Dell and Red Hat's OpenStack Partnership Deepens

Dell has unveiled a series of upgrades and announcements focused on the datacenter this week, and is deepening its cloud computing ties with Red Hat, as the firms focus on OpenStack. Dell and Red Hat recently announced that Dell will effectively become an OEM for Red Hat's Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform by selling systems that run the platform. Dell has also joined the Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network as an Alliance Partner.

At the Dell Enterprise Forum EMEA in Frankfurt, Germany and the Red Hat Summit in San Francisco this week, officials from the two companies announced further plans to team up on OpenStack initiatives focused on IT departments, and agreements to deliver cloud-based test environments for mobile and analytics apps.

Dell has issued a release on many of its datacenter and IT initiatives, seen here.  “IT leaders are facing the challenge of balancing costs with the need to provide bleeding-edge IT services to ensure businesses do not risk losing customers, revenue or productivity. The fact of the matter is handling an increased traffic of any kind puts strain on a data center – and many solutions currently in the market only address parts of the problem,” said Marius Haas, chief commercial officer and president, Enterprise Solutions, Dell, in the announcement. “By leveraging organic and inorganic intellectual property, Dell is accelerating the delivery of its enterprise vision and providing businesses with a unique workload acceleration solution that helps increase agility and be more responsive to their customers.”

Red Hat and Dell are also in the news this week as Red Hat announced that CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Red Hat Technical Account Management services to provide a reliable and stable platform for mission-critical applications. The infrastructure for CERN's platform is comprised of physical two-socket servers and is virtualized using Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization on Dell PowerEdge M610 servers (with Intel Nehalem or Ivy Bridge processors with between 96 GB and 256 GB RAM per server) and a Brocade FC8 SAN with a NetApp data storage system.

We're likely to see Dell and Red Hat team up even more closely on OpenStack solutions going forward. Dell wants to shift its business model away from low margin PCs and be more of a player in the services and support arena, especially for cloud computing. And, Red Hat is making ever bigger bets on OpenStack.

Back in December, when Dell and Red Hat announced their OpenStack initiatives, Paul Cormier, President, Products and Technologies, Red Hat, said: "Our collaboration with Dell keeps getting better and today’s announcement to co-engineer OpenStack solutions marks a significant milestone for both companies and customers. Just as we successfully collaborated with Dell to establish Red Hat Enterprise Linux as an enterprise industry standard, we’re now extending our collaboration to help establish Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform as the standard for open private cloud in the enterprise. Dell and Red Hat are committed to jointly developing and delivering enterprise-grade OpenStack offerings to help customers pursue private cloud today, and advanced computing models in the future.”