Friday Five — March 24, 2017

IBM and Red Hat announced a strategic collaboration designed to help enterprises benefit from the OpenStack platform's speed and economics while more easily extending their existing Red Hat virtualized and cloud workloads to the IBM Private Cloud. As part of this new collaboration, IBM has become a Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider, giving clients greater confidence that they can use Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage on IBM Private Cloud when the offering launches for general availability at the end of March 2017. Additionally, as part of the agreement, Red Hat Cloud Access will be available for IBM Cloud by the end of Q2 2017, allowing Red Hat customers to move eligible, unused Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions from their data center to a public, virtualized cloud environment in IBM Cloud Data Centers worldwide. This enables companies to better preserve and extend their Red Hat software investments while providing the global scale and efficiency of IBM Cloud.

The 13th annual Red Hat Summit, one of the premier open source technology conferences, is expected to welcome thousands of attendees from around the world to the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, May 2-4. Red Hat Summit 2017 will celebrate the power of the individual: individuals who are looking toward to the future, who are willing to step up, try something new and make change happen. When individuals are given the tools to innovate and find new solutions to old problems everyone benefits. Attendees will hear keynotes on the future of enterprise technology and open source from industry leaders including Microsoft, Dell EMC, Ericsson, Google Cloud Platform, Red Hat, HPE, Intel, and Lenovo.

The latest update to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9 builds upon more than six years of enterprise-proven success, offering a more secure, stable and reliable platform for the modern enterprise and prioritizes features for critical deployments. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9 delivers new hardware support developed in collaboration with Red Hat partners which helps to provide a smooth transition of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 production deployments to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 environments. Additionally, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9 adds updates to TLS 1.2 to further enhance secure communications and provide broader support for the latest PCI-DSS standards, better equipping enterprises to offer more secure online transactions.

This latest version of Red Hat's software-defined storage solution includes a number of enhancements and new features that seek to improve small file performance, provide data integrity at a lower cost, and enhance integration with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.2 addresses an inherent challenge with network attached storage around scaling metadata-intensive operations, particularly with files under a few megabytes. These improvements to metadata operations can benefit storage of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform registries. Container registries, the heart of a container platform, are critical to resident applications and need highly elastic, durable storage.

The enterprise shift toward open source has been a boon for companies such as Red Hat. Open source software developers have always been focused on using their collective knowledge base to advance software capabilities, detect and address bugs, and make software tools more efficient. But end users need help making open source software work for them, and that provides an opening for service producers such as Red Hat, according to Bryan Che, general manager of Cloud Product Strategy at Red Hat. "We take open source code and make it consumable, employable, updatable for enterprises," he said, noting that Red Hat based its business on service and support subscriptions rather than on selling closed-source software. Proponents of open source software say it gives end users an edge by fostering innovation and attracting the best software developers.