GigaOM » Red Hat

Inktank gears up Ceph storage with support for Red Hat Linux

Barb Darrow — Tue, 07 May 2013 13:00:57 +0000

One thing we learned at last month’s OpenStack Summit was that the open-source cloud crowd really, really likes Ceph storage. Ceph is an open-source distributed object store and file system that is clearly gaining traction in OpenStack shops. Now Inktank, a company that launched last year to offer services and support for Ceph, is now offering a new version that supports Red Hat 6.3 Linux and has pledged continued support for future versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

That the new release of Ceph, dubbed Cuttlefish, focuses on Red Hat is interesting since Red Hat bought Gluster for its scale-out storage capabilities in 2011 and declared Gluster to be “OpenStack Ready” last month.

The consensus at OpenStack Summit was that Ceph has advanced faster than the Swift storage module that came out of Rackspace and which handles object storage only. But the promised appeal of OpenStack is that users can swap in and out compliant plug-ins as needed for different functionality.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Scoop: Juniper, Ericsson go for OpenStack gold

Barb Darrow — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 13:26:05 +0000

The OpenStack Foundation may get more networking mojo next week when Juniper Networks and Ericsson are on the ballot to become Gold members of that organization.

Both companies are already corporate sponsors but have applied to join the foundation itself and their applications will be voted on on Monday, according to the agenda for Monday’s OpenStack board meeting. That meeting kicks off the annual OpenStack Summit in Portland, Ore. A Juniper spokeswoman confirmed that company’s application. ~~Ericsson could not be reached for comment.~~

Update: Mats Karlsson, VP of architecture and process for Ericsson, said the company brings an understanding of networking and telecom to the table. Stockholm-based Ericsson had already decided to offer OpenStack-based services because it liked the open-source ecosystem and sees tremendous traction. The company has services in beta now with commercial roll-out slated for early 2014

Juniper and Ericsson are already corporate sponsors of the open-source cloud effort, but joining the foundation will give them ~~them a seat on the board.~~ the chance to win a seat on the board. It also requires a funding committment of between $50,000 and $200,000. (The formula is pegged to company revenue per the OpenStack wiki.). Each of the eight top-tier Platinum partners – AT&T; Rackspace IBM, HP, Nebula, Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu — pony up $500,000 per year and must commit to a three-year tenure.

Other Gold members — the total number is limited to 24 companies — include Juniper rival Cisco Systems, Cloudscaling, Dell, Intel, Mirantis, Piston Labs(see disclosure), VMware and others.

Talk at the summit will no doubt focus on how new features and functions of the Grizzly release of OpenStack can bring value to customers. Folks will especially be watching for new customer stories. Most of OpenStack’s case studies to date revolve around tech companies — HP, Intel, Cisco/Webex — all of which are building OpenStack implementations for their own use or which they they want to sell. Now, with Grizzly being the seventh major release of code, it’s time to show OpenStack traction in the world beyond the tech bubble.

This story was updated at 8:45 a.m. PST with Ericsson comment.

Disclosure: Piston is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Applied Micro’s cloud chip is an ARM-based, switch-killing machine

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 12:00:14 +0000

Applied Micro Circuits, a chip firm that designs silicon parts for the computing and networking world, has spent the last three years making a big bet on the cloud computing market and the ARM architecture. The results began shipping last week, and the product essentially takes networking and computing and crams it all onto one system on a chip.

Dubbed the X-Gene server on a chip, the product has been touted by Applied as the first 64-bit-capable ARM-based server in existence, the ideal part for webscale users (check out the pic of Facebook’s Frank Frankovsky holding one up) and also the future of Applied Micro. It’s the first chip to contain a software-defined network (SDN) controller on the die that will offer network services such as load balancing and ensuring service-level agreements on the chip. It’s like shoving the networking and computing vision of the Cisco Unified Computing System on a chip.

This is a big deal. Although the first generation won’t have enough bandwidth to eliminate the need for a switch at the top of a rack, the following generation will.

Paramesh Gopi, president and CEO of Applied Micro, said that these new chips have now made it past the prototype stage (the board in the picture uses an FPGA instead of a production silicon) AND are now in the hands of several customers, including Dell and Red Hat. Gopi expects physical servers containing the X-Gene to hit the market by the end of this year.

