Friday Five — August 4, 2017

This week, Red Hat announced that it has acquired the assets and technology of Permabit Technology Corporation, a provider of software for data deduplication, compression and thin provisioning. With the addition of Permabit's data deduplication and compression capabilities to the world's leading enterprise Linux platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat will be able to better enable enterprise digital transformation through more efficient storage options. Consistent with its commitment to delivering fully open source solutions and upstream-first innovation, Red Hat plans to open source Permabit's technology. This will enable customers to use a single, supported and fully-open platform to drive storage efficiency, without having to rely on heterogeneous tools or customized and poorly-supported operating systems.

This week, Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4, the latest version of the world's leading enterprise Linux platform. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 offers new automation capabilities designed to limit IT complexity while enhancing workload security and performance for traditional and cloud-native applications. This provides a powerful, flexible operating system backbone to address enterprise IT needs across physical servers, virtual machines and hybrid, public and multi-cloud footprints.

Enterprises struggling to find balance between running workloads on legacy apps in the data center and cloud-native apps on distributed resources might be interested to know that container technology might be on the verge of making those worries disappear. Over the past few months, multiple solutions have hit the channel purporting to either push legacy apps to the cloud using portable runtime environments or in some way integrate the functions of on-premises and cloud-based applications to help them work better in tandem. Wipro and Red Hat have teamed up to provide an app modernization program designed to provide a repeatable and rapid means of supporting both legacy apps and newly created cloud-facing apps under a common framework. The service unites Wipro's Cloud Application Factory development service with the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to develop new apps and provide native interoperability with legacy functions to establish cohesive production environments across public, private and hybrid cloud architectures.

DevOps is revolutionizing the way enterprises deliver apps to the market. It blends software development and information technology operations, or the processes and services used by IT staff, as well as their internal and external clients to fulfill their business duties. This process involves intensive work. Consequently, DevOps engineers are constantly on the lookout for new tools. The only problem is that there are so many options out there. Where do they start? To save teams some time, here are 12 indispensable DevOps tools for 2017. At the top is Ansible. Ansible is an automation engine that enables IT admins to automate parts of their daily tasks. Enterprises that use Ansible stand to benefit from increased accountability and compliance in their IT environments as well as innovation and collaboration among their employees. Organizations can also take their Ansible deployment one step further with Tower, which adds control, security and other capabilities that enterprises can monitor with a UI and RESTful API.

When it comes to IT organizations pleasing the CEO, nothing speaks like cold hard cash – as in creating top-line profit. In a new Harvard Business Review (HBR) Analytic Services report, "Revenue-Generating CIOs: Smart Strategies to Grow the Business," you can explore lessons learned from 15 CIOs who are successfully driving revenue for their business. The report finds that CIOs who know how to make it rain do four things particularly well: Adopt a product mentality; increase the speed of development and delivery; hire, develop, and retain exceptional talent; and collaborate deeply with business owners and digital officers. Download the full HBR report now to get more wisdom and advice from 15 innovative CIOs.