Sign up for our Technology Newsletter 
RedHat Buys InkTank
Red Hat has announced that it bought storage system provider Inktank.
Inktank is the company behind Ceph, the cloud based objects and block storage software package used in a number of Openstack cloud configurations.
Ceph will continue to be marketed alongside Red Hat’s own GlusterFS in a deal worth $175m, which the company does not believe will adversely affect its financial forecasts for the year.
In a statement, Brian Stevens, EVP and CTO of Red Hat said, “We’re thrilled to welcome Inktank to the Red Hat family. They have built an incredibly vibrant community that will continue to be nurtured as we work together to make open the de facto choice for software-defined storage. Inktank has done a brilliant job assembling a strong ecosystem around Ceph and we look forward to expanding on this success together.”
As part of the deal Ceph’s Monitoring and Diagnostics tool Calamari will also become open source, allowing users to add their own modules and functionality.
Inktank founder Sage Weil used his blog to assure users that the two storage systems will be treated with equal respect. “Red Hat intends to administer the Ceph trademark in a manner that protects the ecosystem as a whole and creates a level playing field where everyone is held to the same standards of use.”
Red Hat made the announcement fresh from Red Hat Summit in New York, where the company reaffirmed that it is the Linux distribution of choice at the CERN supercollider in Switzerland.
The Inktank deal is set to close later this month.
RedHat Goes Atomic
The Red Hat Summit kicked off in San Francisco on Tuesday, and continued today with a raft of announcements.
Red Hat launched a new fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with the title “Atomic Host”. The new version is stripped down to enable lightweight deployment of software containers. Although the mainline edition also support software containers, this lightweight version improves portability.
This is part of a wider Red Hat initiative, Project Atomic, which also sees virtualisation platform Docker updated as part of the ongoing partnership between the two organisations.
Red Hat also announced a release candidate (RC) for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. The beta version has already been downloaded 10,000 times. The Atomic Host fork is included in the RC.
Topping all that is the news that Red Hat’s latest stable release, RHEL 6.5 has been deployed at the Organisation for European Nuclear Research – better known as CERN.
The European laboratory, which houses the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and was birthplace of the World Wide Web has rolled out the latest versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation and Red Hat Technical Account Management. Although Red Hat has a long history with CERN, this has been a major rollout for the facility.
The logging server of the LHC is one of the areas covered by the rollout, as are the financial and human resources databases.
The infrastructure comprises a series of dual socket servers, virtualised on Dell Poweredge M610 servers with up to 256GB RAM per server and full redundancy to prevent the loss of mission critical data.
Niko Neufeld, deputy project leader at the Large Hadron Collider, said, “Our LHCb experiment requires a powerful, very reliable and highly available IT environment for controlling and monitoring our 70 million CHF detectors. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is at the core of our virtualized infrastructure and complies with our stringent requirements.”
Other news from the conference includes the launch of Openshift Marketplace, allowing customers to try solutions for cloud applications, and the release of Red Hat Jboss Fuse 6.1 and Red Hat Jboss A-MQ 6.1, which are standards based integration and messaging products designed to manage everything from cloud computing to the Internet of Things.
IBM Breaks Big Data Record
IBM Labs claims to have broken a speed record for Big Data, which the company says could help boost internet speeds to 200 to 400Gbps using “extremely low power”.
The scientists achieved the speed record using a prototype device presented at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) this week in San Francisco.
Apparently the device, which employs analogue-to-digital conversion (ADC) technology, could be used to improve the transfer speed of Big Data between clouds and data centres to four times faster than existing technology.
IBM said its device is fast enough that 160GB – the equivalent of a two-hour 4K ultra-high definition (UHD) movie or 40,000 music tracks – could be downloaded in a few seconds.
The IBM researchers have been developing the technology in collaboration with Swiss research institution Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) to tackle the growing demands of global data traffic.
“As Big Data and internet traffic continues to grow exponentially, future networking standards have to support higher data rates,” the IBM researchers explained, comparing data transfer per day in 1992 of 100GB to today’s two Exabytes per day, a 20 million-fold increase.
“To support the increase in traffic, ultra-fast and energy efficient analogue-to-digital converter (ADC) technology [will] enable complex digital equalisation across long-distance fibre channels.”
An ADC device converts analogue signals to digital, estimating the right combination of zeros and ones to digitally represent the data so it can be stored on computers and analysed for patterns and predictive outcomes.
“For example, scientists will use hundreds of thousands of ADCs to convert the analogue radio signals that originate from the Big Bang 13 billion years ago to digital,” IBM said.
The ADC technology has been developed as part of an international project called Dome, a collaboration between the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON), DOME-South Africa and IBM to build the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), which will be the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope when it’s completed.
“The radio data that the SKA collects from deep space is expected to produce 10 times the global internet traffic and the prototype ADC would be an ideal candidate to transport the signals fast and at very low power – a critical requirement considering the thousands of antennas which will be spread over 1,900 miles,” IBM expalined.
IBM Research Systems department manager Dr Martin Schmatz said, “Our ADC supports Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) standards for data communication and brings together speed and energy efficiency at 32 nanometers, enabling us to start tackling the largest Big Data applications.”
He said that IBM is developing the technology for its own family of products, ranging from optical and wireline communications to advanced radar systems.
“We are bringing our previous generation of the ADC to market less than 12 months since it was first developed and tested,” Schmatz added, noting that the firm will develop the technology in communications systems such as 400Gbps opticals and advanced radars.