Red Hat Delivers More Tools, Services for Enterprise OpenStack

Red Hat has a sterling reputation for advancing and supporting Linux in the enterprise, but the company is structuring much of its future growth around cloud computing, and OpenStack in particular. The company  has recently announced the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform,  an Infrastructure-as-a-Service certification program for OpenStack, a deepening partnership with Canonical and Ubuntu surrounding the new Havana release of OpenStack, and more. 

This week, at the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong, and on an associated webcast, Red Hat made several new announcements focused on OpenStack and enterprise deployments.

Everyone has been asking whether Red Hat can support OpenStack deployments as well as it has supported enterprise Linux. That's a good question, because support is going to be the differentiator when it comes to companies focused on the cloud computing platform.  Enterprises will absolutely favor a platform-level solution when it's clear that they'll get completely reliable support.

Now, Red Hat has integrated OpenStack with the new version of Red Hat CloudForms (3.0), which helps manage public, private, and hybrid clouds. It also announced several new efforts in support of the company’s open hybrid cloud vision, including beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 4.0, advancements to drive OpenShift by Red Hat on OpenStack, and a preview of OpenStack-M, an open source deployment and management solution for OpenStack-powered clouds that will be integrated into future versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.

The beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 4.0 includes both OpenStack Havana and the beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5, and includes new features for improved deployment and manageability of cloud computing implementations. These include support for Foreman, a lifecycle management tool for physical and virtual servers; full support for OpenStack Orchestration (Heat); and enhanced integration with Red Hat Storage Server 2.1, providing storage services for OpenStack Object Storage (Swift), OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder) and OpenStack Image Service (Glance).

OpenStack remains a hot commodity and it's clear that 2014 is going to be a big year for Red Hat to strategize around the platform. The company has done very well getting its corporate clients to renew subscriptions for its Linux support offerings, but growth has slowed, and cloud computing is all the rage now.