Tag Archives: RedHat

Pondering Redhat’s future with IBM

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I woke up yesterday morning with a shocker of a news. IBM announced that they were buying Redhat for USD34 billion. Never in my mind that Redhat would sell but I guess that USD190.00 per share was too tempting. Redhat (RHT) was trading at USD116.68 on the previous Friday’s close.

Redhat is one of my favourite technology companies. I love their Linux development and progress, and I use a lot of Fedora and CentOS in my hobbies. I started with Redhat back in 2000, when I became obsessed to get my RHCE (Redhat Certified Engineer). I recalled on almost every weekend (Saturday and Sunday) back in 2002 when I was in the office, learning Redhat, and hacking scripts to be really good at it. I got certified with RHCE 4 with a 96% passing mark, and I was very proud of my certification.

One of my regrets was not joining Redhat in 2006. I was offered the job as an SE by Josep Garcia, and the very first position in Malaysia. Instead, I took up the Hitachi Data Systems job to helm the project implementation and delivery for the Shell GUSto project. It might have turned out differently if I did.

The IBM acquisition of Redhat left a poignant feeling in me. In many ways, Redhat has been the shining star of Linux. They are the only significant one left leading the charge of open source. They are the largest contributors to the Openstack projects and continue to support the project strongly whilst early protagonists like HPE, Cisco and Intel have reduced their support. They are of course, the perennial top 3 contributors to the Linux kernel since the very early days. And Redhat continues to contribute to projects such as containers and Kubernetes and made that commitment deeper with their recent acquisition of CoreOS a few months back.

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Houston, we have an OpenStack problem

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I have always wanted to look deeper into OpenStack, but I never got around to it. However, last week, something about NASA and OpenStack caught my attention … something about NASA pulling out of OpenStack development.

The spin was that “OpenStack has come on its own” is true, because OpenStack today has 180 (at last count on June 20th 2012) companies participating and contributing to the development, deployment and marketing of the highly popular Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud computing project. So, the NASA withdrawal was not as badly felt as to what NASA had said next.

When NASA CIO Linda Cureton announced that NASA has shifted to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for their enterprise cloud-based infrastructure and they have saved almost a million dollars in costs, that was a clear and blatant impalement to the very heart and soul of OpenStack. NASA, one of the 2 founders of OpenStack in 2009, has switched sides to announce their preference to OpenStack’s rival, AWS. It pains me to just listen to the such a defection. Continue reading →

RedHat to acquire Gluster

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This is breaking news. RedHat is to acquire Gluster!

What is Gluster? Gluster is a clustering Linux distribution started by Z Research under the direction of Anand Babu (who is currently Gluster’s CEO) aiming to commoditize supercomputing and supercomputing clustered storage. Gluster is open source but there is a commercial version as well. It runs on commodity 64-bit x86 hardware. The Gluster File System (GlusterFS) aggregates disks and memory resources into a pool of storage thru a single global namespace and accessed through multiple file-level protocols. The scale-out architecture is where storage resources can be added as a storage node in a building block fashion to meet performance and capacity demands, rather like what HP P4000 is doing to the block-level environment for SAN.

Gluster can integrated with most 64-bit Linux distros. This is done at the Linux user space but it can also be crafted at the Linux kernel space, where it is a software appliance, easily integrated into off-the-shelf 64-bit x86-64 platforms. This means that you can build a scale-out NAS pretty easily using your own hardware.

From an architecture standpoint, GlusterFS and its integration to a storage appliance looks like this:

 

Because it works in a modular add-on fashion, this architecture is distribution and extended by replicating the same architecture across additional x86-64 platforms (which is a storage node) as shown below.

 

It’s really easy to install Gluster and build the Scale Out NAS. I have been saving a couple videos about how Gluster is installed and I must say that it’s pretty easy. In less than 30 minutes, you can install your first Gluster storage node and then add additional nodes on the fly.

Enjoy the videos.

Video #1 (Gluster Installation)

(I have difficulty uploading the videos because WordPress requires me to purchase one of their solutions)

Video #2 (Creating and adding Storage Node in Gluster)

(I have difficulty uploading the videos because WordPress requires me to purchase one of their solutions)

Note: If you are interested to see the videos, please email to me at chin-fah.heoh@storagenetworking-academy.com.

This news gets me very excited because this is the perfect endorsement of what I have been saying all along. Storage networking and data management are the foundations of CLOUD and VIRTUALIZATION. Without data being stored and managed well, everything falls apart. And as I have mentioned many times before, this is a fantastic time to become an extra-ordinary storage engineer/consultant/architect/sales (maybe not!)