Red Hat's Latest OpenStack Platform Boasts New Management Features

Red Hat is known to some people as the only U.S.-based public company that is exclusively focused on open source, and known to many for its Linux-focused strategy complemented by rock solid support. But as I've noted before, the cloud beckons in a big way for Red Hat. The company has recently extended a broad partnership with Microsoft focused on Linux and cloud agreements.

And now, Red Hat has announced the availability of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 9, its latest open Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform designed to deploy, scale and manage private cloud, public cloud, and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) environments. It's based on the OpenStack community “Mitaka” release, and Red Hat says it offers customers a more secure, production-ready automated cloud platform integrated with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2, Red Hat Ceph Storage 2, and Red Hat CloudForms for hybrid cloud management and monitoring.

There are also some updates on Red Hat's OpenStack reach in the market. Red Hat OpenStack Platform is driving private clouds across hundreds of customers worldwide, including BBVA; Cambridge University; FICO; NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Paddy Power Betfair; Santander Bank; and Verizon. The ecosystem of partners includes Cisco, Dell, Intel, Lenovo, Rackspace and more. Red Hat co-engineers and integrates its OpenStack platform with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and the KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) virtualization layer from the recently updated Red Hat Virtualization.

The new version of Red Hat's OpenStack platform includes these updates, according to the company:

Automated updates and upgrades with Red Hat OpenStack Platform Director - Red Hat enables users to upgrade their OpenStack deployments through the automation and validation mechanisms of the Red Hat OpenStack Platform Director, based on the upstream community project TripleO (OpenStack on OpenStack). This in-place upgrade tool offers a simplified means to take advantage of the latest OpenStack advancements, while preventing downtime for production environments.

Live migration improvements and selectable CPU pinning from OpenStack Compute (Nova) -- The Compute component now offers a faster and enhanced instance of the live migration process, helping system administrators to observe its progress and even pause and resume the migration task. A new CPU pinning feature can dynamically change the hypervisor behavior with latency-sensitive workloads such as NFV, enabling more fine-grained performance control.

Tech Preview of Google Cloud Storage backup driver in OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder) -- As part of Red Hat’s continued collaboration with Google, new disaster recovery policies in Red Hat OpenStack Platform 9 now extend to the public cloud using integrated drivers created for Google Cloud Storage. This new feature enables more secure backups of critical data across the hybrid cloud.

Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager of OpenStack at Red Hat, said: 

“As customers continue to require more advanced workloads capabilities on top of their OpenStack deployments, we have updated Red Hat OpenStack Platform to go beyond just providing a secure, flexible base to build a private cloud. With this release of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 9, we continue to add capabilities to meet the production requirements of enterprises rolling our private clouds and service providers deploying NFV.”