Gopi’s big bet

The chip is manufactured at 40 nanometers and contains eight 2.4 GHz ARM cores that Applied has designed, four smaller ARM Cortex A5 cores running the SDN controller software (the pink bit on the block diagram below), four 10-gigabit ethernet ports, and various ports that can support more Ethernet, SSDs, accelerator cards such as those from Fusion-io or SATA drives. In short, this a chip that combines networking and computing in one package.

When about asked about the power consumption of the chip, Gopi said it will run at 50 percent of the total cost of ownership of a comparable x86 product, but wouldn’t discuss actual power consumption.

“We’ll be able to run your LAMP stack and SQL jobs on Xeon-class ARM cores, and the routing protocols and such will be running on the Atom-class ARMs,” Gopi said. “It’s the fundamentals of a rack on a single chip.”

Building this chip has taken four years. It required Gopi to visit ARM at its U.K. headquarters to convince them to give him an architecture license to build a chip for servers. In an interview with me at the Open Compute Summit in January, Gopi explained that he saw the flexibility and the architecture that ARM offered could become an asset for webscale computing, so he embarked on turning Applied Micro, a public company with a few hundred million in revenue, into a startup.

Like others, such as Barry Evans of Calxeda or Andrew Feldman of Sea Micro, he saw that power issues were raising the cost of operating data centers — and cutting into the bottom line at web businesses — and he thought he had a solution. His solution was to get an architectural license from ARM, so he could make a 64-bit-capable chip ahead of ARM’s plans to introduce that powerful a core. ARM introduced that core last year, and vendors of ARM-based server chips such as AMD and Calxeda expect to have 64-bit-capable chips next year. But Applied is shipping those machines today.

“We’ll end this wimpy core vs. brawny core debate once and for all,” Gopi said.

The new hardware mindset

Applied Micro CEO Paramesh Gopi.

Gopi has taken advantage of several different trends that are finally coming to fruition. The first trend is the use of the ARM core — ubiquitous in cell phones and tablets — for the enterprise and cloud computing market. But he’s also taking advantage of a more subtle shift happening in the chip world as it pertains to the data center — namely the opening up of the ecosystem.

The mobile industry has relied upon the common ARM architecture to build a wide variety of chips that give each vendor a slightly different set of features. Both Nvidia and Qualcomm start with ARM cores (hell, even Apple has an ARM architectural license) to build their application processors. This lowers the cost of designing chips, because engineers can start from a higher level when solving problems.

And the modularity of the ARM cores combined with an architecture license also means firms can customize their designs for a certain market without spending a huge amount of time or dollars. Gopi will actually address some of this at our Structure event June 19 and 20, in a presentation on designing hardware at the speed of software.

For Applied, this dynamic plays out in the existence of a new type of chip for the data center, but also in the fact that in nine or 12 months Applied plans to test the second-generation X-Gene chip, one that will support 100-Gigabit Ethernet and will obviate the need for a top-of-rack switch. Ironically, this architecture probably won’t be a welcome development for Applied’s existing networking clients like Cisco and Juniper.

But it’s clearly the direction that large webscale customers want to go. And the second-generation architecture is also important for the first-generation X-Gene products, because without it, Applied may not have a chance at getting technically savvy and forward-looking potential customers that need not just a single interesting product, but a real understanding of the roadmap before they commit to a new architecture.

So even as Applied ships these first products to customers for use in devices that hit the market at the end of this year, it’s already developing its production of the next generation 28-nanometer versions of the heavy-duty ARM cores and 100-Gigabit-capable networking while prepping for later versions that may include photonics and other elements that data center customers are already discussing as tomorrow’s technology.

It took a bold vision — and that trip to ARM — for Gopi to get Applied Micro to the table as these discussions about the next generation data center are playing out. But with this design, it has earned a seat. Now all it has to do is earn the business.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

How fourth-quarter 2012 will affect IT spending in 2013

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 19:06:48 +0000

Worldwide IT spending finished out 2012 with a growth rate of 3.8 percent over 2011, the lowest growth rate since 2009. Fourth-quarter 2012 earnings reports and guidance were notable in their lack of any decisively positive news to raise 2013 spending expectations much.

