Archivo de la categoría: Red Hat

Big Data, CloudForms, Datacentre, health, HPC, News & Analysis, Red Hat

Red Hat helps Medlab share supercomputer in the cloud

redhat office logoA cloud of bioinformatics intelligence has been harmonised by Red Hat to create ‘virtual supercomputers’ that can be shared by the eMedlab collective of research institutes.

The upshot is that researchers at institutes such as the Wellcome Trust Sanger, UCL and King’s College London can carry out much more powerful data analysis when researching cancers, cardio-vascular conditions and rare diseases.

Since 2014 hundreds of researchers across the eMedlab have been able to use a high performance computer (HPC) with 6,000 cores of processing power and 6 Petabytes of storage from their own locations. However, the cloud environment now collectively created by technology partners Red Hat, Lenovo, IBM and Mellanox, along with supercomputing integrator OCF, means none of the users have to shift their data to the computer. Each of the seven institutes can configure their share of the HPC according to their needs, by self-selecting the memory, processors and storage they’ll need.

The new HPC cloud environment uses a Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack platform with Lenovo Flex hardware to create virtual HPC clusters bespoke to each individual researchers’ requirements. The system was designed and configured by OCF, working with partners Red Hat, Lenovo, Mellanox and eMedlab’s research technologists.

With the HPC hosted at a shared data centre for education and research, the cloud configuration has made it possible to run a variety of research projects concurrently. The facility, aimed solely at the biomedical research sector, changes the way data sets are shared between leading scientific institutions internationally.

The eMedLab partnership was formed in 2014 with funding from the Medical Research Council. Original members University College London, Queen Mary University of London, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, the Francis Crick Institute, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute have been joined recently by King’s College London.

“Bioinformatics is a very, data-intensive discipline,” says Jacky Pallas, Director of Research Platforms at University College London. “We study a lot of de-identified, anonymous human data. It’s not practical for scientists to replicate the same datasets across their own, separate physical HPC resources, so we’re creating a single store for up to 6 Petabytes of data and a shared HPC environment within which researchers can build their own virtual clusters to support their work.”

In other news Red Hat has announced a new upgrade of CloudForms with better hybrid cloud management through more support for Microsoft Azure Support, advanced container management and improvements to its self-service features.

Channel, News & Analysis, Red Hat, Storage, Storage as a Service

Red Hat launches software defined storage systems that run on commodity hardware

redhat office logoOpen source software vendor Red Hat has launched a portfolio of open, software-defined storage systems which will cut costs by running on commodity hardware. The systems will be sold through a variety of sources across Red Hat’s sales channel.

The logic of selling Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat Gluster Storage system through different channels is to widen the scope of opportunity for Red Hat’s partners, it said. The technology will be made available to any participants in the Red Hat Connect for Business and Red Hat Embedded programmes, as well as all Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Providers from 2016.

Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat Gluster Storage are open source, software-defined storage systems designed to cater for rapid expansion. They will run on commodity hardware and have durable, programmable architectures the vendor said.

Each is suited for different types of enterprise workloads and similarly enterprise customers will be able to mix and match the Red Hat partners whose skill sets are suited to the technical and vertical market conditions.

Red Hat Advanced and Premier partners are authorised to sell Red Hat Storage solutions, but only if they meet the training requirements for their region’s partner programme via the Red Hat Online Partner Enablement Network (OPEN). Having qualified, however, the resellers can be kept motivated as they benefit from competitive and flexible pricing models. Further service incentives come from opportunities to earn additional margin and recurring revenue.

Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat Gluster Storage subscriptions are scheduled to be available to partners through the Red Hat Embedded Program by the end of 2015. Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat Gluster Storage are scheduled to become available to Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Providers in 2016.

Training and certification, marketing and sales programs, and technical content for Red Hat Storage solutions will be available to certified partners in the Red Hat Connect for Business Partners portal.

“By making Ceph Storage and Gluster Storage enterprise-procurement friendly, Red Hat is positioning itself as a formidable IT storage supplier,” said Ashish Nadkarni, program director at analyst IDC.

Azure, Datacentre, Enterprise IT, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Red Hat, Virtualisation

Red Hat launches Cloud Access on Microsoft Azure

redhat office logoRed Hat has followed its recent declaration of a partnership with Microsoft by announcing the availability of Red Hat Cloud Access on Microsoft Azure.

