Friday Five — April 22, 2016

Red Hat made it clear a few years ago that it couldn't rely on its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) glory forever. It needed a path to transformation and it saw a way with OpenStack and the hybrid cloud. [On Wednesday] it continued its steady march toward fulfilling that cloudy vision with the release of OpenStack Platform 8 and the Red Hat Cloud Suite. While RHEL remains a mainstay for the company, the company's shift to the cloud has been determined and purposeful... In its new version, Red Hat improved manageability, always a biggie with a complex system like OpenStack and made upgrades around storage, networking and compute. It also focused on the needs of telcos, big companies with huge networking operations looking to move to OpenStack–a market where Red Hat is hoping to make a big splash. The cloud suite offers an integrated package with cloud, DevOps and container tools in a single solution with the kind of management layer you would expect in such a suite. It combines Red Hat OpenStack with Red Hat OpenShift, its container environment and CloudForms for overall management and the ability to add self-service in a private cloud setting. The idea is to provide an integrated package, but recognizing not everyone will want to get the entire solution from one company, it will also offer the pieces individually and work with other offerings.

For the fourth consecutive year, Red Hat has been awarded a 5-Star rating in the CRN 2016 Partner Program Guide. CRN describes this annual guide as a definitive listing of technology vendors that provide service solutions to the IT channel. The 5-Star Partner Program Guide rating recognizes an elite subset of companies that offer solution providers the best partnering elements in their channel programs. When compiling the list, CRN assesses each vendor's application based on investments in program offerings, partner profitability, partner training, education and support, marketing programs and resources, sales support, and communication... We were also recently named to CRN's Virtualization 50 list for the fourth time, which is great recognition of the work we've done to deliver a top-performing, enterprise-class open source virtualization platform. The Virtualization 50 is designed to help solution providers identify and evaluate virtualization solutions that enable them to modernize their datacenters while leveraging existing investments and building a foundation for the future.

Last week at the Red Hat North America Partner Conference (NAPC), Microsoft and Red Hat celebrated our growing partnership. From running Red Hat Enterprise Linux in Azure to Microsoft .NET apps on Red Hat's OpenShift, partners were excited about our joint offering and how it can deliver value for their customers... There's been very strong feedback from partners–and by extension, their customers–that they really want to see both companies work together and have Red Hat offerings available on Azure and to find ways to work together across both of our platforms in delivery of the hybrid cloud. This has led to additional projects and discussions beyond Azure to application platforms such as .NET and OpenShift, hybrid management from both Microsoft and Red Hat, and on-premise opportunities for integration. As Red Hat's Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and Microsoft's AzureStack get deployed in the market, they are looking for ways that we can better integrate and partner together there as well.

The Open Patient, part of Red Hat Films' Open Source Stories series, tells the story of how openness is changing the patient/doctor relationship–and the healthcare industry as a whole. It also explores OpenNotes, an initiative focused on giving patients access to their healthcare records. This film focuses on 2 individuals, Liz and Steven, who approach having brain cancer in different, innovative ways, and who also support the open patient approach to healthcare.

You're probably pretty good at security. You have a well trained team, efficient, up-to-date on conquering the latest threats, and well-rehearsed for when the inevitable happens. You have worked very hard to secure your organization, but now you're supposed to secure someone else's environment–"the cloud?" And now developers can bring their own replacement parts for the operating system with containers? Are you kidding me?! Relax. You've got this. ... Securing your hybrid cloud (multiple public and private clouds, different virtualization vendors, and now containers), for all the new work it adds to your queue, is an incredible opportunity to improve visibility into the different branches of your infrastructure and match placement and isolation to threats. Introducing a layer of management tools permits this visibility, isolation, and automation to simplify the whole process.