[HN Gopher] IBM swallows Red Hat storage products
___________________________________________________________________
IBM swallows Red Hat storage products
Author : ingve
Score : 157 points
Date : 2022-10-06 10:57 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blocksandfiles.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blocksandfiles.com)
| linuxftw wrote:
| I've had the misfortune of using ceph both supported and
| unsupported. IMO, it's a nightmare to use, it constantly has
| problems, there's tons of bugs in every release. We're currently
| several releases behind because there's some kind of major
| problem with each of the newer versions.
|
| It's sad, because there's a lot of genius level people that work
| on Ceph. But the project as a whole is not high enough quality to
| be reliable.
|
| I imagine most people that work on ceph (eg, the code, not the
| rest of the org) will want to move to greener pastures soon.
| Anyone that wants to work for IBM pretty much already did.
| trasz wrote:
| Which ones of the "swallowed" were not
| helloworldware/marketingware?
| trufas wrote:
| Ceph is the big one
| LinuxBender wrote:
| _Ceph is not becoming Spectrum Ceph. Along with ODF, it will
| remain 100 percent open source. IBM said it will assume Premier
| Sponsorship of the Ceph Foundation, whose members collaborate on
| the Ceph open source project._
|
| That is the key take-away for me that I hope remains true and
| does not go the route of Sequent. Should that be the case I also
| hope the Ceph Foundation keep Ceph alive and independent from IBM
| perhaps by forking it in the same manor that was done with MySQL
| (MariaDB and others) when Oracle acquired it.
| ThaDood wrote:
| What would be the ramifications? IBM now has a forked version
| of ODF and Ceph with enterprise support? Ceph and ODF get
| abandoned?
| 0xF2 wrote:
| Red Hat Ceph Storage and ODF continue. The same team will
| continue to develop newer releases, now with dual IBM and RHT
| corporate access.
|
| Open Source commitment, upstream first, and foundation
| continue as before.
|
| I am a member of the team, and while we are certainly
| adjusting to the news, we are also pretty excited. Red Hat
| has been generous to Ceph, but it could not take Ceph beyond
| platform storage for OpenStack and Kubernetes -- we want to
| reach for the full "Linux of Storage" original vision.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| go the route of Sequent?
| qwertyuiop_ wrote:
| > It's 10x cheaper to build your own infrastructure than use AWS
| on-demand instances
|
| It's always cheaper on the bill of materials. Who is going to
| build and maintain the complex infrastructure. It would be
| interesting to see the TCO over 5 years.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| This depends so much on your usecases.
|
| In our company it certainly is not cheaper. But what they do is
| ridiculous. They just moved from physical datacenters to AWS
| instances. Every "server" instance is running 24/7 independent
| of load, and you have to fill in an excel of 10 tabs to get
| permission to fire up an instance. In fact, the only thing they
| changed is the physical rack location tab to an AWS zone one :P
|
| So now we are "in the cloud" but we have almost none of the
| benefits said cloud offers. And we're using it in such an
| inefficient way that we're wasting money by the millions. And
| we kept all the internal overhead we already had when we
| managed the datacenters itself (that's what that excel is for).
|
| Once we actually start dynamically spinning up instances based
| on load and shutting them down when not needed, then yeah I
| could see it being cheaper than having a bunch of metal in a
| rack somewhere. But I guess we won't get there in the next 10
| years or so. We'll probably be all-in on cloud by the time
| everyone has already gone on to edge computing or whatever the
| next big thing is, lol.
| mroche wrote:
| If anyone wants to read the Red Hat statement on the matter:
|
| https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hat-storage-strategy-upda...
| Nexxius wrote:
| They'd best hope they aren't assigned to the games grid, I hear
| its pretty brutal.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| "NooBaa" ? The hell? Sounds like a magic spell to get rid of evil
| sheep. I would be embarrassed to put out press releases at RH
| about this thing.
|
| Ah, here we go... https://blog.noobaa.com/blog/the-noobaa-brand-
| brilliant-foun...
|
| _" We did in fact have high hopes for words like "Nubes",
| amazingly the latin word for cloud, also a play on words with
| "newb" reflecting our introduction of a new architecture for
| reliably retaining data.
