As
usual, the latest member of the RHEL 6.x family includes numerous small
improvements. The RHEL 6.8 base image has been changed to make it
easier for sysadmins to migrate their traditional workloads into
container-based applications.
To enhance virtual private networks (VPNs) security, RHEL 6.8 has switched to libreswan. This is an implementation of one of the widely supported IPSec VPN protocols. Libreswan replaces openswan as the RHEL 6 IPSEc VPN endpoint solution.
RHEL
6.8 users will also see increased client-side performance and simpler
management through the addition of new capabilities to the Identity
Management System Security Services Daemon (SSSD).
In addition, identity logins are sped up by using client cached
authentication look-up to reduce the unnecessary exchange of user
credentials with Active Directory (AD) servers. Support for adcli, an AD tool, willsimplify AD domain RHEL 6.x management. Finally, SSSD, which handles identity and authentication remote resources, now supports smart card user authentication.
Do you want local back-ups? Then you'll like that RHEL now includes Relax-and-Recover.
This is a really easy to use bare-metal system archiving tool. It
enables systems administrators to create local backups in an ISO format
that can be centrally archived and replicated remotely for simplified
disaster recovery operations. It's that rarest of things: A true set up
and forget it back-up system. I've used it myself and it works.
The
new RHEL also includes an enhanced yum package management tool. This
simplifies installing packages while adding intelligence to the process
of locating required packages to add or enable new platform features.
While it's not an Ubuntu Snap style packing system its functionality is a step in that direction.
Finally when it comes to storage, RHEL 6.8 now uses dmstats
to provide increased storage usage and performance visibility. In
addition, RHEL's Scalable File System Add-on 8 now supports xfs
file-system sizes up to 300TB.
Jim Totton, Red Hat's VP and
general manager of the Platforms Business Unit, said in a statement,
"RHEL 6.8 continues to demonstrate Red Hat's commitment to our
customers' many mission-critical deployments by delivering a proven
foundation for the applications and systems that power the modern
enterprise. With enhancements to security features and management, RHEL
6.8 remains a solid, proven base for modern enterprise IT operations."
Today's release also marks the transition of RHEL 6 into Production Phase 2.
In this part of RHEL 6's life-cycle Red Hat is prioritizing security
features for critical platform deployments over inovatation. If you want
the newest production ready Linux features, you'll want RHEL 7.2.
Being in a leadership role now for some years in this crazy growing
and changing world of technology, I see myself in a position to may give
you some advises you can benefit from, when you develop into your next
play – a role where you´re not only responsible for yourself anymore. A
people manager role. There is this quote saying, that when you develop
from being an individual contributor into a management position, it is
not about how great you are and perform anymore, it is about how successful you can make your team.
I saw people struggling on this. Why? Because by nature sales experts
are restless fighters, chasing for their own success and having a high
level of ego. I don´t mean that in a negative way, it is one of the
skills you do need to have in that business.
So coming from a world where it is all about you and now it is all
about them is not easy. You really have to think it over. Take a step
back, collect lots of feedback from your peers and have an idea about
what really makes you happy. And I mean that not only in the sense of if
it is the right decision for yourself. As I mentioned in the beginning,
you take on responsibility for individuals and you absolutely should
care. A high performing account manager is not necessarily a good people manager
and a development into leadership role may even not be seen as a
development because it feels wrong. Actually this is a step backwards.
If you made up your mind I have three advices for you, which worked for me very well.
1.always hire the best team
In my past years I did hundreds of interviews together with
management peers. I have often been really surprised about the
indifferent way they did their interviews.(Being later on surprised
about why their team is not performing) Your success as a manager is the success of your team in total.
So simple as that. You should have a high interest in hiring the best
people for your specific open roles. Don´t only think about skills,
experience and educational background. Consider soft skills, diversity
and how the person would fit into your existing social micro cosmos. Be bold to hire people for roles where they maybe not the experts in.
