Friday Five — November 4, 2016

Red Hat has seen its workforce more than double over the past four years and revenue skyrocket. Paul Cormier, president of products and technology at Red Hat, has been at the company since the early days. He was the 120th employee in a workforce that now numbers about 9,800. BNN sat down with Paul Cormier and spoke about Red Hat's growth, the company's subscription model, and the future of cloud computing.

Red Hat announced the general availability of Ansible 2.2, the latest version of the leading simple, powerful, and agentless open source IT automation framework. Ansible 2.2 brings performance enhancements, expanded container and Windows automation capabilities, and several new modules, including those for networking, cloud provider platforms, and expanded vault support. Ansible 2.2 continues the upstream momentum for Ansible, introducing several new features, including: more control over users' container development and deployment pipelines; expanded networking support; performance enhancements for cloud services, spanning the Microsoft Azure platform and VMware cloud infrastructures; and new functionality for cloud providers including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and OpenStack providers.

The Cloud Infrastructure for Microbial Bioinformatics (CLIMB) has selected and implemented Red Hat Ceph Storage for their large-scale extensive research needs. A collaborative medical research project involving 4 universities in the U.K., CLIMB aims to provide free cloud-based compute, storage, and analysis tools for academic microbiologists in the U.K. CLIMB's large community of researchers needed a shared IT infrastructure to facilitate collaboration, support new medical breakthroughs, and better manage data. The solution had to be easy to use, able to absorb hundreds of terabytes of data, and scalable on demand to petabytes. Red Hat Ceph Storage provides CLIMB with object storage that is capable of meeting the large-scale storage requirements needed to help support medical breakthroughs. Designed for the cloud, Red Hat Ceph Storage can lower the cost of storing enterprise data and helps CLIMB manage data growth–efficiently and automatically. Capitalizing on Red Hat Ceph Storage's demonstrated ability to handle web scale object storage, CLIMB can now scale to 1.5PB of raw object storage per site.

It is not only business which is reaping the benefits of technologies in the fields of cloud, big data, the IoT, artificial intelligence and others, but areas such as healthcare are also being boosted. Red Hat is another company who is working in the area and it is bringing its open source values and philosophies to shine a light on those who are "open" the default 21st century innovation model. Open Patient tells the stories of two brain cancer patients, Steven Keating, and Liz Salmi who advocated for open healthcare data standards. Steven Keating said that curiosity saved his life. To date, he's gathered and shared more than 200GB of his own medical data. CBR's James Nunns spoke to Leigh Day, VP Marketing Communications at Red Hat, about Open Patient. "Open source methodologies applied to healthcare could mean faster diagnosis, it could mean larger communities of support, it could be more effective treatments. And, at the highest level, it could mean faster routes to cures," Day said.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 has been awarded the Common Criteria Certification at Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 4+ for an unmodified commercial operating system under the Operating System Protection Profile (OSPP). This marks the first time that an operating system has been Common Criteria-certified with Linux Container Framework Support, further demonstrating Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7's ability to provide hardened and more secure IT innovations like Linux containers. The Common Criteria is an internationally recognized set of standards used by the federal government and other organizations to assess the security and assurance of technology products. ... This certification provides government agencies, financial institutions, and customers in other security-sensitive environments the assurance that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 meets clear, specific security standards used by the federal government.