|
| So then it's time to lock in your domain name. GoDaddy had
| nubes.com on sale for $800, of course wayyy beyond the budget of
| this self-funded entrepreneur (and BTW still available.
| Fortunately GoDaddy's algorithm sensed our cheapness, suggested
| alternative "NooBaa.com" for $3.99 per year, and the mouse went
| 'click!
|
| But....NooBaa didn't mean anything. Nobody spelled it right.
| Everybody asked us what it means. We invented creative facts
| about African tribes. Then we observed that it's attention-
| getting. It's intriguing."_
|
| It's baaaaaad.
|
| Technical founders are really a special bunch.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| For some reason, technical founders (like me) really love Latin
| and Greek names for companies. It is such a trap: nobody knows
| what your company does just from the etymology, and literally
| all of the URLs for common Latin words are already registered.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| I'm certain many are very grateful they didn't lock down
| "Nubes" since it would definitely have ended up being conflated
| with a very different market in searches.
|
| It's almost the real life equivalent of Tobias Funke's "A Nu
| Start".
| nolok wrote:
| "I just blue myself"
| jahewson wrote:
| big blue
| spookierookie wrote:
| So it seems that the entrenched powers in IBM are winning over.
| Sad but expected TBH.
| cptnapalm wrote:
| So the hope was that IBM would become Big Red, but instead we're
| getting Blue Hat.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Red hat was a THIRTY FOUR BILLION DOLLAR acquisition. For a
| company that dresses up free software for enterprises.
|
| No way Red Hat is staying like some gilded ivory tower of open
| source purity. They are a brand name for selling services and
| licenses, so if Red Hat still looks after ... wait that was
| only 3 years ago? Well anyway if Red Hat is still recognizable
| after that acquisition in some non-IBM way then IBM is showing
| enormous restraint.
|
| The previous 10 years at IBM were "buy company, attach
| Websphere to the front of their product names, sell, abandon
| product". Still better than Computer Associates software, but
| not much better.
| nimbius wrote:
| christ the IBM acquisition is turning out to be the WORST
| timeline.
|
| - Redhat kneecaps centos because some mid manager was worried he
| might not get this years bonus
|
| - Redhat kneecaps Ansible by making ansible-core and forcing
| everyone to re-install community plugins they _were_ using from
| EPEL, or buy the shiny Redhat version of ansible.
|
| - Redhat decides to turn Ceph into yet another garbage storage
| product with the same exorbitant support fees and contract
| payments that were the original motivation for an open source
| storage solution in the first place.
|
| All this is being done under the guise that "oh its not
| proprietary, its enterprise grade now!" like the very same
| devsecops engineers and SRE's who made this shit work in the
| first place arent wholly capable of running it in production
| without forking over most of their $round of investment to the
| same company that turned softlayer into a swirling vortex of DDoS
| gangs spam relays and double extortion rings.
|
| to date it feels like all IBM wants to do with Redhat is turn it
| into IBM so if thtas all these juggernaut dinosaurs can do im
| quietly waiting to see Microsoft acquire Ubuntu and quietly turn
| it into a teams plugin the same way they acquired github and
| turned it into an outage response simulator for developers.
| zxspectrum1982 wrote:
| Red Hat Process Automation Manager and Decision Manager have
| also moved from RH to IBM recently
|
| https://access.redhat.com/articles/6968468
| e63f67dd-065b wrote:
| I'm working with academics that have code/support from Red Hat,
| and rumours are that funding is not gonna get renewed. Red Hat
| has been a very valuable collaborator, very open to the
| academia side, and funded a lot of cool stuff around the
| ecosystem, looks like that's all going away now :(
| antaviana wrote:
| This process is called bluewash.
| appleflaxen wrote:
| The destruction of value is stunning.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| I have a feeling IBM doesn't even know what they want to be
| themselves, let alone their acquisitions.
|
| What they do now is dabble in a bit of consultancy, a bit of
| datacenter ops, a bit of software and some servers here and
| there. And of course all the support on their legacy mainframe
| stuff. But when they have something that really stands out like
| the Thinkpad line they divest it.
|
| It's almost as if they don't want to be noticed or something. I
| don't know.