They may have an expertise on totally different topics you never have
thought about and they have interesting stories to tell. Don´t limit
yourself. The best advice I have for you in doing a perfect interview
is, ask as much questions you can. Ask what you´re
interested in apart from the job qualifications and prepare yourself to
ask creative questions based on their background. (I don´t mean those
nonsense questions like google used to have – sorry google.
2. be authentic, be interested and show empathy
Now when you manage your team, you´re in a relationship with let´s
say 10 people or more. (In my perspective the span of control for a
people manager ends with around 10-12 individuals) The fundament of this relationship should be trust and authenticity.
You will be together with your team around 10 hours per day. This
relationship mustn´t be friendship (sometimes it can be) and you don´t
have to leave the professional path, but it requires as much intense work to keep it up like a friendship.
What does this mean? It means all those little things which appear not
to be important but at the end they make a difference and make you
unique as a people manager. As the headline says – your business is now
about people. Be interested in them. Don´t arrive at
work, sitting at your desk and claim that you´re always open for them if
they have any issue. Look at your individuals maybe a minute longer and
build up pro-active empathy. What can you read in their faces? Did they
have a good weekend? What kind of activity have they done? What kind of
activity have you done? Give and take and absorb as much as you can.
Don’t always talk about the things which are going well in your life.
You can share your challenges as well. And never forget, personnel development is a key factor in performance management.
You have to provide the platform for it and should know all the time,
by what your individual is being motivated to achieve his next play.
Lead by example and prove your authenticity in speaking about your
career development as well. This makes you a great people manager.
3.always tell the why
Working in IT, technology, marketing or elsewhere in a fast changing
working environment means you have to do quick decisions and have to
cope with a fast pace. Your management style has to be versatile
and to be adapted to several different situations during one day. Sure –
you could be all the time very directive and just tell you team what
you want them to do. But this turns out not to be very useful as you
will not benefit from the skills and knowledge from it. You must manage
your team by objective (MBO) and not by control (MBC). If you have tasks
for your team, make your life easier and tell them the sense behind.
Why do you ask them to do it – and especially why is it important to you personally?
If the spirit is right, every single individual is happy to help you
out. If you have considered number one of my top three people manager
skills, you are surrounded by bright minds. They will claim and want to
know anyway what´s the deeper sense behind. Do concentric briefing and
give a holistic explanation. Make sure that everybody understands buys
in and accepts it as q common task which is in line with the companies
strategy. This leads to the best performance and results.
Most of us grew
up hearing the mantra "Don't be a quitter," and we've internalized it
to the point where we feel guilty even if we don't finish a book that's
boring us to death. Our parents weren't entirely wrong in saying that
persistence is necessary for success, but sometimes quitting is the most
effective course of action. Whether it's a failed project, a thankless
job, or a doomed relationship, quitting can be a virtue.
"Quitting is leading too." - Nelson Mandela
As it turns out, some of us are really good at knowing when to quit, while others have a hard time getting "unstuck." Research from the University of Rochester found that people are motivated by either "approach goals" or "avoidance goals."
Those who fall
into the approach camp are motivated by challenges and don't waste time
trying to solve problems that simply don't have a feasible solution. In
other words, they know when to quit.
People
motivated by avoidance goals, however, worry a lot more about failing.
They want to avoid failure at all costs, so they keep plugging away at
things, long after logic suggests it's time to move on. This is
typically a much less productive way to work.
Knowing when to
quit is a skill that can be learned. If you tend to get stuck on things
long after it's obvious that what you're doing isn't working, you can
train yourself to do better. You just need to practice quitting.
Thankfully, life provides plenty of opportunities to do this. Here are
some things we should all quit doing.
Quit doubting yourself. Confidence plays a huge role in success. Hewlett-Packard conducted an interesting study
whereby they analyzed the process through which people applied for
promotions at the company. Women, it turned out, only applied when they
met 100% of the criteria for the job they wanted, while men applied when
they met 60% of the criteria. The researchers postulated that one of
the (many) reasons men dominated the upper echelons of the company is
that they were willing to try for more positions than females. Sometimes
confidence is all it takes to reach that next level. The trick is, you
have to believe it. If you doubt yourself, it won't work. Faking
confidence just doesn't produce the same results.