The Access service will make it easier for subscribers to move any eligible, unused Red Hat subscriptions from their data centre to the Azure cloud. Red Hat Cloud Access will give them the support relationship they enjoy with Red Hat with the cloud computing powers of Azure, the software vendor said on its official blog. Cloud Access extends to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat JBoss Middleware, Red Hat Gluster Storage and OpenShift Enterprise. The blog hints that more collaborations with Microsoft are to come.

Meanwhile, in his company blog Azure CTO Mark Russinovich gave a public preview of the coming Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets offering. VM Scale Sets are an Azure Compute resource that allow users to create and manage a collection of virtual machines as a set. These scale sets are designed for building large-scale services targeting big computing, big data and containerized workloads, all of which are increasing in significance as cloud computing evolves, said Russinovich.

By integrating with Azure Insights Autoscale, they provide the capacity to expand and contract to fit requirements with no need to pre-provision virtual machines. This allows users to match their consumption of computing resources to their application needs more accurately.

VM Scale Sets can be controlled within Azure Resource Manager templates and they will support Windows and Linux platform images, as well as custom images and extensions. “When you define a VM Scale Set, you only define the resources you need, so besides making it easier to define your Azure infrastructure, this also allows Azure to optimize calls to the underlying fabric, providing greater efficiency,” said Russinovich. “To deploy a scale set, all you need is an Azure subscription.”

Example Virtual Machine Scale Set templates are available on the GitHub repository.

Channel, Linux, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Red Hat

Microsoft Azure to become a Red Hat Enterprise Linux channel partner

redhat office logoA new Microsoft-Red Hat partnership could make hybrid cloud computing a lot easier and less binding, in a surprise move that sees Microsoft become a channel partner for an open source company.

The availability of Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux-based systems on Microsoft Azure was the key component of a joint announcement on Wednesday. Microsoft will offer Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the preferred choice for enterprise Linux workloads on Microsoft Azure.

The two vendors also announced plans to jointly tackle issues that commonly arise when enterprises, ISVs and developers try to build, install and manage applications on Red Hat software across private and public clouds.

Under the terms of the partnership Red Hat systems will be available natively to Microsoft Azure customers and Microsoft Azure will become a Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider. In return, Red Hat Cloud Access subscribers will also be able to bring their own virtual machine images to run in Microsoft Azure.

Microsoft Azure customers can now make full use of Red Hat applications such as JBoss Enterprise, JBoss Web Server, Red Hat Gluster Storage and OpenShift, Red Hat’s platform-as-a-service offering.

The two partners will jointly offer enterprise-grade support for hybrid computing set ups. The cross-platform, cross-company support will span both Microsoft and Red Hat offerings. In a new initiative, support teams from both vendors will be located on the same sites, in a bid to achieve the level of support cohesion the public cloud lacks, according to Red Hat.

The two partners will also work together to unify workload management across hybrid clouds. This will see Red Hat CloudForms interoperate with Microsoft Azure and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, As a result, customers should be able to manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux on both Hyper-V and Microsoft Azure. Extra support for managing Azure workloads from Red Hat CloudForms is expected ‘in the next few months’.

There will also be a level of collaboration on .NET for a new generation of application development options, Red Hat said. Developers will have access to .NET technologies across Red Hat offerings, including Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

“The data centre is heterogeneous, and the cloud is hybrid,” said Paul Cormier, president of Products and Technologies at Red Hat. “Together, we’re offering the most comprehensive support agreement for our mixed technologies to support customers.”

Fujitsu, Hardware, Infrastructure as a Service, News & Analysis, OpenStack, Primeflex, Radhesh Balakrishnan, Red Hat, server, Vendor

Fujitsu, Red Hat partner on OpenStack-based private clouds

Red Hat and Fujitsu are partnering to develop OpenStack converged infrastructure solutions

Red Hat and Fujitsu are partnering to develop OpenStack converged infrastructure solutions

Fujitsu and Red Hat have jointly developed a dedicated solution to simplify the creation of OpenStack private clouds.

The Primeflex is a converged compute and storage combines Fujitsu’s server technology with Red Hat OpenStack and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform software, and backed by Fujitsu’s professional services outfit.

The companies said the OpenStack-based converged offering will speed up cloud deployment.

Harald Bernreuther, director global infrastructure solutions at Fujitsu said: “Primeflex for Red Hat OpenStack can underpin any organisation’s plan to transform their business model by leveraging cloud computing. By opting for an OpenStack-based solution, organisations can run new cloud-scale workloads while also optimising costs.

