Ansible is one of the four main players in the automation market, younger then the well known Chef and Puppet, has been launched in 2013 in Durham, N.C. and acquired last October by Red Hat.
Ansible itself is especially popular within the developers’ community, thanks to its simplicity and agentless nature while Ansible Tower is its control visual dashboard providing centralisation, role-based access control, job scheduling and graphical inventory management.
At the end of July Ansible launched release 3 of Ansible Tower under the name of Ansible Tower by Red Hat.
History
IBM announces earnings for Q2 2016
Yesterday IBM announced its results for Q2 2016.
If we compare with the same quarter in 2015 earnings per share, from continuing operations, decreased 22%. Net income, from continuing operations, decreased 24%.
Consolidated diluted earnings per share down 20% YoY and operating (non-GAAP) diluted earnings per share, from continuing operations, decreased 21%.
These results reflect the continuous shrinking of IBM’s server hardware and z Systems business but, considering investors’ reaction, emerging business such Cognitive Solutions (aka Watson) and cloud (aka BlueMix/Softlayer) are enough to keep Big Blue an appealing investment.
Red Hat announces earnings for Q1 2017
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.
Release: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 4.0 Beta
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
WhatMatrix community keeps growing
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.
DockerCon 2016: Day 1 wrap-up
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
Release: WinDocks Community Edition
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.
Docker releases Docker Security Scanning
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.
Release: WinDocks 1.0
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 Acquires AppSense
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.