Those optimistic about 2013 point to the second half of the year (now only four months away) as when we’ll begin to see some stronger growth. In their view, Europe will be better, the U.S. will be stronger, China will begin to reaccelerate in earnest, currency will be stable, and (perhaps most importantly) the year-over-year (YoY) comparisons between 2012 and 2013 will be easier because mid-2012 was so weak. Moreover, as EMC CEO Joe Tucci stated during the company’s recent earnings call, “You can’t starve IT for too long,” which suggests that better times must get rolling again. On the other hand, CEO John Chambers’ statement in the Cisco earnings call, that perhaps 2012 represents the new normal, might be a better indicator of what we can expect in 2013. We’ll see.

That said, here’s what we’re expecting for 2013.

Table 1. 2012 and 2013 worldwide IT spending (in $ billions)

Market segment	2011	2012	2012 growth rate	2013	2013 growth rate	Note
Smartphones and tablets	$213	$265	24.4%	$319	20.4%	Smartphones and tablets
Hardware	$429	$419	-2.3%	$423	1.0%	PCs, servers, storage, peripherals, network
Software	$256	$270	5.5%	$291	7.8%	Systems, middleware, solutions
Service	$797	$805	1.0%	$826	2.6%	Consulting, IT outsourcing, systems integration, BPO, education and training, maintenance
All spending	$1,695	$1,759	3.8%	$1,860	5.7%

Overall, smartphones and tablets will lead the way, with a 5.6 percent worldwide IT growth rate in 2013. While Apple’s tepid forward guidance in its recent earnings call and its implications for smartphones and tablets gives us pause, we expect the category to continue to lead, with growth in the 20.4 percent range in 2013. In hardware, 2013 will look like 2012, with smartphones and tablets buoying the otherwise-weak spending in the PC, peripheral, and server segments. (This will be offset somewhat by stronger storage and network hardware spending.) Software continues to flourish — especially solutions-related software like SaaS-enabled customer-relationship management (CRM), supply-chain management (SCM), and industry vertical systems like health care. This sector will continue to grow in 2013. Finally, services has experienced a punishing 2012, and this area will only look modestly better in 2013.

A methodological note: We’ve reevaluated our model and determined that we have underweighted business-process outsourcing (BPO) as a service category. As such, we are restating 2012 and 2013 growth rates to accommodate a higher weighting of BPO in our services spending. The net is that growth in services and all spending are a bit more robust, since BPO is growing faster than the aggregate of traditional IT services. The full methodology can be found at the end of this report.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Startup Strongloop brings supported Node.js to Red Hat

Barb Darrow — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 17:56:20 +0000

Strongloop, founded by heavy-hitting Node.js committers Bert Belder, Ben Noordhuis and Al Tsang. has come out with a version of the popular server-side language for Red Hat Linux. Since Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is the Linux of choice for many enterprises, this is a significant development for the growing community of Node.js programmers and for enterprise developers who want a supported version of the language for their own work.

While there has been a Node.js download available for RHEL and its cousins Fedora and CentOS via the Red Hat Package Manager (RPM), there was no formal support from Red Hat or Joyent (the company behind Node.js) and Node.js itself is not included in the Red Hat distribution. Besides Red Hat/CentOS release 6.3, Strongloop Node also supports:

Debian/Ubuntu 12.10 (DEB)
Mac OS X Mountain Lion 10.8 (PKG)
Microsoft Windows 7 (MSI)

The official support and service that Strongloop provides could be critical for RHEL developers who want to make use of Node.js’ event-driven talents. Now if a RHEL developer has an issue or problem with Node.js he or she has to go to the mailing list for help. “Now they can get support from us and we write Node.js,” Tsang told me.

As Joyent CTO Jason Hoffman once told GigaOM, Node.js is a very good way to write high-performance servers that need to handle APIs and facilitate very fast data ingress and egress. Those are attributes that might come in handy for enterprise developers.

Strongloop’s news comes the same day Node.js v. 10.0 debuted.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Rackspace gussies up private cloud with new OpenCenter dashboard

Barb Darrow — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 15:25:16 +0000

Another day, another OpenStack announcement. Rackspace on Wednesday unveiled an update to its OpenStack-based private cloud with a new single dashboard for deploying, configuring and running those clouds in a company’s data center.

OpenCenter aims to make it easier for enterprises to automate rollout of updates and deploy their cloud in the first place. ”Deploying high-availability used to take a lot of manual steps but we can now point and click to do that in OpenCenter,” said Scott Sanchez, director of strategy for Rackspace. OpenCenter, he said, is part of an overall operations “fabric” that will let us roll things out faster, provide continuous deployment and updates right into the private cloud.

