National Science Foundation Awards grant to develop next-generation cloud computing testbed powered by Red Hat

Red Hat announced that the National Science Foundation (NSF) division of Computer and Network Systems has awarded a grant to a research team from Boston University, Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass) to help fund the development of a national cloud testbed for research and development of new cloud computing platforms.

The testbed, known as the Open Cloud Testbed, will integrate capabilities previously developed for the CloudLab testbed into the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC), a production cloud developed collaboratively by academia, government, and industry through a partnership anchored at Boston University’s Hariri Institute for Computing. 

As a founding industry partner and long-time collaborator on the MOC project, Red Hat will work with Northeastern University and UMass, as well as other government and industry collaborators, to build the national testbed on Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud technologies.

Testbeds such as the one being constructed by the research team, are critical for enabling new cloud technologies and making the services they provide more efficient and accessible to a wider range of scientists focusing on research in computer systems and other sciences.

By combining open source technologies and a production cloud enhanced with programmable hardware through field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), the project aims to close a gap in computing capabilities currently available to researchers. 

As a result, the testbed is expected to help accelerate innovation by enabling greater scale and increased collaboration between research teams and open source communities. Red Hat researchers plan to contribute to active research in the testbed, including a wide range of projects on FPGA hardware tools, middleware, operating systems and security.

Beyond this, the project also aims to identify, attract, educate and retain the next generation of researchers in this field and accelerate technology transfer from academic research to practical use via collaboration with industry partners such as Red Hat.

Since its launch in 2014, Red Hat has served as a core partner of the MOC, which brings together talent and technologies from various academic, government, non-profit, and industry organizations to collaboratively create an open, production-grade public cloud suitable for research and development. The MOC’s open cloud stack is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat OpenShift.

Beyond creating the national testbed, the grant will also extend Red Hat’s collaboration with Boston University researchers to develop self-service capabilities for the MOC’s cloud resources. For example, via contributions to the OpenStack bare metal provisioning program (Ironic), the collaboration aims to produce production quality Elastic Secure Infrastructure (ESI) software, a key piece to enabling more flexible and secure resource sharing between different datacenter clusters. 

By sharing new developments that enable moving resources between bare metal machines and Red Hat OpenStack or Kubernetes clusters in open source communities such as Ironic or Ansible, Red Hat and the MOC’s researchers are helping to advance technology well beyond the Open Cloud Testbed.

Red Hat JBoss EAP 7.2 secures Common Criteria Certification to deliver solutions for regulated industries

Red Hat, provider of open source solutions, announced Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP) 7.2 has been awarded Common Criteria Certification at Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 4+ by the Italian Common Criteria scheme Organismo di Certificazione della Sicurezza Informatica (OCSI). 

The certification provides government agencies, financial institutions, and customers in other security-sensitive and regulated environments the assurance and confidence that JBoss EAP 7.2 meets government security standards.

This achievement demonstrates Red Hat’s position in technology and security. This is the third time JBoss EAP has achieved Common Criteria certification. 

JBoss EAP 7 is built to provide simplified deployment and full Java EE performance for applications in any environment. Whether on-premise or in virtual, private, public and hybrid clouds, JBoss EAP features a modular architecture that starts services only as they are required. JBoss EAP 7 is built for performance and flexibility in modern application environments. Its modular architecture and services-driven set of components reduces scale-out times and provides flexibility for applications deployed in different environments.

In 2015, JBoss EAP 6.2 also achieved recognition at the EAL4+ assurance level. Red Hat’s latest certification will be recognized by all countries under the Common Criteria Recognition Arrangement (CCRA) at Evaluation Assurance Level 2 since there is no generally agreed criteria for higher assurance levels.

The Common Criteria is an internationally recognized set of standards used by the federal government and organizations to assess the security and assurance of technology offerings. EAL categorizes the depth and rigor of the evaluation, and EAL4+ assures consumers that the software has been methodically designed, tested, and reviewed to meet the evaluation criteria.

Red Hat worked with atsec information security, a government accredited laboratory in the United States, Germany, Sweden, Singapore and Italy to complete the certification. atsec tested and validated the security, performance and reliability of the solution against the Common Criteria Standard for Information Security Evaluation (ISO/IEC 15408) at EAL4+.

"We're exceptionally proud that Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform again has achieved the Common Criteria Certification. It is important that our customers know they are getting the highest standard of security when they use JBoss EAP,  especially those in highly regulated industries,” said Paul Smith, senior vice president and general manager, Public Sector, Red Hat. “Common Criteria accreditation is a rigorous security standard and means customers can confidently trust Red Hat with sensitive applications, services and data. Repeatedly achieving this accreditation is a key value of the Red Hat subscription, and one that differentiates enterprise-class open source, and proves our on-going dedication to providing top solutions to security-conscious customers." 

