Friday Five — April 1, 2016

Open source software veteran Red Hat reported fourth-quarter results last Tuesday. The company met or beat analyst expectations across the board, and became the first open source business to record annual sales of $2 billion. To put that achievement into perspective, Red Hat crossed the $1 billion threshold just four years ago, and has doubled its yearly sales since then... On the earnings call, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst noted that his company is a terrible indicator for macroeconomic trends. This is objectively true, if you look at Red Hat's sales performance across market downturns compared to other enterprise software specialists... [Says Frank Calderoni, Red Hat CFO] "If you look back over a number of years, we have not been affected by economic downturns. Actually, we tend to see an acceleration of business in a downturn because most customers, when they are looking to spend less, start to look for a better-cost solution. And that fits so nicely in the model that we sell, where we sell open source which has a much lower cost profile than any of the proprietary offerings that have been out there. So that tends to drive more customers in our direction."

Red Hat and SanDisk Corporation, a global leader in flash storage solutions, today announced a strategic alliance aimed at bringing combined benefits of Ceph and flash storage to enterprise customers. SanDisk's award winning InfiniFlashTM flash storage system, paired with Red Hat Ceph Storage, offers world-class performance and efficient data management that can significantly reduce operational and capital expenditures. As part of the alliance, Red Hat Ceph Storage will be offered as the preferred Ceph solution for the latest SanDisk InfiniFlash storage system from SanDisk. The combination of open, software-defined storage from Red Hat and flash storage from SanDisk enables companies to serve a broad set of workloads with more tightly integrated, high-performing storage that scales.

"We want a world where free and open culture is widespread, we want people to work together as the default, and we want users to control their own computing destiny – that's the long-term vision. It's bigger than just Fedora as king of something. With our basic charter as a leading-edge distribution, Fedora isn't right for every situation. If you need a support lifetime of over a decade, Red Hat makes an amazing enterprise distribution which happens to be fed from Fedora work. Every time someone installs RHEL [Red Hat Enterprise Linux] – or CentOS – that's Fedora success. And, it's not just the direct derivatives; whenever Fedora pioneers technology that helps Linux and open source advance overall, that's a win." —Matthew Miller, Fedora Project Leader

Success for an OpenStack architect means taking the long view, say Vinny Valdez and Vijay Chebolu, both from Red Hat. They outline an approach to designing an enterprise OpenStack cloud that looks good up close, too. The role of the architect in OpenStack is less siloed, more flexible than in traditional IT environments, they say. These architects need to consider more frequent builds, maybe daily or weekly, and ways to enable their users to completely be self-serviceable. Everything should be API first, they add, and operations should be repeatable and improveable, rapidly... "Start small and use an incremental approach, building a minimum viable product (MVP) first and then iteratively grow that to cover more use cases," [Chebolu, a practice lead in Red Hat's cloud infrastructure team] says. "OpenStack releases every six months so you don't want to plan for something that's required two years from now." Planning your upgrades several release cycles into the future – forklift? rebuild? partial? – is also essential.

Late in 2015 Verizon went live with a five-data-center telco cloud, which it only just made public at a modestly attended break-out session during the recent Open Networking Summit (ONS). "This is for all of our networks," said Chris Emmons, director of network infrastructure planning with Verizon... "We're strategically placing these [data centers] through all our networks–wireless and wired," he said. "The idea is to build the cloud to serve any app in any location and have that connectivity pre-built." Verizon began working on the project in March 2015 by evaluating technology such as hypervisors, virtualization software, network interface cards, and other hardware. In the summer of 2015, Verizon conducted the design and testing of the data centers, dealing with such things as cabling, cooling, power, and selecting the hardware. By November, it had gone live with five sites in the United States: two with 100-plus nodes and three with 400-plus nodes. The data center platform uses a core-and-pod architecture, and it's based on OpenStack with Ceph storage.