Year: 2016

Red Hat announced its financial results for the first quarter of fiscal year 2017.

Total revenue for the first quarter was $568 million, with an increase of 18% from the same quarter last year (in constant currency). Looking at the financial details we can see that total subscription revenue earned for the quarter was $502 million, with an increase of 18% year-over-year (in constant currency). Operating cash flow for first quarter was of $232 million, up 8% year-over-year, total cash, cash equivalents and investments as of May 31, 2016 was $2.12 billion after repurchasing approximately $66 million, or approximately 900 thousand shares, of common stock in the first quarter.

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Today Red Hat released in beta version 4.0 of its KVM-based virtualization platform Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV).

As a major release RHEV 4.0 ships a wide series of enhancements including:

• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager 7.2 Support: Supporting all the latest RHEL technologies such: JBoss EAP 7, Java OpenJDK 8 and Postgresql 9.2
• RHEL 7 as host OS: This new host offers a better hardware support and also behaves more  like an appliance enabling simplified operations, easy packages & third party driver updates. The host ships with a new common installer for both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization hypervisor (RHEV-H) called Anaconda and a web-based administration tool for RHEV-H called Cockpit
• RHEL Atomic Host as guest OS: Administrators can now obtain information like a list of running containers on the Virtual Atomic instances

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virtualization.info has been following WhatMatrix since its inception and, after 6 months since the website has been launched, we are happy to report that its community is growing and contributing with a number of new comparisons.

WhatMatrix.com provides a comparison engine that, once populated with datapoints by its community members, offers the audience a tool to make IT purchase decisions, create solution proposals and perform technical product research.

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DockerCon 2016 began yesterday in Seattle with a number of announcements from Docker and key partners.

Here is a quick summary of the day:

• Docker 1.12 with built-in orchestration: starting with version 1.12 Docker added to the core engine a set of new API objects introducing, for example, the ability to describe Services and Nodes and to deploy and manage apps on swarms, aka groups of Docker Engines

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Yesterday, Bellevue (WA) based company WinDocks, released a free edition of its homonymous port of the Docker daemon to Windows called WinDocks Community Edition.

The company, founded by a small group of former Microsoft’s employees, rides Docker’s momentum and promotes DevOps practices in Microsoft’s space.

WinDocks Community Edition adds support for Windows 8 & 10 in addition to Windows Server 2012, extending container support for .NET 2, 3.5, 4.5, SQL Server 2008, 2008r2, 2012, 2014 and Windows applications to Microsoft’s desktop OSes.

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Containers’ security is one of the emerging topics in those companies moving this technology into production. A few small players emerged to compete exclusively in this portion of the market but now is time for larger companies, like Docker, to offer solutions in this space.
On May 10th the company released Docker Security Scanning, a tool able to provide risk and compliance management on docker images stored in private repositories on Docker Cloud and Official Repositories on Docker Hub.

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Yesterday, Bellevue (WA) based company WinDocks, released version 1.0 of its homonymous Docker engine for Windows.

The company, founded by a small group of former Microsoft’s employees, rides Docker’s momentum and promotes DevOps practices in Microsoft’s space.

WinDocks 1.0 is basically a port of the Docker daemon to Windows Server 2012 and provides container support for .NET 2, 3.5, 4.5, SQL Server 2008, 2008r2, 2012, 2014 and Windows applications.

WinDocks is available in two editions: standard ($400/core/yr) and SQL+ ($1,000/core/yr) with Developers licenses, providing unlimited use on a single machine available, for $249/year.

A free cloud hosted Test Drive is also available through the company website.

LANDesk Software, founded in 1985 and headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah , provides systems management, security management, service management, asset management and process management solutions with a strong focus on the physical world.

AppSense, on the other side, is a niche player in the virtualization market, baked by a number of former Citrix employees, with many ups and downs, especially in the last few years.

On Monday LANDesk announced to have signed a definitive agreement to acquire AppSense with the goal to expand its portfolio of endpoint management solutions to virtualized endpoints.

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Last week open source giant Red Hat announced the availability of version 3.6 of its KVM-based virtualization platform Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV).

While this new release provides the expected improvements from a technical standpoint adding things like:

• Hotplug memory support provides dynamic, one-click memory scaling, working with underlying infrastructure to give an application more memory “on the fly” while avoiding disruption to the application runtime.
• PCI device assignment enables administrators to directly assign a physical adaptor or device to a virtual machine, allowing for near bare-metal performance for graphics and networking-intensive computing.
• Host Update Manager: Streamlines the patch release process across the virtualized environment through integration with Red Hat Satellite, a systems management solution used by half of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization customers.
• Object Health Status: Provides visibility into external system health events, such as issues with storage, CPU, server or hard-drive performance, via the Red Hat Enterprise VIrtualization interface. This feature alerts admins to events that may cause downtime or negatively impact virtual machine performance, so they can proactively manage risk and potential downtime.

What catches our eyes is the newly integrated V2V tool aimed to simplify the migration from VMware to Red Hat’s platform.

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Yesterday Docker announced to have acquired a semi-stealth startup called Conductant, focused on workloads orchestration.

Both Conductant’s founders, Bill Farner and David Chung, have significant enterprise experience coming from the technology provider space and their experience will be spent on a commercial distribution for Aurora and its integration with Docker Swarm.

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