“Primeflex for Red Hat OpenStack extends the philosophy of cost optimisation, through simplifying system maintenance and consolidating technology updates across the entire system stack, all the way from the underlying hardware through to the operating system,” Bernreuther said.

Red Hat said there is value in driving strong integration between software and hardware in the cloud space.

“OpenStack is a rapidly-growing, open source cloud infrastructure platform that is cost-effective, open, flexible and highly scalable,” said Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager, OpenStack, Red Hat.

“We are excited about Fujitsu’s offering based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform to deliver private cloud infrastructure solutions and we look forward to continuing the collaboration to provide customers with an innovative cloud platform for digital business initiatives,” he said.

Red Hat isn’t the only OpenStack vendor boosting its converged infrastructure strategy as of late. In July Mirantis unveiled plans to work with a range of vendors, initially Dell and Juniper, to deliver OpenStack-based converged infrastructure solutions for enterprises.

Enterprise IT, Features, Interviews, Red Hat, Werner Knoblich

A tale of two ITs

Werner Knoblich, head of strategy at Red Hat in Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA)

Werner Knoblich, senior vp and gm of Red Hat in EMEA

Gartner calls it ‘bimodal IT’; Ovum calls it ‘multimodal IT’; IDC calls it the ‘third platform’. Whatever you choose to call it, they are all euphemisms for the same evolutions in IT: a shift towards deploying more user-centric, mobile-friendly software and services that more scalable, flexible and easily integrated than the previous generation of IT services. And while the cloud has evolved as an essential delivery mechanism for the next generation of services, it’s also prompting big changes in IT says Werner Knoblich, senior vice president and general manager of Red Hat in EMEA.

“The challenge with cloud isn’t really a technology one,” Knoblich explains, “but the requirements of how IT needs to change in order to support these technologies and services. All of the goals, key metrics, ways of doing business with vendors and service providers have changed.”

Most of what Knoblich is saying may resonate with any large organisation managing a large legacy estate that wants to adopt more mobile and cloud services; the ‘two ITs can be quite jarring.

The chief goal used to be reliability; now it’s agility. In the traditional world of IT the focus was on price for performance; now it’s about customer experience. In traditional IT the most common approach to development was the classic ‘waterfall’ approach – requirements, design, implementation, verification, maintenance; now it’s all about agile and continuous delivery.

Most assets requiring management were once physical; now they’re all virtualised machines and microservices. The applications being adopted today aren’t monolithic beasts as they were traditionally, but modular, cloud-native apps running in Linux containers or platforms like OpenStack (or both).

Not just the suppliers – but also the way they are sourced – has changed. In the traditional world long-term, large-scale multifaceted deals were the norm; now, there are lots of young, small suppliers, contracted in short terms or on a pay-as-you-go basis.

“You really need a different kind of IT, and people who are very good in the traditional mode aren’t necessarily the ones that will be good in this new hybrid world,” he says. “It’s not just hybrid cloud but hybrid IT.”

The challenges are cultural, organisational, and technical. According to the 2015 BCN Annual Industry Survey, which petitioned over 700 senior IT decision makers, over 67 per cent of enterprises plan to implement multiple cloud services over the next 18 months, but close to 70 per cent were worried about how those services would integrate with other cloud services and 90 per cent were concerned about how they will integrate those cloud services with their legacy or on-premise services.

That said, open source technologies that also make use of open standards play a massive role in ensuring cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-legacy integrations are achievable and, where possible, seamless – one of the main reasons why Linux containers are gaining so much traction and mind share today (workload portability). And open source technology is something Red Hat knows a thing or two about.

Beyond its long history in server and desktop OSs (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and middleware (JBoss) the company is a big sponsor and early backer of Open Stack, increasingly popular cloud building software built on a Linux foundation. It helped create an open source platform as a service, OpenShift. The company is also working on Atomic Host, an open source container-based hosting mechanism for a slimmed down version of RHEL with support for other open source container technologies including Kubernetes and Docker, the darlings of the container community.

“Our legacy in open source is extremely important and even more important in cloud than the traditional IT world,” Knoblich says.

“All of the innovation happening today in cloud is open source – think of Docker, OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes, and you can’t really think of one pure proprietary offering that can match these in terms of the pace of innovation and the rate at which new features are being added,” he explains.

But many companies, mostly the large supertankers, don’t yet see themselves as ready to embrace these new technologies and platforms – not just because they don’t have the type or volume of workloads to migrate, because they require a huge cultural and organisational shift. And cultural as well as organisational shifts are typically rife with political struggles, resentment, and budgetary wrestling.

