Red Hat's vision of building an enterprise-ready version of the increasingly popular OpenStack cloud continues to coalesce: The company today announced the RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) OpenStack Platform, built to serve as a foundation for customers' own OpenStack clouds, along with an IaaS (infrastructure as a service) offering dubbed Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure.
"As organizations migrate from traditional virtualization deployments to cloud architectures, the focus is shifting from just the hypervisor to the entire stack of cloud software, which includes IaaS cloud system software and hybrid cloud management," said Gary Chen, research manager for enterprise virtualization software at IDC. "As customers start evaluating technologies like OpenStack for cloud, Red Hat's new solutions are well-positioned to generate interest from the industry."
As the name implies, RHEL OpenStack Platform unites RHEL Server with the company's flavor of OpenStack, providing a foundation for building public, private, and hybrid clouds. RHEL Server serves as the core for running OpenStack workload servers (compute nodes, storage nodes, and controller nodes) as well as guest VMs; Red Hat OpenStack integrates with RHEL for the development of managed public and private clouds.
Naturally, Red Hat is pushing the openness of its cloud package as well as the service it brings to supporting the platform. The company envisions customers developing, deploying, and tailoring their OpenStack infrastructure to their liking, regardless of which brand of hypervisor they're using. Red Hat promises to maintain the underlying RHEL Server and OpenStack code; the company also brings testing and certification for each OpenStack release, and its array partners will provide compute, storage, networking, ISV software, deployment, and customization services.
Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure is designed for organizations to build and manage private cloud IaaS for traditional workloads as well as cloud-infrastructure-based workloads on Red Hat OpenStack. It has four main components, including Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, which handles both Linux and Windows enterprise-grade workloads.
Additionally, there's Red Hat CloudForms, an open hybrid cloud management tool for monitoring and managing existing heterogeneous virtual infrastructures. Organizations can use CloudForms to deploy, monitor, and manage cloud services across Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, VMware vSphere, and other virtualization solutions, hypervisors, and platforms.
Red Hat's OpenStack IaaS offering is part of the Cloud Infrastructure mix, providing the private-cloud component built on OpenStack. RHEL Server, meanwhile, serves as the OS for guest VMs running on OpenStack compute nodes.
Both Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure will be available in July.
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