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Ask anyone working in a complex enterprise IT environment and chances are they’ll agree that there are never enough resources to meet the demands of the business. Too much time and money is being spent on managing existing IT systems, rather than proactively developing new systems to deliver greater competitive edge. Meanwhile, CIOs and IT management are facing the ultimate challenge – to achieve more with less. Businesses are demanding more from their IT resources, while budgets are being sliced.
On top of that, systems are becoming more complex and more connected and the requirement to patch and fix these systems is becoming more critical. This is one area where businesses cannot afford to be complacent. As purse strings tighten, decision-makers have to re-think their approach to vulnerability management.
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Management software has typically fallen into one of two categories: big, integrated, and expensive or small, disjoint, and unconnected. Neither of these models are sufficient to meet the needs of all communities. On top of that, there hasn’t been an easy-to-use open source infrastructure to provide an integrated solution to monitoring, administration, and configuration, operational control, and software management.
Before JBoss AS came around, people bought one of the expensive, closed-source solutions. With its introduction, JBoss AS changed the landscape by providing a robust, open source alternative that was embraced to a great extent in the community. You no longer had to have the choice of building your own application server (as used to be the norm) or spend large sums of money on a complex and difficult-to-install product.
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I just reviewed David Carr’s article on the top 50 open source tools for CIOs to consider. It provides another perspective on how CIOs should view open source and how the environment for open source solutions is changing rapidly.
The economic challenges faced by most organizations reinforce the need to invest in value-oriented, highly functional open source products. Carr notes that you may also have an opportunity to better manage the open source tools that are already in your enterprise.
The selections reinforce the reality that whether you are considering Linux as an operating system, web services and application stacks, end user tools, wikis and content management systems, databases, programming tools or other applications, there are great open source solutions available. Read the full article at 50 Top Open Source Resources CIOs Should Know (And Maybe Love).
We’re using many of these open source solutions to run our business at Red Hat. We’ve found them to be both flexible and cost effective. They enable us to achieve our goal of driving innovation in Red Hat’s business.
For some thoughts on appropriate open source solutions for your personal applications, see my post on Migrating Your Personal Application Portfolio.
The Red Hat healthcare team is at HIMSS08 in Orlando this week. We’re excited about our partnership with One Laptop Per Child, which will enable the donation of additional laptops and educational material to children in developing countries. Our partners AMD, DLT and Vivat have been working with us to tell our story in healthcare, and we’ve got a full slate of meetings lined up with current and prospective partners — the amount of interest from ISVs and customers in using Red Hat and open source for healthcare is clearly gaining momentum. If you’re at HIMSS, stop by our booth #4771 for a visit and even get your shoes shined.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 was released almost a year ago, in March 2007. Our customer response has been overwhelmingly positive; it has been a catalyst for more and more companies to adopt open source infrastructure. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is the core of our Linux Automation architecture, which delivers major gains in operational efficiency, capital expense reduction and operating expense reduction. This expands the value which open source provides by an order of magnitude.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 has gained some industry awards, from organizations with interesting and important viewpoints.
In January, it was recognized as SearchEnterpriseLinux.com’s “Product of the Year” in the Linux Server Distributions category.
This month, Datamation announced its 2008 Product of the Year winners and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 received the most votes in the Enterprise Linux category. Datamation’s picks were selected by its readers, which are made up of IT professionals from across the industry, and we’re pleased to be picked as an outstanding product by this experienced crowd.
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The JBoss DNA project is building an enterprise repository to capture, version, manage and understand the numerous kinds of metadata used in software systems.
Why an enterprise repository? Plain and simple: there’s so much information and metadata going into software systems that it’s difficult to get a handle on exactly it and to understand what it means for the system. What components, services, schemas, data sources, policies, and subsystems do I have? What are the relationships between them? How does my production system differ from my development and test environment? What’s the impact of a proposed change? How has the system changed over time? What do I need to know to manage and govern the system?
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Eight years ago the U.S. regulatory authorities, and four years ago the European regulators made clear to Microsoft that its refusal to disclose interface information for its monopoly software products violates the law. So, it is hardly surprising to see even Microsoft state today that “interoperability across systems is an important requirement” and announce a “change in [its] approach to interoperability.” Of course, we’ve heard similar announcements before, almost always strategically timed for other effect. Red Hat regards this most recent announcement with a healthy dose of skepticism. Three commitments by Microsoft would show that it really means what it is announcing today:
In the middle of the great discussions and conferences taking place at JBoss World, Orlando, Red Hat quietly leaked out the first cut of what is likely to influence the future of virtualization. Project oVirt. oVirt’s aim is to transform the host virtualization layer into a small stateless image which can be embedded on FLASH, or booted off a CD or PXE. No local disks needed. No installs. A physical server can become a virtual server just by booting oVirt.
oVirt also includes a new web management console which can manage any libvirt-based virtualization system. Whether that be one personal system, or the enterprise. It is no accident that oVirt is tightly integrating with the freeIPA project, so that administrators will be able to authenticate, authorize, and audit their virtual resources across the enterprise.
Not a bad week.
During this year’s very successful JBoss World event, which took place last week in Orlando, Fla., I was given the opportunity to meet and exchange stories with some of Red Hat and JBoss’ most distinguished customers. Our customers were at the event to speak with our engineers and developers, swap experiences and how-to’s with other JBoss-technology users and attend sessions to learn about the things that we have up our sleeve for the future. Some also came to be recognized for their impressive and unique implementations of JBoss solutions through the second-annual JBoss Innovation Awards.
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Free software is becoming increasingly popular with non-technical users and, as a result, good documentation is becoming more important. The greatest barrier to achieving good, free documentation has not been a lack of interested contributors, but the difficulty of the tools required to create and manage regularly updated and complex documents.
Thankfully things have just got a lot easier: Publican has arrived. Red Hat’s documentation team has been using this tool, which automates the process of creating all the files needed to begin a new document, as well as exports the finished content into many of the most common formats including HTML and PDF. Now they’ve opened it up to the world and it is being hosted by the Fedora Project, whose own documentation team is set to adopt it.
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