Harish Pillay, Global Community and Technology Architect, Red Hat, talked about the open source software vendor’s endeavor to branch into areas beyond the OS such as Big Data and more
What’s new from Red Hat?
We have gone past the OS level, in some ways past the middleware—JBoss and all that—and looking at other aspects of computing like storage. We have a product that we have packaged and selling as an appliance; it’s a piece of software that herds your commodity hardware into a storage appliance. We acquired this technology from a company called Gluster based in Bangalore in September 2011. Pandora, the Internet radio, has petabytes of audio and they use this technology.
One area where there hasn’t been sufficient commoditization both in terms of the software as well as the equipment is enterprise storage. You need price points that are competitive and it has to be scalable. From a storage perspective, organizations are facing challenges when they try to deal with Big Data.
Our solution is independent of the application that uses Big Data. The goal is to use commodity hardware. It works with any kind of disk, any kind of interface and it gives an organization the ability to store the data next to you and not in an archive that has to be spun up. It starts with two nodes and scales up from there.
We are creating opportunities for ISVs, data scientists etc by providing an open platform for managing Big Data.
The interconnect is 10/40 GbE. If you have FC/Infiniband that also works; we are agnostic about that.
Does this work only with RHEL or are other platforms supported?
It’s an open platform that’s built on top of RHEL. It’s called Red Hat Storage. The genesis of this was Gluster. They continue as an open source project. We do additional engineering and release this technology with support. Below the Red Hat Storage layer, there’s the XFS file system that you require. This came out of the idea of being able to access streams of data.
What’s the deployment of RHEL like nowadays?
80% of Linux servers running in production environments are running RHEL.
Is Red Hat doing anything new pertaining to the Cloud?
As we move up the stack, another aspect that we have tackled is OpenShift. This is a Platform as a Service. There was no open source PaaS out there. So we created one. We are offering it directly and we are running it on top of AWS. You can run the same PaaS on a local machine. You can move your application back and forth. The platform supports Python, Java (through JBoss), Perl, PHP, Ruby and a whole bunch of other frameworks including Joomla. You use standard git tools. Best practices in terms of coding are available. We have Jenkins, an continuous integration tool sitting within OpenShift.
There’s a new category of developers called DevOps. They are both developers and they operate an entire stack. PaaS gives you to opportunity to create DevOps.
How many developers certified on your technologies are there in India?
We have 15,000-20,000 RHEL-certified engineers in India.
Red Hat typically has been a support company. What’s the lifetime of your software releases?
Our products are officially supported for 10 years. RHEL 6 is the current version and it will be supported till 2020.
Tell us about how your customers are using virtualization on RHEL.
We had a customer in Thailand who were running RHEL instances on another platform. The cost of spinning up a new VM on their existing proprietary platform was prohibitive. I asked him, if RHEL itself can do this, and you’re already paying for it, why not use it. They moved their entire infrastructure onto RHEL.