|
| I never thought their RedHat acquisition was a good thing for
| RedHat, though I never thought RedHat was a very good company
| to begin with. When Microsoft acquires Ubuntu (and I'm
| surprised this hasn't happened yet) they have more good stuff
| to mess up. Which I'm sure they will. And it seems like
| Canonical in anticipation of the acquisition has already
| started going the wrong way themselves.
| jskrablin wrote:
| I've been through an IBM acquisition a few years ago, peak
| Openstack time. They don't know what they're doing or what
| they want to achieve. They're trying to buy something that
| would keep em relevant but the end results are usually just
| sad. Early version of IBM cloud was unstable to a point I
| couldn't even use it for personal experiments. Last I heard
| it's still not very close to being reliable, while their
| middle management is always obsessing about Gartner magic
| quadrant or whatever that is. It's a dinosaur firmly on its
| way to extinction along with everything they buy along the
| way.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Regarding Ansible, I still default to installing with `pip3
| install ansible`, which installs the "Ansible Community
| Distribution" (which is still called "Ansible" even though it
| seems "ansible-core" is also called "Ansible", but there's also
| "Ansible by Red Hat" which is the 'Ansible Automation Platform'
| which includes Tower and other related products...).
|
| The ACD (or what I still call "Ansible") includes everything
| that was traditionally part of Ansible, and then some, just
| bundled up into one big install instead of requiring you to
| install ansible-core then pick and choose collections to
| install on top.
|
| This covers about 99.9% of all use cases (for Ansible for
| automation work) still, and for anything else, you can add your
| own roles or install an additional community collection or two.
| notabee wrote:
| After much struggle, I reached the same conclusion. And it
| gets around the problem of downloading collections only to
| find that they don't support the version of python on the
| system you're trying to use it on. But since those
| collections get stored in python site-packages instead of
| anything in ANSIBLE_COLLECTIONS_PATH, it's still kind of
| confusing. And I still haven't checked what happens if a
| teammate accidentally installs the latest collection version
| locally in their home from Galaxy as well (a stupid default
| imho).
|
| I understand why collections got split out due to development
| needs, but the switch over to them has been pretty crappy
| from a user perspective.
| acomjean wrote:
| I was at IBM (research) at the turn of the century after the
| Lotus acquisition. IBM was all in on Notes and I was developing
| notes applications for a department. (I actually came to
| appreciate Notes, and understand that Notes was being sold for
| mail, when mail is just another notes database, which is why it
| isn't great...)
|
| But it was clear later when I met from people from Lotus there
| was tension between the Lotus division which IBM had bought.
| The cultures didn't mesh well and they resented everything
| being IBMified. Though from the IBM side it seemed they really
| were all in on Notes. Really pushing it hard. Lotus's "smart
| suite" of desktop application not as much.
|
| Another friends company got bought by IBM a couple years ago.
| It seems they didn't really want it as they let half the people
| go (core people, not just overhead).
|
| Its kinda sad really. It seems its better after an acquisition
| to let the company keep doing what it was doing, with minimal
| changes (excepting removing the corporate overhead stuff).
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Notes was always pretty horrible, slow and buggy. It was
| right handy to make little databases in it, which wormed
| their way into business critical processes and became
| dependencies long after their developer left the company. I
| think this is what kept Notes going, because there was no
| migration path for all this legacy stuff. We spent years
| moving away from notes, rebuilding each little 'handy Joe's
| database' that was caught somewhere in a critical business
| process manually in modern technologies. And this was after
| we already discarded the 90% that weren't important.
|
| I'm pretty sure that if not for this we would have moved away
| in the early 2000s. Instead we waited until the situation
| became so untenable that we had no choice to invest the
| millions and years to make it happen. I remember Notes
| constantly crashing when someone would send me a 'funny' GIF
| on Sametime, and of course it would take all my draft emails
| with it because the autosave never seemed to do what it was
| supposed to.
|
| The only thing I did like about it was collapsible sections
| in emails. And the fact that you could write really advanced
| 'agents' for it. I had one that would remove the "return read
| receipt" flag and insert a button in the email so I could
| send it whenever I did wish to send it instead.