The OpenCenter code is free and available under the Apache 2 license.

More host operating systems to choose from

The new private cloud option utilizes OpenStack’s Folsom code base and will be updated to the newer Grizzly release when it comes out next month. Rackspace said its public cloud already uses Grizzly. Also with this private cloud release, customers can choose between Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS as their host operating system. In the previous private cloud, Ubuntu was the default host OS.

San Antonio, Texas-based Rackspace hopes its use of OpenStack across private, public and hybrid cloud deployment models will resonate with enterprise customers, many of whom still prefer to deploy workloads in their own (non-shared) data centers. Even Amazon, the king of public cloud, has started to open up to a hybrid model — with its Virtual Private Cloud capabilities that enable a business customer to rope off a section fo the AWS cloud for its own use and then with its alliance with Eucalyptus.

Lots of clouds fighting for business

Amazon touts itself as the low-cost, high-volume provider of cloud services — a claim it enhanced Tuesday with yet another price cut on it EC2 reserved instances – while Rackspace wraps itself in its “fanatical support” branding, as in “hey, we may cost more, but we give you actual service and support.” Many Rackspace customers attest that the company lives up to its name by providing actual engineers for phone support and other handholding. Amazon has a way to go there, although it is busily staffing up its enterprise sales and support teams. On the other hand, Rackspace has shown itself to be flexible on pricing as well: Last month it announced price cuts of its own.

OpenStack, in general, is a multi-vendor response to Amazon’s power in cloud computing services. But Rackspace, which helped birth the OpenStack effort with NASA three years ago, is now one of many OpenStack options. In the past year, Hewlett-Packard, Red Hat, Cloudscaling and other vendors have rolled out OpenStack clouds. And IBM, the king of enterprise IT players, on Monday announced plans to put all of its cloud resources on OpenStack going forward. So there will be a lot of contenders for these business workloads.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Exclusive: Startup AnsibleWorks pitches open-source IT configuration, deployment tool

Barb Darrow — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 08:01:57 +0000

A couple of former Red Hat veterans think there’s an easier way to configure, deploy and manage IT across an organization and founded AnsibleWorks to attack that problem.

Ansible co-founder Said Ziouani.

Systems administrators and developers want one tool for deployment, configuration and management — they don’t want to deal with agents and add-ons, said Said Siouani, CEO of Santa Barbara, Calif.-based AnsibleWorks.

No doubt Ansible’s orchestration engine will face off against popular configuration tools like Opscode Chef and Puppet Labs’ Puppet (see disclosure). Siouani characterized Ansible as a more “holistic” solution than what is on the market now in that it focuses on configuration management and actual deployment.

Ansible co-founder Michael DeHaan.

Ansible itself is an open-source project kicked off a year ago by Michael DeHaan, one of the Red Hat vets who also spent time at Puppet Labs (see disclosure) and was also the force behind Cobbler, a popular Linux server installation tool.

In the ensuing year, Ansible has drawn some name-brand users including Aerospike, AppDynamics, Basho Technologies, Care.com and Gawker Media. And, as of Tuesday, AnsibleWorks will provide maintenance and service subscriptions for that toolset.

“We’re coming into this fresh with an all-open source solution that is flexible enough to configure all your systems — physical, virtual and which uses a text-based language, not scripting, which makes it easy to learn to use,” said Siouani, who spent 10 years at Red Hat and was most recently executive vice president of sales at Eucalyptus.

Disclosure: Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Red Hat open sources its take on Hadoop storage

Derrick Harris — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 17:35:00 +0000

Red Hat is getting into the big data act more deeply, announcing on Wednesday that it’s open sourcing its Red Hat Storage Hadoop plugin as an alternative to the Hadoop Distributed File System. The plugin, which the company expects to release to the Apache Software Foundation some time this year, is based on the Gluster File System technology Red Hat acquired when it bought Gluster for $136 million in 2011. Red Hat has already incorporated Gluster’s technology into its Red Hat Storage Server product.

According to a press release announcing the news

“Red Hat Storage brings enterprise-class features to big data environments, such as Geo replication, High Availability, POSIX compliance, disaster recovery, and management, without compromising API compatibility and data locality. Customers now have a unified data and scale out storage software platform to accommodate files and objects deployed across physical, virtual, public and hybrid cloud resources.”

