Friday Five — February 3, 2017

As the world's value-creation activities move from industrial manufacturing to software asset development, and use of open-source software becomes more prevalent, government IT personnel should look to the past to ensure their future. This means taking a close look at their software supply chains and the components they're using to build applications. A major area of focus should be software supply chain. The same basic idea behind traditional industrial supply chain management can be applied to open-source software: fewer suppliers and high-quality parts lead to a reliable product. But open-source software supply chains have grown in complexity as open source becomes more popular. If federal IT professionals are not careful, they could end up with a huge number of suppliers and low-quality parts. There are a few strategies agency administrators can adopt to help their open-source supply chains remain secure and reliable: Build a parts list, understand the quality of the parts, and ascertain security implications.

Red Hat announced a collaborative research and education agreement with Boston University (BU), an internationally recognized institution of higher education and research, to advance research and education on open source and emerging technologies, including cloud computing, machine learning and automation, and big data. Via the five-year agreement, Red Hat plans a broad educational and research collaboration with BU with grants totaling $5 million administered by BU's Cloud Computing Initiative. Through the collaboration - spanning research, incubated projects, and fellowship and internship programs for students and visiting scientists - Red Hat and Boston University aim to advance research projects focused on emerging technologies, including open source operating systems, cloud computing technologies and services, machine learning and automation, and big data platforms. A fundamental goal of the collaboration is to combine the strengths of research and open source innovation, developing techniques and best practices to integrate the rigor and focus of academic research with the power of community-powered open source innovation.

Monash University, one of Australia's most prestigious research universities, has implemented a massive multi-petabyte deployment on Red Hat Ceph Storage. Eventually, the critical need to manage a continually growing pool of research data collided with the prohibitively huge investment presented by its previously deployed proprietary hardware solutions, leaving the University at a crossroads. Monash University selected Red Hat to implement a software-defined solution using Red Hat Ceph Storage on Dell EMC servers that can accelerate application performance, simplify systems management and address workloads at any level. Using Red Hat Ceph Storage as an object store, Monash projects that its software-defined storage solution will significantly reduce costs and give researchers the freedom to independently and incrementally add capacity and performance for future growth. Monash University's eResearch Centre is now able to store and manage massive workloads of data, already encompassing five petabytes, within a single infrastructure.

TransUnion, a global risk and information solutions provider, has migrated its applications and systems from a mainframe environment to one partly based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. As part of TransUnion's technology transformation, the company worked closely with Red Hat to move from mainframes to a more flexible environment. By basing elements of their new environment on Red Hat solutions, TransUnion has reduced its number of data centers and eliminated a third-party disaster recovery contract, supported its new servers, which are provisioned in hours instead of weeks, and improved application availability, with the company currently out-performing service level agreements for its applications.

The European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, is using
Red Hat OpenStack Platform to deliver the scale and flexibility required to drive its Embassy Cloud project. The goal of Embassy Cloud is to transform the way collaborative research, such as pan-cancer analysis, tackles the world's toughest biological challenges. The institute had previously used VMware's vCloud for its Embassy Cloud but was in need of a replacement solution that could scale its IT resources dramatically, both up and down. Recognizing OpenStack as an accepted standard in the research community, EMBL-EBI migrated to the Red Hat OpenStack Platform to deliver a scalable, flexible cloud platform that would support its objective of improving global research collaborations. EMBL-EBI considered two major factors when deciding to migrate: the platform had to be co-engineered to work seamlessly with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and the provider had to provide local, hands-on support in Europe. The provider's local IT teams had to be available to provide guidance and technical assistance to the institute's in-house teams, whenever and wherever required. Red Hat delivers on both.