Quit putting things off.
Change is hard. Self-improvement is hard. Scrounging up the guts to go
for what you want is hard, and so is the work to make it happen. When
things are hard, it's always easier to decide to tackle them tomorrow.
The problem is that tomorrow never comes. Saying you'll do it tomorrow
is just an excuse, and it means that either you don't really want to do
it or that you want the results without the hard work that comes along
with it.
Quit thinking you have no choice.
There's always a choice. Sure, sometimes it's a choice between two
things that seem equally bad, but there's still a choice. Pretending
that there isn't one makes you a victim who is voluntarily taking on a
mantle of helplessness. To play the victim, you have to give up your
power, and you can't put a price on that. To succeed at the highest
level, you have to quit giving your power away.
Quit doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
Albert Einstein said that insanity is doing the same thing and
expecting a different result. Despite his popularity and cutting
insight, there are a lot of people who seem determined that two plus two
will eventually equal five. The fact is simple: if you keep the same
approach, you'll keep getting the same results, no matter how much you
hope for the opposite. If you want different results, you need to change
your approach, even when it's painful to do so.
Quit thinking everything is going to work out on its own.
It's tempting to think that it's all going to work out in the end, but
the truth is that you have to make it work. This has many implications.
Don't expect your boss to notice when you're ready for a promotion,
don't expect your colleague to stop sloughing work off on you if you're
always willing to do it, and don't think that anyone is going to stop
walking all over you as long as you allow it. Everything is not going to
magically work out on its own; you have to be proactive and take
responsibility for yourself.
Quit saying "yes."
Every "yes" you utter is a tradeoff. By saying "yes" to one thing,
you're saying "no" to something else. Saying "yes" to staying late at
work, for example, might mean saying "no" to the gym or to time spent
with your family. Research conducted at the University of California,
San Francisco, showed that the more difficulty you have saying "no," the
more likely you are to experience stress, burnout, and even depression.
Saying "no" is indeed a major challenge for many people. No is a powerful word that you should not be afraid to wield. When it's time to say "no," avoid phrases such as I don't think I can or I'm not certain.
Saying "no" to a new commitment honors your existing commitments and
gives you the opportunity to successfully fulfill them. When you learn
to say "no," you free yourself from unnecessary constraints and free up
your time and energy for the important things in life.
Bringing It All Together
There are
dozens of ways we get in the way of achieving our full potential. We
doubt ourselves, we decide that something is just too hard, or we tell
ourselves that we'll worry about it tomorrow. If you really want to
succeed--and I mean really succeed--stop focusing so much on what you
should be doing and, instead, take a really good look at the things you
should quit doing.
There is a traditional Danish proverb that runs “When you have a
clock in your house, you know the time – once you get two clocks you are
no longer certain”. I believe we need to be more certain of all the
definitions and concepts that help understanding of all ideas of ICT
Management.
Important part of the language of information science is about
understanding the term ‘Information’. Conceptually information is the
facts provided of learned about something, the words data, information,
and knowledge are often used interchangeably. In fact, they are similar
concepts, but with some key differences so it is important to distinct
among Data, Information, and Knowledge.
Data is elementary description of facts and statistics collected
together and recorded but are not organized to convey any specific
meaning. An example of data items is the employee birth date; another
example form IT field is the date of logged incident.
Information is data that is organized for a specific purpose and
presented within a context that gives it meaning. An example of
information items is the average employees over fifty; another example
form IT field is the rate of unauthorized change within the
organization.
Knowledge consists of organized and processed data, facts, skills,
and/or information acquired through experience or education. An examples
of knowledge items is the average employees over fifty increased by
about 20% since applying a new HR rule last year; another example form
IT field is the rate of unauthorized change has decreased by 10% since a
new version of ITSM tool was released.
