will talk about the foundational piece, which is the platform, and how Red Hat Enterprise Linux can help you modernize your platform.

We live in a world where technology is evolving at a rapid pace and what you need is a modern OS that can support not only your existing infrastructure but also help you rapidly innovate to grow your business. And who’s the most modern of them all? Linux! Am I saying this because I work at Red Hat? You don’t have to take my word for it, let’s look at the numbers! The global OS market is growing at 2.3% and will reach $13 billion in 3 years (source below). While Windows has a steady 2.3% growth and Unix and mainframe market are declining, the growth is coming from Linux at 7.5%!  It is not only the modern OS, but is the OS of choice--9/10 public clouds are built on Linux, 99% of supercomputers run linux and even 62% of embedded systems run Linux. And the mantra we’d like to chant - Linux is Red Hat Enterprise Linux! Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the no. 1 commercial distribution in the public cloud, and is the trusted OS by 90% of the Fortune 500.

The numbers highlight why Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the modern OS and how it should be your OS of choice, but what does one really desire in a modern OS? The short answer is Control, Confidence and Freedom! Your organization needs the Control to focus on business growth instead of worrying about security vulnerabilities or management configuration errors. You need the Confidence that your critical workloads are running on a platform that is stable, highly-available and has a record-breaking performance. You need the Freedom to innovate with a platform that supports a wide range of deployment footprints, offers a rich yet continually evolving application experience and supports both your old as well as new architectures. Red Hat Enterprise Linux gives you all these things:

CONTROL

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux you can assert Control over your infrastructure by automating your regulatory compliance, implementing a centralized identity management system and receiving continuous vulnerability updates. You will gain even more Control with its management and automation portfolio that could save up to 42% of your IT staff’s time and reduce planned downtime by 74%. With the addition of Satellite, you’ll be able to speed image building, deployment and patch management. It even provides you with a easy-to-use web interface to manage your infrastructure and helps you drive consistency through automation with Ansible. All this without blowing a hole in your IT budget!

CONFIDENCE

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux you can build Confidence in your infrastructure--you can achieve 99.999% uptime and improve system and storage availability while preserving application stability with each update. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a platform that is highly performant and ultra-scalable, that can dramatically decrease storage costs through data compression and data duplication. The proverbial cherry on the top, which will further boost your Confidence, is a 10 year life-cycle promise.

FREEDOM

As your business grows and evolves, Red Hat Enterprise Linux gives you Freedom to choose the architecture that supports your needs, a rich toolset and language to support that helps you build innovative applications, and the speed to deliver applications to the market with our container strategy. As the modern OS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has an extensive ecosystem community that gives you the Freedom to choose from a rich set of certified software, hardware, and cloud solutions and services.

Visit us at the ITO Booth, at Red Hat Summit to learn how to achieve Control, Confidence and Freedom by modernizing your platform! If you can’t make it there in person, stay tuned to this blog for a series of posts on the other infrastructure slices, and in-depth demos of Red Hat Enterprise Linux products and solutions!

Market Data Source: Gartner Enterprise Software Forecast, Q3FY17