What ever happened to OpenStack, the open-source software platform for cloud computing? It’s fully alive, actually. As for its wellness and prospects for the future, that depends on how one sees the glass — half full, half empty, or brimming over with public-cloud complexity. This year’s OpenStack show was not the most hotly anticipated conference ...

As if data collection, cleansing, wrangling, mangling and disentangling weren’t frustrating enough to enterprises, the General Data Protection Regulation is going live this month, impacting any business with customers in Europe. How are companies going to navigate all the twists and bends toward a data-driven business model? Will a vendor swoop in and show them the way through? ...

Red Hat Inc.’s crazy-enough-to-work business model of selling open-source technology in managed packages has a reverse mirror image: It’s also buying for-profit companies and spilling the tech out into the open-source community. “We buy companies and we open-source their software, and we make it available to you as part of your subscription,” said Denise Dumas (pictured), ...

In its ongoing assault on the complexity of containers (a virtualized method for running distributed applications), Red Hat Inc. acquired CoreOS Inc. earlier this year. CoreOS has broken ground in the use of Kubernetes (an open-source container orchestration platform) for operations automation. The two are blending their technologies to wrought out easy, practical value-adds from ...

Storing, moving and managing data is becoming a pain in the neck as modern workloads demand gymnastic data agility. Can a virtualized storage or data backup solution bring harmony to hybrid cloud environments and distributed applications making a mess of data? Distributed, data-centric applications are forcing virtualization technology to evolve, according to Duncan Epping (pictured), ...

How is NetApp Inc. not only alive, but lavishing in revenue growth as a storage company in 2018? By picking its battles, steering clear of far-out waters, and diving deep into storage as data management. “There is absolutely always going to be a place out there for a best-of-breed story,” said Bruce Shaw (pictured), senior director ...

Technology for social good is an expanding domain attracting boot-strapped entrepreneurs and industry giants alike. Sussing out solutions for epidemics, emergencies and natural disasters isn’t exactly simple arithmetic. Ingenious use of open-source technologies, big data analytics, and agile computing methods is helping innovators slay some of society’s biggest beasts. Red Hat Inc. and United Nations Children’s Fund have teamed up ...

Containers (a virtualized method of running distributed applications) awkwardly straddle a line between state-of-the-art and too hairy-to-handle. Thankfully, their complexity and that of Kubernetes — an open-source container-management platform — is coming under assault from partnering vendors. Red Hat Inc. announced container management partnerships with public cloud providers Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google Cloud ...

The term design thinking may conjure ideas of conceptual fluff or do-nothing aesthetics; in practice, though, it is a productive philosophy and practice for birthing brainchildren into the corporeal world. At least, that is the ideal that IBM Corp.’s multidisciplinary IBM iX design teams set for themselves. “Design we view as a craft; so we have very ...

Weather data by itself may not sound wildly appetizing, but when kneaded in with additional sources of data, it could bake out a fine predictive analytics meatloaf. “We’re not in the weather business; we’re in the decision business,” said Mary Glackin (pictured, right), senior vice president of science and forecast operations at The Weather Company, an ...