Have you seen our coverage of Red Hat Summit 2014 day one? It's just a click away.

First thing's first

Like most people, the team at Red Hat Storage started the day with breakfast. A breakfast hosted by our GM/VP Ranga Rangachari:

Ranga talked about the importance of open software defined storage. We captured select slides from the presentation to share with you:

Ranga closed the breakfast with a comment you'll hear a lot from us -- "Community is the fountain of innovation from which we draw inspiration."

The Keynotes

The first keynote featured Steve Bandrowczak EVP, Hewlett-Packard.

Steve is not the type of person to mince words. After telling the audience about his experience consolidating a number of data centers he said, “I learned what CIO stands for. ‘Career is over.’” Steve talked about the history of IT -- from the original green-screen mainframe days where IT was king to today, where the pace of change and the response time demanded by users in minutes, not months, weeks, or days.  Steve's session featured social media quite heavily:

Steve shared a particularly poignant point regarding cloud computing: It's just a marketing term. With cloud you have an offering, you have users, you roll out upgrades frequently -- it's normal IT, just at an accelerated pace. Steve shared a case study from NASCAR, who wanted to harness big data to make their broadcasts more enjoyable. By tapping into the conversation on social media, they learned what the audience was curious about and were able to react in real time. Example, if someone on Twitter was wondering what was happening with a pit crew, NASCAR's systems (implemented by HP) picked up on that and switched to a feed of the pit crew working on a car. Next up was Brian Stevens, CTO of Red Hat:

Brian talked about how the IT industry of 6-7 years ago was pretty boring. What was the hottest topic back then, anyway -- consumerization of IT? Brian talked about what exciting times we're in now, with big data and cloud technology and mobile exploding around us.

Brian then alluded to the parallels between RPM, a tool that helped catapult Red Hat Linux into the mainstream over a decade ago, and Docker today.

Brian was followed by Sam Greenblatt from Dell:

Sam opened his talk by sharing a story about how his daughter was at the Boston Marathon during the bombing, and he was able to learn she was safe thanks to the cloud. The marathon organizers had set up sensors along the route to track runners, and the data from these sensors was used to determine who was safe and who might be in danger.

Sam talked about how committed Dell is to open source, and that it configures OpenStack as Infrastructure as a Service. He explains that Dell wants to enable enterprises to build apps in minutes, not months.

He also talked about a joint project between Dell and Puppet Labs to create Active System Manager, a tool that brings service templates, unified console, and a wizard-driven UI to make management of virtual systems painlessly easy.

Post-keynote

After the keynotes, we hit the partner summit to see what was new and exciting. We also took a few minutes to challenge Red Hat employees and partners alike to introduce themselves, and their solutions, in less than six seconds (click the audio icons on each video to hear!):

Red Hat Big Data:

 

ownCloud

We also paid a visit to the now-completed, after 25,000 pieces, LEGO mosaic:

The LEGO pieces will be donated to San Francisco Bay Area schools.

Sesssion

We attended the big data panel:

We heard a great point from MongoDB's Paul Cross who said "Big Data always focuses on volume, but we should also focus on how data is coming in."; and from HP's Andrea Fabrizi who said "...in Telco, the Big Data paradigm is shifting from network management to subscriber management." Paul also revealed an interesting, but not surprising, fact: 50% of MongoDB deployments are with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

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