Friday Five — March 11, 2016

On Wednesday, Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.6. This new version of Red Hat's KVM-based virtualization solution offers increased performance, scale, and security for high-intensity Linux workloads. It also updates user experience and management tools to help reduce cost and time of VMware migrations by eliminating the need to purchase a third-party migration tool. Lowering the costs and sprawl of proprietary virtualization solutions is a common customer challenge addressed by Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization... Building on previous releases, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.6 provides the infrastructure layer for customers to move their workloads to containers or the cloud. It also integrates with Red Hat's hybrid cloud management platform, Red Hat CloudForms, to manage heterogeneous environments across multiple clouds, hypervisors, containers, and traditional computing infrastructure.

Red Hat joins North Bridge and Black Duck Software as a collaborator in the 10th Annual Future of Open Source Survey. Open source technology has reached a new level of penetration throughout all corporate software use. However, important questions remain about open source management, security, policies and procedures, and governance. This year, the survey digs deeper to understand what's happening behind the scenes while continuing to track drivers, inhibitors, and key areas for use of open source. Your feedback is essential to inform industry leaders on how to improve the climate for effective and secure use of open source software. Join Red Hat and other leading open source organizations in making 2016 the largest survey ever. The Future of Open Source Survey sponsors, Black Duck and North Bridge, will host a live panel discussion revealing this year's survey results on April 27, 2016 at 2:00 PM ET.

"So you finally surrendered to containers and discovered that they solve a lot of problems and have a lot of advantages... However, many users are still treating containers just like typical virtual machines and forget that containers have an important characteristic: Containers are disposable. This characteristic forces users to change their mindset on how they should handle and manage containers; and I'll explain what you should NOT do to keep extracting the best benefits of containers. [Number 1]: Don't store data in containers – A container can be stopped, destroyed, or replaced. An application version 1.0 running in container should be easily replaced by the version 1.1 without any impact or loss of data. For that reason, if you need to store data, do it in a volume. In this case, you should also take care if two containers write data on the same volume as it could cause corruption. Make sure your applications are designed to write to a shared data store." —Rafael Benevides, senior software engineer, Red Hat

Network Data Solutions (NDS) needed to differentiate its cloud services offering to stand out in a crowded marketplace. By choosing Red Hat CloudForms to automate cloud services provisioning, NDS found the differentiator it needed and can now let customers use cloud services flexibly, while avoiding complexity.

The SWITCH Foundation, a Swiss IT provider in the education market, needed to reduce IT costs and increase innovation. They decided to modernize by consolidating and optimizing their IT landscape. SWITCH successfully implemented a comprehensive convergent IT solution using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, and Red Hat Satellite with a preconfigured Cisco FlexPod solution. The consolidated infrastructure delivers scalability and standardization for greater cost savings.