Friday Five — May 15, 2015

How will you evolve your IT infrastructure strategy to respond to new business demands while maintaining your core infrastructure? How will you define your business in a hybrid IT world? See how Red Hat technologies can help.

SaskTel, Saskatchewan's leading full-service communications provider, had huge volumes of syslog data streaming in from devices across its network. It had a new analytical platform capable of taking in and interrogating this data in all its volume, variety, and velocity, but it didn’t have an affordable solution for storing the data long term. Then SaskTel analysts discovered the versatility and affordability of software-defined storage with Red Hat Gluster Storage.

Red Hat announced that Red Hat CloudForms and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 have won SIIA CODiE Awards for Best Cloud Management Solution and Best Open Source Innovation, respectively. The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), the principal trade association for the software and digital content industries, announced Red Hat’s win... Red Hat CloudForms provides the industry's most robust open source management experience robust management experience across multiple platforms... Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 not only lays the foundation for the open hybrid cloud and serves enterprise workloads across converged infrastructures, but also pushes the operating system beyond today's position as a commodity platform.

Companies struggling with a "two track" approach to IT - seeking to sustain stability in core IT but also support an agile methodology - should start with mobile app development, according to Cathal McGloin, formerly CEO of mobile application platform provider FeedHenry, now VP Mobile Platforms at Red Hat... "The whole idea is keeping existing systems and skills running, but also introducing a new track with new skills, new tools and new ways of doing things that are more agile. You keep them alongside each other, rather than trying to change things altogether."

Organizations of all kinds have long struggled to accurately measure the performance of individual members. The typical approach is to assess an individual’s performance against a metric usually tied to whether or not they performed a task and the amount of output they generated by doing so... But what about the kinds of jobs where measuring someone’s “output” isn’t about counting the number of widgets they produced, but rather it’s about how they managed a team or influenced others or helped people collaborate better?... That’s why at Red Hat we’ve developed a simpler, more flexible approach to performance reviews, one that doesn’t limit us to narrow measures of performance.