The day: April 15. The place: San Francisco's Moscone Center (south). We were on the scene providing live coverage of the keynotes, panels, and the partner pavilion. The day began like any other...with a series of epic keynotes:

Packed house for RedHat Summit keynote. #RHSummit pic.twitter.com/hrs27UfKGn

— Erik Rudin (@erikrudin) April 15, 2014

 

The keynotes

The first speaker ...

#rhsummit Red Hat President, Products & Tech, Paul Cormier pic.twitter.com/Ds50DX5pTK — Red Hat Storage (@RedHatStorage) April 15, 2014

Paul talked about what an exciting time we're living in for open source software, whose pace of innovation is like never before, and that we're currently disrupting what the "proprietary guys" set up a decade ago. Paul then displayed a quote from a former CEO of a virtualization company  saying "The traditional operating system has all but disappeared."

Paul disagrees.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has become one of the two great OS' in data centers (the other being Windows). Customers of every major vertical, from banking to media and beyond, have started transforming their mediums with RHEL. Virtualization is a key part of that -- it was, and continues to be, developed as an integrated part of the Linux OS instead of a proprietary layer.

Paul went on to reveal...

#rhsummit Red Hat President, Product & Tech, Paul Cormier announces new RHEL Atomic Host to run containers pic.twitter.com/SNTMqcRQXm

— Red Hat Storage (@RedHatStorage) April 15, 2014

You can read a little more about that here and here. The next speaker of the evening:

#RHSummit Paul introduces Padmasree Warrior, CTO, Cisco pic.twitter.com/FkLzQgHlCg — Red Hat Storage (@RedHatStorage) April 15, 2014

Padmasree pointed out three big trends we're experiencing: The rise of mobile (not just the quantity of devices and users, but the demand for enterprise apps to be mobile); Cloud, which is creating new business models; and Internet of Things, whose implications we're only beginning to understand.

Padmasree then talked about the phases of the Internet. First, email -- the original 'killer app'; Second, e-commerce; Third, the digitization of interactions, aka social media; fourth will be connecting people, processes, data, things. Cisco calls this the "Internet of everything", and estimates there is $19 trillion in value hidden away there.

The next speaker:

#RHSummit Doug Fisher, VP Intel, "HW without SW is just heat!" :) pic.twitter.com/ijaBk9Rbxd

— Red Hat Storage (@RedHatStorage) April 15, 2014

Doug showed a fun video about what happens whenever a datacenter goes down:

Doug said that, by 2020, there will be 50 billion connected devices driving 35 zetabytes of data, and that we're currently in a virtuous computing cycle where devices create data, where services make use of that data, and that ends up driving sales of more devices. But we have to be mindful of security -- $1 trillion is estimated to be lost in data breaches every year, a figure larger than the illegal drug trade. 469,000 new malware samples are discovered every week! Doug also talked about how, in 2009, 12% of Intel's IT was virtual...but today more than 75% of it is. They can now provision a new service in less than an hour!

#RHSummit Doug Fisher, VP, Intel, "Forbes calls Big Data the 'New Oil'" Intel focus on Hadoop contribution pic.twitter.com/m151PKkC59 — Red Hat Storage (@RedHatStorage) April 15, 2014

 

The sessions

The first session we covered after the keynotes was:

#RHSummit Scott Clinton, Sr.Director, Red Hat Storage, presents software-defined storage for the modern data centers pic.twitter.com/6Ij01W7jPX

— Red Hat Storage (@RedHatStorage) April 15, 2014

Scott shared insights on open software-defined storage. He had a few great anecdotes about how things used to be, however. He recounts how, during his time at NASA's Ames research center, there was a computer the size of 11 refrigerators...whose power is now equaled by the smartphones in our pockets. And that NASA had washing machine-sized storage devices. Ultimately, IT infrastructure is moving from smaller to smarter to...software. We're no longer deploying boxes but virtual instances. Scott went on to say that the new challenges IT faces today are volume, variety, and data portability. Moving data workloads is a whole new exercise, and that 90% of the data growing in our infrastructure is unstructured.

#RHSummit Scott Clinton, Sr. Director, Red Hat Storage discusses Casio, Intuit and U. Porto customer success stories pic.twitter.com/DI6MWx2VHX — Red Hat Storage (@RedHatStorage) April 15, 2014

Intermission

We took a brief break after Scott's keynote to help Worldvision in the Volunteer Zone. Worldvision asked attendees to stuff backpacks for children around the world in need. Here's a vine video showing what we mean:

Our Vine -- helping @worldvision stuff backpacks for needy kids worldwide #rhsummit https://t.co/BZLnpOpYX5

— Red Hat Storage (@RedHatStorage) April 15, 2014

Sessions, resumed

We joined the Red Hat Enterprise Linux roadmap session with Denise Dumas, Lars Herrmann and the Platform Engineering Managers. And we learned something very exciting. A RHEL 7  release candidate is due out the week of April 21 -- you should be able to find it here: http://red.ht/1kuLScD  We were also treated to a brief history of RHEL:

#RHSummit RHEL roadmap breakout session Lars Herrman speaking about RHEL 7 being the foundation for Open Hybrid Cloud pic.twitter.com/NHVffbMmtQ — Red Hat Storage (@RedHatStorage) April 15, 2014

We heard a lot about the commitment to containerization in RHEL 7, support for new 64-bit architectures (X86_64, Power, and S390), support for up to 64 terrabytes of RAM, and much more. You'll no doubt get more insight using the link above!

We then jumped over to the roadmap session for OpenStack and Red Hat Server.

#RHSummit RHSS Roadmap breakout session, Sayan Saha & Vijay Bellur presenting real storage customer use cases pic.twitter.com/GxIIaOeIyN

— Red Hat Storage (@RedHatStorage) April 15, 2014

We got to hear some interesting use cases. Such as how one RHSS OpenStack customer, a car manufacturer, needed a data store for all vehicle data, which it would analyze later. It estimated receiving 200 terrabytes per week and storing 5 petabytes. The solution they required would need to scale cost-effectively. Their solution? Red Hat Storage Server with SMB and native client.

The presenters also shared insights on GlusterFS' upstream roadmap for GlusterFS 3.5. Among the new features slated for this release: distributed geo-replication, quota scalability, readdir ahead translator, and brick failure detection.

Be sure to stay tuned for our coverage of Red Hat Summit, day two!