|
| Anyway, when IBM took over Lotus we were still full-on using
| it and I was really hoping they'd clean up the product and
| make it functional. Of course none of that happened and they
| just let it continue on its path to extinction. I have no
| idea why they would buy something way after its prime and
| then just let it wither away.
|
| Oh yeah and the notes mail databases. When there was a new
| version we'd get tons of questions like "why does my mail
| still look like the old app but notes itself is new??". Well,
| click on the upgrade your database. Ooops now it got
| corrupted completely well good luck bye :D
|
| Seriously why did the email UI look and behaviour have to be
| embedded inside each user's mail database??? This makes
| totally no sense and breaks pretty much every software design
| concept. As well as create tons of vulnerabilities for
| malware to embed itself. Data and code don't belong in the
| same place. Though luckily Notes got deprecated before that
| really became a thing.
| acomjean wrote:
| We didn't have any of the stability problems though is was
| kind of "quirky" (I also used it at another big corp which
| was only mail, which is terrible). I see you are not a fan.
| I had to use it and by the end kind of liked it. I didn't
| have to migrate from notes to something else though. (I
| migrated a non Y2K database to Notes). I suspect "Mail" was
| the way to get an installed base of Notes applications
| across a business.
|
| >The only thing I did like about it was collapsible
| sections in emails. And the fact that you could write
| really advanced 'agents' for it. I had one that would
| remove the "return read receipt" flag and insert a button
| in the email so I could send it whenever I did wish to send
| it instead.
|
| Thats pretty good.
|
| I see notes as a basically a NoSQL database attached to a
| primitive gui and a very bad scripting language (lotus
| script). You could make a little application and deploy it
| to a team pretty easily. IBM had a bunch of little Notes
| databases/applications that could be used by the dept to
| track project and other things. I haven't seen much that
| replaces its sort of simplicity and ease of use. I guess
| the web, but it seems it takes more to stand up a custom
| app these days.
|
| I have no idea how you would export the unstructured data
| that lives in those databases..
| evol262 wrote:
| This isn't really reality-based. There are/were a bunch of
| problems, but it's not these.
|
| > - Redhat kneecaps centos because some mid manager was worried
| he might not get this years bonus
|
| Red Hat paid (pays, probably) bonuses quarterly, and they were
| (are, probably) based on stock performance. They are not and
| never were based on cost saving measures.
|
| The reality is that, probably, CentOS should have never become
| part of the "Red Hat family". The Chinese firewall concept
| didn't really work internally, the vast majority of RH
| engineers ran Fedora anyway, and it was basically just giving
| CentOS better build infrastructure plus giving customers a way
| to buy their way out of nonsense situations. The Red Hat
| support agreement always said "if you're not running RHEL,
| we'll close your case", which frequently meant customers who
| ran CentOS in dev/qa/preprod and RHEL in production who were
| forced to install another RHEL system (which RH made no money
| on anyway, since they never charged license costs, only
| subscription fees for updates) just to reproduce an issue so
| the sosreport didn't say "CentOS Linux ...".
|
| In general, the same engineers who worked bugs (or were
| escalated to cases) on RHEL were often part of the community of
| upstream maintainers anyway, and RH's policy was "upstream
| first, and if it needs an emergency downstream bandaid, take it
| out once upstream accepts a patch and backport it properly",
| but it was easier for customers to get attention on problems if
| they could back it with dollars.
|
| Rocky, Alma, and OEL (however you feel about that) exist anyway
| and basically picked up where they left off. Stream probably
| always should have been a thing. It was (probably is) an
| enormous amount of work to branch, re-sync, and generally re-
| sync again any given Fedora snapshot to a new RHEL release, and
| getting it into shape was (probably is) a nightmare, because
| the difference between the code which is currently running on
| any given RHEL release and what upstream is is huge. sysvinit
| -> upstart/sysv -> systemd, for example.
|
| - Redhat kneecaps Ansible by making ansible-core and forcing
| everyone to re-install community plugins they were using from
| EPEL, or buy the shiny Redhat version of ansible.
|
| The Ansible leadership was generally terrible about open source
| philosophy regardless. This is nothing new.