“You can’t just install OpenStack or Dockerise your applications and ‘boom’, you’re ready for cloud – it just doesn’t work that way. Many of the companies that are successfully embracing these platforms and digitising their organisations set up a second IT department that operates in parallel to the traditional one, and can only seed out the processes and practices – and technologies – they’ve embraced when critical mass is reached. Unless that happens, they risk getting stuck back in the traditional IT mentality.”

An effective open hybrid approach ultimately means not only embracing the open source solutions and technologies, but recognising that some large, monolithic applications – say, Cobol-based mainframe apps – won’t make it into this new world; neither will the processes needed to maintain those systems.

“For some industries, like insurance for instance, there isn’t a recognised need to ditch those systems and processes. But for others, particularly those being heavily disrupted, that’s not the case. Look at Volkswagen. They don’t just see Mercedes, BMW and Tesla as competitors – they see Google and Apple as competitors too because the car becomes a technology platform for services.”

“No industry is secure from disruption, particularly from players that scarcely existed a few years ago, which is why IT will be multi-modal for many, many years to come,” he concludes.

This interview was developed in partnership with Red Hat

AT&T, Box, Cisco, Cloud Foundry Foundation, CoreOS, Cycle Computing, Docker, eBay, Goldman Sachs, Google, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Joyent, Kismatic, Linux containers, Mesosphere, News & Analysis, Open Source, Red Hat, Switch Supernap, Twitter, Univa, VMware

Box, Docker, eBay, Google among newly formed Cloud Native Computing Foundation

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation is putting Linux containers at the core of its definition of 'cloud-native' apps

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation is putting Linux containers at the core of its definition of ‘cloud-native’ apps

The Linux Foundation along with a number of enterprises, cloud service providers , telcos and vendors have banded together to form the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in a bid to standardise and advance Linux containerisation for cloud.

The newly formed open source foundation, a Linux Foundation collaborative project, plans to create and drive adoption of common container technologies at the orchestration level, and integrate hosts and services by defining common APIs and standards.

The organisation also plans to assemble specifications to address a “comprehensive set of container application infrastructure needs.”

The members at launch include AT&T, Box, Cisco, Cloud Foundry Foundation, CoreOS, Cycle Computing, Docker, eBay, Goldman Sachs, Google, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Joyent, Kismatic, Mesosphere, Red Hat, Switch Supernap, Twitter, Univa, VMware and Weaveworks.

“The Cloud Native Computing Foundation will help facilitate collaboration among developers and operators on common technologies for deploying cloud native applications and services,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation.

“By bringing together the open source community’s very best talent and code in a neutral and collaborative forum, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation aims to advance the state-of-the-art of application development at Internet scale,” Zemlin said.

The central goal of the foundation will be to harmonise container standards and techniques. A big challenge with containers today is there are many, many ways to implement them, with a range of ‘open ecosystems’ and vendor-specific approaches, all creating one heterogeneous, messy pool of technologies that don’t always play well together.

That said, the foundation expects to build on other existing open source container initiatives including Docker’s recently announced Open Container Initiative (OCI), with which it will work on building its container image spec into the standards it develops. Google also announced that the foundation would henceforth govern development of Kubernetes, which reached v.1 this week, over to the foundation.

“Google is committed to advancing the state of computing, and to helping businesses everywhere benefit from the patterns that have proven so effective to us in operating at Internet scale,” said Craig McLuckie, product manager at Google. “We believe that this foundation will help harmonize the broader ecosystem, and are pleased to contribute Kubernetes, the open source cluster scheduler, to the foundation as a seed technology.”

Ben Golub, chief executive of Docker said while the OCI offers a solid foundation for container-based computing many standards and fine details have yet to be agreed.

“At the orchestration layer of the stack, there are many competing solutions and the standard has yet to be defined. Through our participation in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, we are pleased to be part of a collaborative effort that will establish interoperable reference stacks for container orchestration, enabling greater innovation and flexibility among developers. This is in line with the Docker Swarm integration with Mesos,” Golub said.

Channel, Linux, Mark Enzweiler, Michael Ferris, News & Analysis, Red Hat

Red Hat beefs up cloud partner programme as ecosystem broadens

Red Hat is broadening its cloud partner programme

Red Hat is broadening its cloud partner programme

Red Hat is replacing its existing cloud provider programme with a revamped one it claims will help provide better support for distributors, managed service providers and systems integrators. The company said the move was in response to what it sees as a broadening ecosystem of partnerships in cloud.