A10 Networks Orion 5G security lineup delivers business transformation for service providers

A10 Networks announced its Orion 5G Security Suite that enables mobile carriers and service providers to be ready for the business transformation 5G and NFV brings. The suite allows customers to meet the requirements needed today and helps them future proof their networks for tomorrow by delivering security, scalability, agility and analytics, while integrating with a partner ecosystem. A10 brings unique expertise from working with many of the production 5G networks that are now operational around the world.

A10 Networks has been at the forefront of initial 5G rollouts with tier-one carriers worldwide and is working with many others to plan for their future 5G initiatives. 

With the announcement of the 5G Orion Security Suite, service providers have a proven comprehensive suite of secure applications services that have been engineered for cloud-native architecture to aid in making their 5G and NFV strategies successful. 

The Orion 5G Security Suite enables advanced security and reliability functions as individual services by modularizing and offering them as a service layer with a set of connected technologies that employ automated intelligence, machine learning and centralized visibility and control.

Partnering with tier-one operators, A10 has honed its solutions to meet the critical 5G requirements for improved security, reliability and performance learned from 5G network rollouts over the last year. A10 provides an interconnected suite – virtual or physical – resulting in lower latency, larger scale, higher reliability and lower TCO—all of which have been required for the emerging 5G use cases customers are enabling.

In the last year to 18 months, first movers have deployed the first wave of 5G networks and demonstrated improved customer satisfaction and increased average revenue per user (ARPU), despite an increase in network demands, including higher data usage and download rates.

The Orion 5G Security Suite addresses existing and emerging mobile network architecture requirements for agility, consolidated services, greater scale, and lower latency communications across the Gi-LAN, virtualized evolved packet core (vEPC), and multi-access edge computing (MEC) environments. 

The Orion 5G Security Suite’s disaggregated, cloud-native security services provide agility while maintaining scale and performance by leveraging cutting-edge technologies. It also goes beyond just protecting the data plane through a GiFW by adding protection for the control plane and signaling plane with full visibility.

The Orion 5G Security Suite represents a major evolution of the company’s 5G strategy outlined in late 2018 by providing a comprehensive solution for mobile operators and other service providers to successfully deploy 5G non-standalone (NSA) and standalone (SA) solutions at hyperscale for 5G devices and new NFVi requirements.

A10 supports existing 4G and 3G network architectures and use cases for the Gi-LAN and EPC, while catering to demanding requirements for 5G architectures, including the cloud-native agility needed for MEC. These solutions can be deployed in infrastructure but are future proofed for 5G deployments. This includes functional consolidation for application visibility and control, subscriber-aware intelligent traffic steering, Gi/SGi firewall with carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT), GTP/SCTP firewall, integrated DDoS for frequently attacked services, intelligent traffic steering and more.

5G demands are inherently different than 4G, with smaller packet sizes, more throughput, and higher concurrent session counts. A10 solutions can scale concurrent sessions to multi-billion levels and throughput to multi-terabit levels in a scale-out cluster. 5G deployments can benefit from compact and efficient options, for example, 385 Gbps in compact physical network functions (PNFs), or high-performance 180 Gbps virtual network functions (VNFs) and cloud-native network functions (CNFs). 

Support for Kubernetes and Docker containers are available now. The compact PNF form factors and very high-performance software offerings (including containerized) are especially beneficial in emerging MEC use cases where space and power are at a premium.

With new user-plane and control-plane security requirements coupled with the increased attack surface and scale brought by 5G and IoT device proliferation, more advanced, scalable and automated approaches are needed. To guarantee uptime and ensure control- and user-plane security, components include edge firewall, GTP firewall, Gi/SGi firewall, control- and user-plane policy enforcement, DNS protection, RAN security gateways (SeGW), and more. 

Additionally, A10’s advanced DDoS protection solution includes artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities with its Zero-day Attack Protection (ZAP), continuous base lining, and One-DDoS for distributed intelligence. This provides full visibility into all packets versus traditional sample-based-only solutions. Network-wide ML-powered DDoS detection and mitigation for in-house protection can also be offered as a customer scrubbing service.

A10’s solutions can be delivered in a variety of form factors to meet the demands of the emerging NFVi architecture including, VNFs, CNFs, bare metal and PNFs. These solutions are integrated with leading NFVi architectures and interoperate with multiple MANO environments for faster network roll-out and optimized performance and agility. A10 also provides flexible software licensing and consumption with FlexPool subscription-based capacity pooling licensing.