|
| - Redhat decides to turn Ceph into yet another garbage storage
| product with the same exorbitant support fees and contract
| payments that were the original motivation for an open source
| storage solution in the first place.
|
| Open source Ceph still exists. I don't see the difference here.
| It's just moving it from one independent company to another
| independent company, at least nominally.
|
| The systemic problem with IBM acquiring Red Hat was in a lack
| of good answers for many of the questions employees had
| (policies on open source, WFH, etc), the fact that the purchase
| was not communicated even to management until news articles
| broke, a six month cliff for "business critical" employees, and
| following that, the fact that IBM fundamentally believed that
| they could do what everyone always thought Red Hat was doing
| and drive the market, so they were constantly pouring money and
| engineers into projects that had no chance to succeed in the
| market rather than adopting and fostering upcoming solutions,
| and *that* drove engineers out of the company very rapidly.
| hintymad wrote:
| > Redhat decides to turn Ceph into yet another garbage storage
| product
|
| Is Ceph still a viable alternative in hardware and operational
| cost and reliability to HDFS to store hundreds of PBs of data,
| if not EBs? I kept hearing people recommend Ceph over HDFS, but
| was unable to find examples of large deployment of Ceph for
| HDFS-like workload.
| [deleted]
| crazytalk wrote:
| > all IBM wants to do with Redhat is turn it into IBM
|
| Reading the histories of both companies, it seems to me that
| Redhat was always IBM. The acquisition was a marriage of
| separated twins more than anything else, the dominating culture
| in both organizations is largely sales and consulting driven,
| with public strategy not quite identical but strongly rhyming.
| The technology aspects (while perhaps once important) were far
| from the prime focus of either organization long prior to the
| merger. I think of IBM's acquisition more as a desire to access
| marketing expertise and established sales channels than
| anything to do with technologies, most of RH's open source
| technology is after all mostly just an advanced form of
| disguised marketing
| e63f67dd-065b wrote:
| I don't think that's right; Red Hat, culturally, does much
| more community engagement and open source development. I know
| several RH developers from working on Ceph-adjacent things
| and RH has been much more open to contributions and
| collaborations in academia and industry, plus they funded a
| significant chunk of research around storage in quite a few
| labs around the area. IBM never had that kind of culture imo,
| I would take RH anyday.
|
| From what I know Red Hat devs are also very open in other
| areas of OS research and development, from the new io_uring,
| eBPF, etc. IBM is trying to stamp it out, but it's still
| there.
| sillystuff wrote:
| Maybe GP is referring to IBM having an equity stake in
| Redhat since the late '90s? Or, maybe because they both
| generate the majority of their revenue via support
| contracts with the same sorts of customers buying said
| contracts?
| qwertyuiop_ wrote:
| Right on the money ! Most deals these "spent fuel" companies
| do are for acquiring the Rolodex of the acquisition target.
| netfortius wrote:
| I sure hope Ceph stays "untouched"
| KaiserPro wrote:
| If you're going to buy storage from redhat/ibm you might as well
| skip all the pain and just use GPFS (which is currently branded
| as spectrum scale)
|
| Ceph is fine, but its a toy.
|
| You can slam hooks into everything, and the raid replacement
| (which is probably only allow on IBM tin, the bastards.) is
| brilliant. (rebuilding stuff doesn't take 24 hours)
|
| Want to have a global filsystem, no problem, want to mange wrote
| clashes? no problem, everything is based on rules. Want to have a
| storage array in the US, but a copy in the EU, no problems. just
| set your rules and you're away.
|
| and its all posix and really rather scalable.
| neverartful wrote:
| "Ceph is fine, but its a toy."
|
| Because?