Since we live in the "information age," information technology has
become a part of our everyday lives. That means the term "Information
Technology," already highly overused. Now let us move a tiny step
forward to dive into the term information technology. Information
Technology is often defines as all forms of technology and computer
based elements such as networking, hardware, processes, methodologies,
software, or the Internet, that people use to the development,
maintenance, and use of data, information, and knowledge.
Nowadays information technology could be considered a mainstay of the
business and I want to bring to your attention that there is a various
factors affect the business value impact of Information Technology (IT).
The most important factor is the alignment between IT and business
processes, organization structure, and strategy this alignment require a
proper management methodology to be adopted before we delve into these
encounters, it is wise to describe in a nutshell the definition of term
‘management’.
The fact is that there are many definitions of management, in the
terms of early theorist Henri Fayol (1841 –1925) management described as
the process of planning, leading, organizing, and controlling.
Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) has defined management as the
knowing exactly what you want people to do and then see in that they do
it in the best and cheapest way.
From resource-based perspective organisations use four basic kind or
resources; human, financial, physical, and information. Definitely we
are interested in the last one, the information, which are usable data
needed to make effective decisions. So let us has a quick overview of
the information technology management.
Information Technology Management can be defined in term of early
theorist Henri Fayol as the process of planning, leading, organizing,
and controlling information technology to help people perform all tasks
related to data, information, knowledge processing and management.
From what we just define IT Management is a PROCESS controlling
TECHNOLOGY to help PROPLE. Those three elements, Process, People, and
Technology are always inevitable when we start speak about IT
management. And to be a successful IT manager you need to know how to
manage the relation among them.
Canonical have conducted a legal review, including discussion with the
industry's leading software freedom legal counsel, of the licenses that
apply to the Linux kernel and to ZFS. And in doing so, we have concluded
that we are acting within the rights granted and in compliance with
their terms of both of those licenses.
While the CDDL and GPLv2
are both "copyleft" licenses, they have different scope. The CDDL
applies to all files under the CDDL, while the GPLv2 applies to
derivative works. The CDDL cannot apply to the Linux kernel because
zfs.ko is a self-contained file system module -- the kernel itself is
quite obviously not a derivative work of this new file system.
Today our organizations are becoming increasingly complex, with
projects spanning multiple teams, managers, and even continents. In our
highly interdisciplinary and global world, the teams that end up
achieving the most success are the ones whose members can access
resources outside the team—those who can acquire assets and get help
from experts who might be useful to the primary team. [1][2][3]
Here’s what organizational greats Deborah Ancona and David Caldwell have to say about making great cross-boundary teams. 1. Know Your Type
While bureaucratic workplaces vary from broken water coolers to
segways, a team’s structure—based on its members’ involvement and the
group’s position in the broader organization—typically falls into one of
four quadrants.
First we have the seven-year-old soccer squad, where no one passes
the ball and everyone gets watermelon after the game. These teams have
low internal cohesion and low external pressures, and are more
accurately characterized as groups providing aggregated output divorced
from the broader organization.
(Don’t tell your aspiring soccer stars!)
Next, we have teams with high internal pressures and low external demands or
timelines.
Think brainstorming groups—or aspiring musicians backed by their
billionaire families. Because all the information used for hitting goals
in this group is found within the team, the trick for managers here is
to find members who possess all the necessary information for the goal
at hand. [4a]
The third group is a rare breed. It’s rare to find teams that only
have external demands and low internal demands, and they might just be a
construct by Ancona and Caldwell (gasp*).
However, teams of the fourth variety—those that need to juggle both
high internal and external demands—are becoming increasingly common as
work becomes more interdependent and complex. In these industries, the
key is to find members who not only possess the right skillsets, but who
can also harness the skills, expertise, and resources of others’.
Here’s how you can engineer a team for success. 2. Pick People with Different Essential Strengths
Research shows that teams comprised of members with more functional areas perform at higher levels than others [7]. Just like when Tom Cruise formed his
team in Mission Impossible, your first step in forming an effective team is to recruit
individuals with skills in all the functional areas necessary to
accomplish the mission—or for the rest of us, to build the product.
