Friday Five — August 26, 2016

Twenty-five years ago today via a short Usenet post, Linus Torvalds shared the first iteration of a free, hobby operating system that he had developed. Of course, what became known as Linux is now far, far more than a hobbyist's OS and spawned a wave of innovation that significantly changed the IT landscape. While Linux is the poster child, open source is also about far more than an operating system (although it remains critically important!). The underpinnings of open source, from transparency and collaboration to freedom and broad dissemination, have spilled out well beyond the confines of enterprise technology to greatly impact both the world of consumer technology as well as the global business climate at large. ... Without Linux driving open source, we'd likely still see the enterprise datacenter as a brick-walled silo, with little to no insight into the broader business and much of the IT team's daily operations focused on simply keeping the lights on. With Linux and open source, IT is now far more transparent to the broader enterprise, helping to better align with general business goals and actually innovate as opposed to just maintaining a status quo.

Back in the 1990s when Red Hat got started a few years after Linux's birth, Whitehurst said his company didn't have a great business model. At one point, Red Hat actually tried to sell shrink-wrapped boxed software at big box retailers. Around 2001, Red Hat first introduced the enterprise open-source software model that is the core of the company's business today. The basic idea is to bundle open-source software together, test and certify the software, and then provide multiple years of enterprise-grade support. ... Many large organizations have simply found Linux to be faster and cheaper than legacy alternatives, according to Whitehurst. On the speed front, Whitehurst recounted that a decade ago the U.S. Navy had a need for a real-time operating system to help with missile defense systems. The work to enable Linux for real-time operations also was attractive to the financial community for high-speed transactions. Today, Linux powers many of the world's leading stock exchanges, including NYSE, where Red Hat is listed. Whitehurst said that the Navy's needs that helped push Linux forward to the benefit of the financial community is just one example of an odd combination that helped create Linux's success.

Red Hat Virtualization has always handled the basics: Linux and Windows machines side-by-side, rule-based scheduling of virtual machines, and a unique SELinux-based security mechanism called sVirt that isolated virtual machines from each other and even the hypervisor that hosts them. That work was necessary, but ten years of investment made it possible to do much more. We have capitalized on our close engineering relationship with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenStack Platform teams to introduce a single software-defined networking infrastructure based on OpenStack's Neutron. We've standardized how third-party vendors can plug in their software-defined networking solutions to any Red Hat virtualization platform, without requiring a custom integration for each platform. That means a networking vendor that supports OpenStack can easily add support for Red Hat Virtualization, as well. Our management interface was long-overdue for a refresh, so with version 4, it has been reimagined. It is now cleaner and more approachable, making common administrative tasks obvious. We wanted to design a platform where you could quickly become productive, whether you were a hard-core command-line Linux admin or a VMware Certified Professional.

The Emperor has no clothes! Those were the words uttered by a bold observer of the king's procession in the Danish fairy tale written by Hans Christian Andersen in 1837. The metaphor has since been used to connote, among other things, collective denial or ignorance of an obvious fact. Such is the case today with storage, as IT has had to grope with exponential growth of data from social media and cloud, media and entertainment, video on-demand services, and even medical imaging. In an era where people throw around buzz words like digital transformation and discuss solutions to address the ensuing pressures imposed by all this data growth on capacity, scalability, and cost, we're often led to believe that storage will take care of itself. Thanks to new research by Vanson Bourne Ltd in a survey commissioned by Red Hat, we're beginning to see mounting evidence that denying the critical role of storage in "sexy" solutions spanning physical, virtual, private cloud, container, and public cloud environments is like sequestering the unabashed observers of the masquerading naked king. Indeed, today's solutions require the agility to access data from anywhere, anytime, on any device, the flexibility to store data on-premises or in the cloud, and advanced data protection that provides integrity and high availability at very large scale. All of these are core deliverables of software-defined storage.

[Red Hat's president and CEO Jim Whitehurst] is a true evangelist of the open everything company and here he offers 3 simple strategies for driving company profits, building culture, and changing the world by opening more than just source code, but rather by opening everything... Perhaps what is most inspiring of all when it comes to the open everything movement at Red Hat, is that the crusade has transcended their walls becoming a revolution in terms of transparency, open communication, and collaboration in all different ways, creating a crater sized impact on humanity. Think of how differently you might operate within the walls of your own family unit when you work at an open everything organization as opposed to the kind with a strict organizational flow chart. ... Red Hat has been one of the forefathers of the "open source" movement since their inception in 1993, and Jim Whitehurst has become the evangelist. He has spent his career closely examining the intricacies of big business from all sides, both hierarchical organizational structures and open everything firms, perhaps making him the most qualified of anyone to share insights on the benefits of running an open everything organization. His message and his mission are profound; open everything applies not just to software code, but to employees and culture. Open everything applies not just to employees and culture, but to home and families. Open everything applies not just to home and families, but to creating a better world... [Whitehurst's] notion is simple; almost everything in the world becomes better when it's open.