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| We have Spectrum at work, it's not comparable. Ceph is great,
| but Spectrum is a beat and a half!
| Nursie wrote:
| Oh wow, an odd convergence of two of my IBM careers... Dennis
| Kennelly was in charge of the part of Tivoli I worked for for a
| while about 15 years ago and then about 7 years ago I consulted
| for a year with the Storwize storage folks...
|
| Well, it'll happen, unfortunately. Everything that Big Blue buys
| will eventually be assimilated. Unfortunately the next phase is
| usually a few years of tightening budgets, then beyond that
| 'buying another thing to replace it'.
| yourapostasy wrote:
| Blue Washing never ceases to amuse me.
|
| _> Unfortunately the next phase is usually a few years of
| tightening budgets..._
|
| This happens because post-Blue Washing, execs want to _quickly_
| drive cash towards shareholders and bonuses towards themselves,
| and the easiest way to do that is to slash budgets. This
| translates into losing the best and brightest, and...
|
| _> ...then beyond that 'buying another thing to replace it'._
|
| This doesn't happen at 1:1 product granularity as much as many
| think it does. It is more a big swap of strategic focus, which
| happens to include large, splashy purchases of other assets
| that gets lots of attention while existing steady revenue
| generators get metaphorically tossed aside if not budget-wise,
| then management focus-wise.
| jandrusk wrote:
| Everything IBM touches turns to shit.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| IBM touched the personal computer market in 1981, and here we
| are.
| tyingq wrote:
| Makes me curious what the internal politics is like. IBM does
| seem to have mostly let RedHat continue working as it did before,
| not meddling on a broad scale.
|
| Now we have some RedHat employees getting the news they are being
| transferred to an IBM area. I wonder how that's viewed from the
| RedHat side.
| spicyusername wrote:
| It was broadcast pretty widely inside Red Hat, post
| acquisition, that some products are going to be deduplicated.
|
| It wasn't clear which products those would be and when, though.
| zatarc wrote:
| Whats next? Websphere and JBoss?
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| It would likely frighten me to know how much JBoss and
| Websphere is still used.
|
| It seems 15 years ago I was asking ?why aren't we running
| this in vanilla Tomcat?
|
| I know, I know, it's like "Beetlejuice", you say
| "Integration Integration Integration" and five salesmen
| appear to sell you something that provides a bad UI in
| front of configuration files you'll eventually hand-edit
| anyway.
| kyuudou wrote:
| > It would likely frighten me to know how much JBoss and
| Websphere is still used.
|
| Most of the big banks
| zatarc wrote:
| And Insurances
| subpixel wrote:
| At Red Hat very talented people leave money on the table to
| align their work with their passion and idealism. The main risk
| with "you work for IBM now" is that this bubble is burst and
| that the smartest people decide to just go somewhere and get
| paid.
| capableweb wrote:
| > Now we have some RedHat employees getting the news they are
| being transferred to an IBM area. I wonder how that's viewed
| from the RedHat side.
|
| Shocking absolutely no one. Every acquisition comes with the
| promise of "X will let Y operate exactly like it always has
| been, and we'll never steer their direction" and it has never
| been true.
| tyingq wrote:
| In this case, I had asked some RH folks about it when the
| acquisition happened. There was a lot of bravado that IBM
| would leave it be. This is small in relative terms, but
| appears to be the first crack. Thus, I'm curious if it's a
| hot topic there.
| mogwire wrote:
| Was it a crack when ACM came over from IBM to Red Hat? Or
| Hypershift came over from IBM to Red Hat?
|
| You align software to where it works best. IBM is better
| suited to develop and sell Software Defined Storage than
| Red Hat.
| tyingq wrote:
| Well the presumption is that the culture at RedHat is
| preferable to the one at IBM. So, no, those two moves
| didn't cause me to wonder about whether those teams had
| concern about the move.
| jhickok wrote:
| This is for sure the biggest crack in the divide. Red
| Hatters have had multiple occasions for pause, however,
| beginning with IBM obtaining the list of Red Hat customers
| and trying to upsell OpenShift/IBM Software customers to
| Cloud Paks (IBM's embedded software solutions on
| OpenShift).
| stuff4ben wrote:
| Why would that give anyone pause? They're IBM customers
| now and it makes sense to sell as much as you can I would
| think.
| robszumski wrote:
| Former Red Hatter here. It has also gone the other way, where
| Red Hat obtained IBM teams that were better suited to live on
| our side and those products were more successful via
| integration with other Red Hat products.
| mogwire wrote:
| We miss you already Rob!
| [deleted]
| bonzini wrote:
| This is not the first time that people have been moved from IBM
| to Red Hat or vice versa, for what it's worth.
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