Friday Five — August 19, 2016

The tech industry is full of exciting trends that promise to change the face of the industry and business as we know it, but one that is gaining a huge amount of focus is containers. ... Lars Herrmann, GM, Integrated Solutions at Red Hat spoke to CBR about five common misconceptions. ... [One] misconception is that containers can replace virtual machines; they may look similar on the surface but they solve different problems. ... [V]irtualisation extracts the underlying physical world and provides a software defined infrastructure environment, containers don't. A container is running inside an OS instance and an OS takes care of running the underlying hardware but doesn't provide a virtual hardware environment into the container. One of the implications of this is that containers are lightweight because they don't need to contain everything that is needed to support the virtual hardware environment. "They can be smaller in image, smaller in surface, and also they have less of an performance impact because there's no overhead," he said. This is why a container can effectively be launched as quickly as a process, or application.

[Red Hat] JBoss Data Grid 6 is now the culmination of the project that started out as a little database cache. And Red Hat is now fully embracing the in-memory aspect of the product as its purpose in life. ... "Data Grid basically provides you a way to manage your application data in memory" [says Syed Rasheed, Red Hat's director of middleware solutions marketing]. ... "People want to take immediate action, as soon as something changes in the data. One of our customers is using Data Grid because they want to monitor real-time change in pricing of their catalog, and they want to correlate that event with, who looked at this item in the past five minutes, so they can alert them in real-time. 'Ah, there's a price drop in the item you just looked at in your previous session, five minutes ago. Do you want to buy it?' It's that kind of event broker."

The role of today's manager, says Whitehurst, is to "create a context in which people can do their best work." An important part of that is giving the work they do some meaning. "You need to start off with the mission of the company, why we're doing it, why it transcends just a paycheck – meaning is absolutely critical." Mission statements are a bit old hat now but it's nonetheless true that workers want to have a non-financial reason to do their job. At Red Hat that's an obsession with the philosophy of 'open source' software development. A more down-to-earth example could be as simple as helping customers try great food or manufacturing the highest-quality widgets in the country. Workers also need to see their role in delivering on that purpose. "People need to understand the strategy of the company and how they fit that strategy deeply. They need to understand the context of how to make the right decisions."

Saving time and money is probably the most traditional and long-running IT concern tackled by virtualization modernization. ... However, efficiency – together with stability and reliability – is paramount when modernizing or extending existing IT infrastructure and applications. Toward that end, you can modernize virtualization to save time and money. Many of today's virtualized infrastructures are not operated as densely as they could be. ... At the same time, having a higher density of VMs isn't useful if they're sitting idle or not being properly managed. ... Red Hat CloudForms provides the ability to manage VMs throughout their life cycle, from provisioning through operation and eventually to VM retirement. ... This level of automation leads to the more efficient use of infrastructure. It also means that a given administrator can handle more physical and virtual servers – and can do so more repeatedly.

Healthesystems, a provider of medical cost management solutions, needed to keep up with changing state healthcare requirements and customer demands. To achieve this improved agility, the provider decided to implement a new business rules management system (BRMS) to separate business logic and code and reduce time to market. A new business rules solution based on Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite improved reliability, speed, and manageability for the provider's critical report-generating system and created opportunities for future IT modernization.