A10 Harmony Controller provides actionable intelligence to manage subscriber services, meet law enforcement agency mandates and compliance, and deliver per-subscriber analytics. Harmony Controller provides visibility, management, orchestration and automation. Coordination of distributed One-DDoS data from all the Orion 5G Security Suite solutions is seamlessly orchestrated from the integrated aGalaxy TPS system.

A10’s products integrate with multiple third-party solutions and vendors, ranging from DevOps tools, such as Ansible, to providers of 5G solutions such as Ericsson, Red Hat, NEC, Tech Mahindra and Lenovo.

SANTALUCÍA digitalizes user experience with Red Hat for greater business efficiency and faster time to innovation

Red Hat announced this week that SANTALUCÍA Group is embracing Red Hat’s agile integration and open hybrid cloud technologies as part of its ongoing strategic plan for digital transformation.

With Red Hat’s unified integration portfolio delivering the core integration, messaging and API management functionality, and Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform, serving as a common platform to run containerized applications across its infrastructure, SANTALUCÍA has gained greater flexibility and scalability, with automated operations optimized for developer productivity and innovation as it builds out its hybrid cloud strategy going forward.

SANTALUCÍA can now benefit from an accelerated software development process. One of the first services it has since built and launched is its API Portal for developers, which is helping the business to increase consistency and interoperability between applications, and facilitate the sharing and provision of services between group companies and with third parties. It has also redesigned its digital contracting strategy to enable automation and an improved user experience during the sign up process for customers. 

This is powering its new cross-platform application for home insurance, among others. Being able to push out improvements to the customer journey and launch new services more frequently than before helps the organization to gain deeper and broader relationships with customers.

Through this initiative, the Spanish insurer is aiming to better meet the changing needs and preferences of its customers, reinforce its relevance and core business leadership in the digital age, and open new areas for growth by accelerating the time to market for new customer channels and services.

To support its transformation efforts, SANTALUCÍA adopted an agile integration approach that harnesses open APIs (application programming interfaces), microservices and containers to build, connect and manage new cloud-native applications faster and more easily, as well as more efficiently connect and manage heterogeneous applications, data and devices that have proliferated throughout the organization in recent decades.

"SANTALUCÍA recognised that keeping up with market disruption requires excellence in meeting customer expectations. The challenges of achieving agility and dynamism, as well as reducing release cycles for new products and services, can be addressed with the help of hybrid cloud architectures and modern software processes,” said Julia Bernal, country manager, Spain and Portugal, Red Hat. “Red Hat is proud to support SANTALUCÍA along its digital transformation journey, helping it to be more technologically efficient and to innovate to meet the evolving needs of customers using our agile integration blueprint for enterprise architecture."

"As SANTALUCÍA approaches its 100th year, our focus on customer experience remains steady, while our business continues to transform. The agile integration approach that we are enacting with Red Hat is helping us become a faster, more efficient and more adaptable organization, in terms of IT and digitalization,” said Javier Sanchis Bonilla, director arquitectura, SANTALUCÍA. “Combining open source innovation and flexibility with features designed for security and reliability, Red Hat technology and expertise is enabling us to create new opportunities with our partners and build stronger relationships with our customers."

Red Hat extends security profile of its Enterprise Linux platform, renews FIPS 140-2 validation for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6

Red Hat announced Tuesday the renewal of the Federal Information Processing Standard 140-2 (FIPS 140-2) security validations for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6. Driven by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), FIPS 140-2 is a computer security standard that specifies the requirements for cryptographic modules -- including both hardware and software components -- used within a security system to protect sensitive information.

This renewed validation maintains and extends Red Hat’s leadership in providing mission-critical-ready open source technologies to government agencies and regulated industries, such as healthcare and telecommunications. 

With Red Hat’s FIPS 140-2 validated solutions, these industries can better meet necessary information security guidelines without compromising on the need for flexible software solutions. Red Hat maintains a strong commitment to providing open, more secure IT innovation to the public sector, with the company’s technologies now holding more than 20 active FIPS validations that meet the criteria for use by U.S. government agencies.

FIPS 140-2 validation is needed when agencies determine that specific information systems should use cryptography to protect data; if cryptography is required, then it must be validated. In order to achieve FIPS 140-2 validation, cryptographic modules are subject to testing by NIST-accredited independent Cryptographic and Security Testing Laboratories. 

The validation for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 was performed by Atsec information security corporation’s Cryptographic and Security Testing Laboratory in Austin, Texas. Atsec is an independent organization with long-standing experience in IT security standards.

In addition to the renewed certification of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.7 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 are currently on the NIST "Implementation Under Test" list with the intent to extend FIPS 140-2 validation to the latest releases of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 platforms.

