Was April 10th 'Add storage features to enterprise OSes day'?

May 5th is World Naked Gardening Day^* and Wednesday April 10th might just have been “Add better storage features to enterprises OSes day” because Microsoft and Red Hat both did just that.

Microsoft teased the storage stuff coming in Windows 2019, with the headline act being a new “Storage Migration Service (SMS)”.

Microsoft described SMS as “a job-based orchestration and proxy that:

• Allows administrators to inventory existing servers for their data, security, and network settings.
• Migrates that data, security, and network settings to a new, modern target by using the SMB protocol.
• Takes over the identity of the old server completely, while decommissioning the original source, in such a way that users and applications are unaffected and unaware that migration has taken place."

SMS will come to Windows Server 2019 Standard and Datacenter editions and will be happy targeting on-prem or cloudy servers. Redmond reckons it will help to make in-place upgrades easier and has revealed it feels some users stayed on old versions of Windows Server because of the difficulty.

Red Hat’s storage news is a bit more anodyne, as it’s added a “virtual data optimizer” that applies “de-duplication and compression of data before it lands on a disk.”

RHEL 7.5 has also added support for full support for Buildah, “an open source utility designed to help developers create and modify Linux container images without a full container runtime or daemon running in the background.” The new release is also better at sharing data with Azure instances and at playing nicely with Windows Server. There’s also new features “to enable the creation of Ansible Playbooks directly from OpenSCAP scans which can then be used to implement remediations more rapidly and consistently across a hybrid IT environment.”

Full RHEL 7.5 release notes are yours for the reading here. ®

^* We’re not making this up. Check out wngd.org if you doubt us.