Red Hat Extends its Cloud Offerings, Focused on OpenStack
The OpenStack Summit in Austin is just days away, and in advance of it, Red Hat is announcing several major enhancements to its distribution and suite of related tools. The company unveiled Red Hat Cloud Suite and Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8, offering improved hybrid cloud management, security, and performance via integration with Linux containers, Red Hat CloudForms and Red Hat Ceph Storage.
As we'e reported, Red Hat recently crossed the $2 billion annual revenue threshold, and CEO Jim Whitehurst has attribued much of the company's recent success to its cloud computing initiatives. Here are more details on the company's new OpenStack suite.
Red Hat now offers an integrated hybrid cloud stack with a container application platform (OpenShift by Red Hat), infrastructure tools (Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8) and management tools (Red Hat CloudForms), available individually or via a single offering with Red Hat Cloud Suite.
Forming the backbone of Red Hat’s hybrid cloud offerings is Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8, which is the latest version of the company’s scalable IaaS platform based on the OpenStack community “Liberty” release. (Note that the latest release of OpenStack is Mitaka, but Liberty is more proven in the field at this point.)
Red Hat’s core OpenStack offering now natively includes:
Automated upgrades and updates. A component of the Red Hat OpenStack Platform director automatically performs the necessary system-wide updates to both the core OpenStack services, as well as the director tool itself.
Infrastructure and workload management included. You can use Red Hat CloudForms for lifecycle and operational management over OpenStack infrastructure and workloads. CloudForms can manage Linux and Windows workloads running on top of OpenStack.
Software-defined storage. Red Hat Ceph Storage, Red Hat’s massively scalable, software-defined storage solution, is now included with Red Hat OpenStack Platform.
Telco-focused preview. Version 8 adds features focused on improving network virtualization functions. With this release there is more assured predictable latency with real-time KVM, improved network I/O performance with DPDK- accelerated Open vSwitch; and an OpenDaylight networking plugin for customers intending to build a software-defined network.
Red Hat Cloud Suite combines the container application platform OpenShift Enterprise with scalable cloud infrastructure tools in the form of Red Hat OpenStack Platform, and a common management framework through Red Hat CloudForms.
Tim Yeaton, senior vice president of Infrastructure Business at Red Hat, said:
“OpenStack-based private clouds are rapidly becoming the standard in scalable enterprise computing, but require a vibrant ecosystem of technologies, services and hardware to help organizations truly realize their potential. Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8 and Red Hat Cloud Suite showcase the power of Red Hat’s open innovation, with solutions that can address nearly any private cloud deployment scenario while at the same time delivering a streamlined cloud-native application development platform coupled with the needed enterprise-level controls for cloud management and improved security.”