The “Certified Cloud and Service Provider” programme will replace the existing “Certified Cloud Provider” initiative and broaden the types of members included. The company will  certify and provide technical support to vendors as well as service providers offering Red Hat-based cloud services for any type of cloud deployment.

The company said the move was driven in part by the continued adoption of newer technologies and platforms like PaaS and Linux containers, and the broadening of the ecosystem of potential partners.

“Much like enterprise IT itself, the world of cloud computing is constantly evolving, especially with the growing promise of hybrid cloud approaches and Linux container-based architectures,” said Michael Ferris, senior director, Business Architecture, Red Hat.

“The Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider program is designed to encompass nearly all service provider models, spanning the public cloud to on-site managed services, offering our customers a secure, stable and trusted partner ecosystem upon which to build their next-generation IT projects using Red Hat solutions.”

Red Hat said the revamped programme will launch with about 13 of the 15 service providers recognised in Gartner’s oft-cited Magic Quadrant, and has grown close to 60 per cent from the previous year. The company has close to 50 cloud providers signed up to the programme so far.

Mark Enzweiler, senior vice president, Global Partners and Alliances, Red Hat said: “The Certified Cloud and Service Provider program is an important next step for one of Red Hat’s key channels. Our partners want to develop their businesses based on enterprise-ready open source technologies, and this global program delivers new opportunities for recurring revenue to a diverse set of participating partners to expand their business with Red Hat.”

Acronis, Appointment, Crenshaw, Infrastructure as a Service, News & Analysis, Rackspace, Red Hat, VeriSign

Rackspace taps former VeriSign, Red Hat exec to lead strategy, product engineering

Scott CrenshawRackspace has appointed Scott Crenshaw to the role of senior vice president of strategy and product. Crenshaw, who formerly hails from VeriSign, will oversee the company’s corporate strategy, business development and product and engineering portfolio.

Crenshaw most recently served as senior vice president of products at VeriSign, where he led the development of the company’s new products and services. Before that he served as vice president of strategy and chief marketing officer at Acronis, a data backup and recovery solutions provider, and spent a number of years at Red Hat, where he served as vice president and general manager of the cloud business unit.

He also holds a number of patents related to subscription service provision and monitoring.

“We are excited to have someone of Scott’s caliber and experience joining our team,” said Rackspace president and chief executive officer Taylor Rhodes.

“Throughout his career, Scott has established a strong track record of developing winning strategies, managing and growing unique product offerings and working collaboratively with colleagues and customers. Scott will work closely with our marketing, sales, support and other critical functions to drive compelling product offerings and the best customer experience in the industry.”

Crenshaw said: “I am thrilled to be a part of this talented team at such an exciting moment in the company’s history.”

 

Dell, Jim Ganthier, Radhesh Balakrishnan, Red Hat

Red Hat, Dell redouble OpenStack private cloud efforts

Red Hat and Dell are co-developing OpenStack-based private cloud solutions

Red Hat and Dell are co-developing OpenStack-based private cloud solutions

Red Hat and Dell have announced a series of co-engineered, high-density servers the companies claim are optimised for large-scale OpenStack deployments.

The co-engineered servers ship with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and are based on Dell PowerEdge R630 and R730xd high-density rack servers, the latter ideal for compute and the latter optimised for storage utilisation.

“Enterprise customers are requiring robust and rapidly scalable cloud infrastructures that deliver business results,” said Jim Ganthier, vice president and general manager, Dell Engineered Solutions and Cloud.

“Dell and Red Hat continue to jointly deliver cost effective, open source-based cloud computing solutions that provide greater agility to our customers, and this newest version of the Dell Red Hat Cloud Solution leverages best of breed technology from both companies to do so,” Ganthier said.

Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager, OpenStack at Red Hat said: “Red Hat’s ongoing collaboration with Dell to co-engineer enterprise-grade cloud solutions is further enhancing OpenStack to be production-ready.End customers continue to benefit from Red Hat’s strategic partnership with Dell as we deliver joint solutions that streamline deployment and accelerate time to innovation.”

A number of interrelated forces seem to be at play here. In revealing its fourth quarter 2015 financial results last month Red Hat said deals involving OpenStack-based offerings tripled when compared to the fourth quarter 2014, and with HP pushing its Helion OpenStack-based private cloud offerings hard it seems reasonable to expect Dell, one of its largest private cloud rivals, would want to counter with OpenStack-integrated offerings of its own.