Red Hat Summit 2018—It's a wrap!

By Will McGrath, Product Marketing, Red Hat Storage

Wowzer! Red Hat Summit 2018 was a blur of activity. The quality and quantity of conversations with customers, partners, industry analysts, community members, and Red Hatters was unbelievable. This event has grown steadily the past few years to over 7,000 registrants this year. From a Storage perspective, this was the largest presence ever in terms of content and customer interaction.

Key announcements

For Storage, we made two key announcements during Red Hat Summit. The first was around Red Hat Storage One, a pre-configured offering engineered with our server partners, announced last week. If you didn’t catch Dustin Black’s blog post that goes into the detail of the solution, check it out .

The second announcement, which occurred this week, highlighted the momentum in building a storage offering that provides a seamless developer experience and unified orchestration for containers. There are now more than 150 customers worldwide that have adopted Red Hat’s container-native storage solutions to enable their transition to the hybrid cloud, including Vorwerk and innovation award winner Lufthansa Technik.  

We featured a number of customer success stories, including Massachusetts Open Cloud, which worked with Boston Children’s Hospital to redefine medical-image processing using Red Hat Ceph Storage.

If you’d like to keep up on the containers news, check out our blog post from Tuesday and this week’s news around CoreOS integration into Red Hat OpenShift. You might also like to check out the news around customers deploying OpenShift on Red Hat infrastructure—including OpenStack—through container-based application development and tightly integrated cloud technologies.

Storage expertise on display

On the morning of the first day of Summit, Burr Sutter and team demoed a number of technologies, including Red Hat Storage, to showcase application portability across the open hybrid cloud. This morning, Erin Boyd and team ran some way cool live demos that showed the power of microservices and functions with OpenShift, Storage, OpenWhisk, Tensorflow, and a host of technologies across the hybrid cloud.

For those who had the opportunity to attend any of the 20+ Red Hat Summit storage sessions, you were able to learn how our Red Hat Gluster Storage and Red Hat Ceph Storage products appeal to both traditional and modern users. The roadmap presentations by both Neil Levine (Ceph) and Sayan Saha (Gluster and container-native storage) were very popular. Sage Weil, the creator of Ceph, gave a standing-room only talk on the future of storage. Some of these storage sessions will be available on the Red Hat Summit YouTube channel in the coming weeks.

We also had several partners demoing their combined solutions with Red Hat Storage, including Intel, Mellanox, Penguin Computing, QCT, and Supermicro. Commvault had a guest appearance during Sean Murphy’s Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure talk, explaining what led them to decide to include it in their HyperScale Appliances and Software offerings.

This year, we conducted an advanced Ceph users’ group meeting the day before the conference with marquee customers participating in deep-dive discussions with product and community leaders. During the conference, the storage lockers have been a hit. We had great presence on the show floor, including the community booths. Our breakfast was well attended with over a hundred people registered and featured a panel of customers and partners.

Continue the conversation

During his appearance on The Cube by Silicon Angle, Red Hat Storage VP/GM Ranga Rangachari talked about his point of view on “UnStorage.” This idea, triggered by his original blog post on the subject, made quite a few waves at the event. Customers and analysts are responding positively to the idea of a new approach to storage in the age of hybrid cloud, hyperconvergence, and containers. Today is the last day to win prizes by tweeting  @RedHatStorage with the hashtag #UnStorage.

If you missed us in San Francisco, we’ll be at OpenStack Summit in Vancouver from May 21-24. Red Hat is a headline sponsor at Booth A19. If you’re attending, come check out our OpenStack and Ceph demo, and check back on our blog page for news from the event. We’ll also be hosting the “Craft Your Cloud” event on Tuesday, May 22, from 6-9 pm at Steamworks in Vancouver. For more information and to register, click here. For more fun and networking opportunities, join the Ceph and RDO communities for a happy hour on May 23 from 6-8 pm at The Portside Pub in Vancouver. For more information and to register for that event, click here.

On to Red Hat Summit 2019

You can check out the videos and keynotes from Red Hat Summit 2018 on demand. Next year, Red Hat Summit is being held in Boston again—it's been rotating between San Francisco and Boston—so if you couldn’t attend San Francisco this year we urge you to plan to visit us in Boston next year. We hope you enjoyed our coverage of Red Hat Summit 2018, and hope to see you in 2019.