Because it’s fully distributed, Red Hat’s file system does away with the NameNode that keeps track of data in most Hadoop clusters and can be both a bottleneck and a single point of failure. (Although, the Hadoop community has mitigated some of these concerns with Apache Hadoop 2.0 (as has Facebook with its own engineering effort called AvatarNode).) Red Hat has also combined its storage and virtualization technologies so anyone using both can have virtual pool of storage and compute resources residing on the same physical infrastructure.

Red Hat isn’t the only company or organization trying eliminate problems associated with HDFS or to improve its utility to large enterprises and/or webscale companies. Companies such EMC, NetApp and others are offering their own alternatives, and Quantcast actually built and open sourced its own version of HDFS called the Quantcast File System. As we’ll be discussing at Structure: Data next month, Hadoop’s future prospects will be determined by how applicable it is to the workloads companies want to run, and some of the HDFS alternatives might represent solid options for enterprise workloads until Apache Hadoop can catch up.

Of course, Red Hat being Red Hat, Wednesday’s news isn’t all about big data. The company makes it pretty clear that it expects its Hadoop efforts to be part of a broader cloud computing push, in which companies can run their applications in big data environments that span private and public resources, including OpenStack and the Amazon Web Services clouds.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

This week in cloud: Red Hat snags ManageIQ; Amazon builds on devs’ devotion

Barb Darrow — Sun, 23 Dec 2012 14:00:57 +0000

Red Hat snaps up ManageIQ for $104M

Red Hat’s decision to buy ManageIQ, announced Thursday, gives it a stronger cross-cloud management story. ManageIQ, already a Red Hat partner, works with Red Hat’s CloudForms and Red Hat’s KVM-centric enterprise virtualization software but also with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure public clouds.

As InformationWeek reported when the deal was announced on Thursday:

“The acquisition is aimed at making Red Hat a stronger player in the creation of multi-hypervisor, on-premises clouds capable of working with various public cloud services. ManageIQ workloads can be configured to run via Amazon Web Services EC2 or Microsoft Azure.”

Planned support for the Xen-based Rackspace Cloud gives ManageIQ total hypervisor coverage.

This sort of multi-vendor kumbaya message is getting more important as customers evaluating cloud deployment want to be assured they won’t be locked into a single-vendor, single-technology-stack solution.

VMware also touted that rationale of heterogeneous support when it acquired DynamicOps last summer.

No surprise: AWS reigns supreme for developers

The vast majority (more than 70 percent) of developers surveyed by Forrester Research use Amazon EC2 for custom app development. Microsoft Windows Azure came in a distant second at 25 percent; with Google and Force.com following close behind that. This according to 106 developers participating in Forrester’s Global Cloud Developer Online survey.

And, of those EC2 users, about 19 percent said they expected their usage would hang steady over the next 12 months, roughly 12 percent said it would shrink and 43 percent expect it to grow. (See chart below.) Among those using Azure about 5 percent said their usage of that platform would shrink — about the same percentage thought it would stay the same, and about 19 percent expect their Azure use to grow.

Amazon rolls out fat new instance type, Data Pipeline

Amazon had a busy pre-Christmas week. On Friday, it launched its promised Data Pipeline service. And to keep those aforementioned EC2-mad developers happy it also came out with a big new EC2 instance type for data intensive applications. The new High Storage Eight Extra Large instances suit applications requiring high storage depth and high sequential I/O performance.

Such applications include data warehousing and log processing. For those with short memories, Amazon announced its Redshift data warehousing service at AWS: Reinvent in November. taken together, the Data Pipeline and Redshift could be a potent combination in Amazon’s quest to provide a platform for enterprise-class data warehouse applications –taking on such legacy giants as Oracle, Teradata, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Cloud computing 2013: how to navigate without a map

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 07:55:08 +0000

In 2013 IT organizations that support large enterprises will have to figure out how to successfully get mission-critical systems onto public and private cloud computing platforms. The way the industry will use cloud-computing technology in 2013 is not a matter of prediction but more a matter of following the existing adoption patterns and trends into the New Year. Those trends, discussed in this report, include the rise of standards, big data’s role in the cloud, industry-specific clouds, security, and more.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.