Friday Five — June 9, 2017

Red Hat announced Red Hat Ceph Storage 2.3. This release, based on Ceph 10.2 (Jewel), introduces a new Network File System (NFS) interface, offers new compatibility with the Hadoop S3A filesystem client, and adds support for deployment in containerized environments. These improvements expand the product's versatility as an object storage platform, offering the ability to support big data analytics and serve as a common platform for file-based workloads. This release marks the latest milestone in Red Hat's mission to provide highly elastic, flexible storage that can be optimized to suit a variety of workloads across any size of enterprise deployment.

Two years ago, Red Hat president and CEO Jim Whitehurst released his book, The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance. The book was ahead of its time, focusing on the need for businesses around the world to abandon top-down, command-and-control approaches to organizing and management and embrace an open organization model. In the last two years, we've seen business leaders recognize and adopt what we have been practicing for years: They now see that by opening up their businesses, they can react more quickly and effectively to the changes in the world around them. Since its publication, the book has sold nearly 44,000 copies, has been translated into multiple languages, and was one of Forbes' most creative leadership books of 2015. Proving that the conversation never stops, the open organization community at Opensource.com also launched a companion series to Jim's book. To celebrate the The Open Organization's second anniversary, we're now adding a fourth companion piece to the series – The Open Organization Guide to IT Culture Change. More than 25 contributors from open source communities, companies, and projects collaborated to offer hard-won lessons and practical advice for creating a more open IT department – one that can deliver better, faster results and unparalleled business value. Download your copy today or purchase a paperback copy of the book.

Linux containers are gaining significant ground in the enterprise, which is not surprising, since they make so much sense in today's business environment. With that said, container technology as we know it today is relatively new, and companies are still in the process of understanding the different ways in which containers can be leveraged. In a nutshell, Linux containers enable companies to package up and isolate applications with all of the files necessary for each to run. This makes it easy to move containerized applications among environments while retaining their full functionality. The recent Bain and Company study "For Traditional Enterprises, the Path to Digital and the Role of Containers" found that "respondents are beginning to benefit from faster innovation as well as improved development and deployment cycles. For example, adopters frequently report 15 to 30 percent reductions in development time. Adopters also report initial cost savings of 5 to 15 percent due to greater hardware and process efficiencies." The Bain and Company study went on to say that containers' portability improves the flexibility and scalability of IT architectures. Indeed, as companies find more ways to apply this flexibility and scalability, they are developing more use cases for containers – with some benefits they may not have expected along the way.

We're excited to bring AnsibleFest back to London on June 22. Join hundreds of users, developers and industry partners for more Ansible content than ever before. In addition to a general session with automation insights, Ansible product updates and industry thought leadership, the conference will feature four content tracks. Whether you're interested in Solutions, Tech Deep Dives, Ansible Essentials or Network Automation, there is a track for you. AnsibleFest provides you the knowledge, best practices and connections you need to transform your business through IT automation with Ansible. Attendees include DevOps engineers, operations engineers, open source fans, systems engineers, system administrators, operations staff, release engineers, network engineers and security professionals.

The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) is using Red Hat Ceph Storage to support the growing needs of its research community. Researchers and students aggregate, analyze, and store massive amounts of data, which is used to support groundbreaking medical discoveries from new cancer biomarkers to state-of-the-art magnetic resonance imaging techniques. UAB selected
Red Hat Ceph Storage because it offers researchers a flexible platform that can accommodate the vast amounts of data necessary to support future innovation and discovery. UAB operates a high-performance computing cluster that has increased processing power by 11 times and storage capacity by 10 times. The reliability and performance of Red Hat Ceph Storage has also complemented the high-performance computing user base within the university. In the three years since UAB implemented Red Hat Ceph Storage, they have reduced data storage costs by 54 percent.