Functionally diverse teams offer a two-fold benefit. They have more
frequent internal exchanges of information, allowing for more innovative
decisions than less diverse teams. They are also more likely to
communicate more frequently to outside groups, making them them better
at acquiring external resources. [8]
(The one caveat to this is that if you load your team in one
functional area, members will start to compete for status. Just like in
the animal kingdom, balance is important!) 3. Build a Diverse Network
To maximize the chances of success for your group, include both
individuals with strong and weak relational ties. Strong ties exhibit
high reciprocity and high time investment (i.e. every serious romantic
relationship you’ve ever had); weak relational ties exhibit low reciprocity and time investment (i.e. every Tinder match you’ve ever had) [9]. Each type of tie has its advantages, and you want both for your team.
Networks characterized by strong ties have high information value but
low variety. Although there are fewer options to choose from, the value
of those relationships can can be effectively transferred to the team.
Networks characterized by weak ties have low information value but high
variety, as weak ties require less energy to maintain and provide high
access to information. However, because those ties are weak,
transference of information is more difficult.
Ideally, you want to the best of both worlds. Recruiting individuals
with strong and weak ties is the best strategy to cultivate a highly
connected team with a large information flow. 4. Offer Temporary Roles
Bring in the interns! But actually ;)
Expanding a core team is expensive in terms of energy, finances, and time. Temporary positions can be a great solution.
Teams can get the added information and resource boost of expansion
by bringing in experts for limited times or specific functions, offering
membership contingent on the progress of a project, assigning part-time
roles, or providing tiered membership options 5. Send Fewer Emails—But Make Them Count!
A study of 45 product development teams found that team productivity
was boosted when individuals participated in activities to promote their
team, secure resources, or strengthen bonds with groups linked in the
work flow [1].
The study also found that while the frequency of communications members had with other teams had little impact on effectiveness, the quality of their interactions did.
One good voice message left every 3 months could do a better job of
staying in touch then daily “hey” text messages. Repeatedly spraying
your business cards like Rick Ross sprays dollar bills may not be as
effective as you (and only you) think.
Remember, the quality and content of a team’s external
communications are significantly more important than the frequency of
those interactions [4][5] 6. Focus
Before you engage your valuable resources, it’s important to know what you’re looking for.
When groups engaged in unfocused attempts to acquire key information
outside the team, broadly scanning the environment for resources, performance among team members suffered, particularly later in the production life cycle [1].
Once a product idea was developed, less successful teams sought out general information, while more successful teams cut down
on broad, generalized communication, increased the number of
communications aimed at acquiring specific information, and began
coordinating distinct tasks. Takeaways to Keep You Cool
If you want to form a team that works and plays well with others, consider the following questions:
Do the people I’m selecting have the skills and experience to match their assigned goals? Can they actualize their own projects?
Do potential members have connections to relevant networks inside and outside organizations? Do they have relevant contacts who can help them out?
Does management understand what the team can and can’t do? How much does the team need to rely on others? How much of the work needs to be outsourced?
To understand why hyperconvergence has gotten so popular so quickly
it’s necessary to keep in mind other trends that are taking place.
There’s pressure on IT departments to be able to provision resources
instantly; more and more applications are best-suited for scale-out
systems built using commodity components; software-defined storage
promises great efficiency gains; data volume growth is unpredictable;
and so on.
More and more enterprises look at creation of software products and
services as a way to grow revenue and therefore want to adopt agile
software development methodologies, which require a high degree of
flexibility from IT. In other words, they want to create software and
deploy it much more often than they used to, so IT has to be ready to
get new applications up and running quickly.
recruit
individuals with skills in all the functional areas necessary to
accomplish the mission—or for the rest of us, to build the product.
weak relational ties exhibit low reciprocity and time investment (i.e. every Tinder match you’ve ever had) [