YJFX chooses Red Hat OpenStack Platform to build out customer service infrastructure

Red Hat announced that YJFX Inc., a financial subsidiary of Yahoo Group focused on foreign exchange services, has adopted Red Hat OpenStack Platform to build out the company’s private cloud infrastructure. 

Red Hat’s massively scalable Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering, Red Hat OpenStack Platform offers YJFX extensive scalability, helping it deliver new infrastructure more quickly as it seeks to bring differentiating applications and services to end users.

YJFX provides online foreign exchange (forex) trading services in 22 currencies as well as investment trust services. As a leading service provider in the forex industry, YJFX constantly seeks new ways to improve customer satisfaction along with the reliability and quality of its offered services, both current and new. To continue enhancing the customer experience, YJFX wanted to drive innovation at all levels of the company’s IT stack, starting with the infrastructure layer.

The company’s existing IT environment for building new services used proprietary virtualization technologies running on public cloud infrastructure. While workable, this strategy made delivering new infrastructure environments in a timely manner difficult. 

The IT teams in charge of the infrastructure had to manually make adjustments to deliver individual environments and servers, increasing time to market of new services while increasing procurement costs. From a cost and time perspective, these challenges limited YJFX’s ability to drive innovation more quickly.

In order to drive down the costs and time associated with delivering new services, YJFX wanted to empower its developers to self-provision their environments more quickly without having to rely on IT operations teams. To do this, the company began exploring options beyond the public cloud in 2018, electing to migrate to a scalable, private cloud built on Red Hat OpenStack.

Built on the open industry standards of the OpenStack project, Red Hat OpenStack Platform delivers the innovation of the OpenStack community to YJFX paired with hardened codes, enterprise security updates and the expertise and support of Red Hat. 

YJFX also participated in a discovery session of the Red Hat infrastructure migration solution, provided by Red Hat. With the support of Red Hat Consulting, YJFX was able to better visualize the issues and effects of the migration project as well as conceptualize an image of the ideal private cloud development environment. 

To deploy the new Red Hat-based private cloud, YJFX enlisted DTS CORPORATION, a systems integrator, to handle the migration work and build out the new infrastructure. After comparing the costs of maintaining and operating its existing infrastructure to the new private cloud platform, YJFX expects to see the associated expenses lowered by 30-40 percent over the next five years. 

The time needed to prepare development environments, which previously could take as long as one month, has now been reduced to a few hours thanks to developers being able to self-provision resources. This has also led to a reduction in workload for IT operations staff while providing a flexible, scalable infrastructure layer that can help drive new application delivery and improve customer service.

The initial migration for the dealing room was completed at the end of April this year.

Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces 2 offers air-gapped installs, support for Visual Studio Code extensions, updated user interface

Red Hat has released Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces 2, a cloud-native development workflow for developers. This release of CodeReady Workspaces enables developers to create and build applications and services in an environment that mirrors that of production, all running on Red Hat OpenShift, its comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform.

CodeReady Workspaces 2 strengthens the initial releases — the in-browser integrated development environment (IDE), centralized one-click developer workspaces, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), Active Directory (AD), OpenAuth support and more — along with several new tools and services. 

This version will include air-gapped installs, which enable CodeReady Workspaces to be downloaded, scanned and moved into more secure environments when access to the public internet is limited or unavailable. It doesn’t "call back" to public internet services, comes with an updated user interface, bringing an improved desktop-like experience to developers.

It also supports VSCode extensions, giving developers access to thousands of IDE extensions; includes Devfile, a sharable workspace configuration that specifies everything a developer needs to work, including repositories, runtimes, build tools and IDE plugins, and is stored and versioned with the code in Git; and features production consistent containers for developers, which clones the sources in where needed and adds development tools (such as debuggers, language servers, unit test tools, build tools) as sidecar containers so that the running application container mirrors production.

Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces runs inside a Kubernetes cluster and manages the developer’s code, dependencies and artifacts inside OpenShift pods and containers. Where traditional tools may only take advantage of Kubernetes during the final phase of testing and deployment, CodeReady Workspaces brings the developer into OpenShift from the start, addressing issues that developers often face when moving applications from development platforms to production systems. 

Developers do not need to be Kubernetes or OpenShift experts to use the IDE. CodeReady Workspaces is designed to handle the management of Kubernetes artifacts behind the scenes so that developers can get started developing containerized applications in OpenShift with ease.

CodeReady Workspaces enables development teams to set up and work in Kubernetes by hosting configurations that define source code, build environment runtimes, and development tools. With the in-browser IDE, source code remains centrally hosted improving security without sacrificing the speed you need to stay productive. 

An administrative dashboard means administrators supporting developer teams have centralized management tools and dashboards to monitor CodeReady Workspaces and developer workspace performance.