Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Cloud Suite and Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8, helping to bridge the gap between development and operations teams at the scale of cloud computing. With today’s newly-available products, Red Hat now offers a complete, integrated hybrid cloud stack with a container application platform (OpenShift by Red Hat), massively scalable infrastructure (Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8) and unified management tools (Red Hat CloudForms), all available individually or via a single, easy-to-deploy solution with Red Hat Cloud Suite.
A growing number of organisations are building private clouds to give them massively scalable and modern infrastructure, while maintaining increased security and control. According to the Red Hat Global Customer Tech Outlook 2016, private cloud deployments are expected to outpace public cloud by 6x. In addition, development teams are looking to streamline the creation and deployment of new cloud-native applications while IT leadership is hoping to meet growing business demands with cloud-based automation.
Red Hat’s latest cloud solutions help answer these needs through the availability of:
- Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8, the newest version of Red Hat’s leading OpenStack offering which adds optimised storage and management capabilities through the native inclusion of Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat CloudForms respectively.
- Red Hat Cloud Suite, a pre-integrated set of Red Hat’s cloud technologies that, for the first time, allows for cloud-native application development and deployment with the inclusion of OpenShift by Red Hat in addition to massively-scalable infrastructure and unified management.
“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 organisations truly realise 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”, says Tim Yeaton, Senior Vice President, Infrastructure Business, Red Hat
Red Hat’s OpenStack-based private cloud solutions provide an open foundation to meet production-level needs of today’s modern businesses, combining highly-scalable infrastructure and management with developer productivity, backed by a broad ecosystem of certified hardware and software providers. Available as a single platform with Red Hat OpenStack Platform or as an integrated offering through Red Hat Cloud Suite, Red Hat’s cloud solutions help customers build scalable, fault-tolerant, IaaS environments.
Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8
With the debut of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8, Red Hat’s core OpenStack offering now natively includes:
- Automated upgrades and updates; Red Hat OpenStack Platform automatically performs necessary system-wide updates to both the core OpenStack services, as well as the director tool itself, helping to deliver a healthy and stable OpenStack cloud while minimising downtime.
- Infrastructure and workload management included; Red Hat CloudForms can be used for lifecycle and operational management over OpenStack infrastructure and CloudForms can manage Linux and Windows workloads running on top of OpenStack, including lifecycle management, usage monitoring and reporting, multi-node orchestration, and governance and policy-based access control.
- Software-defined storage; Red Hat Ceph Storage, Red Hat’s massively scalable, software-defined storage solution, is now included with Red Hat OpenStack Platform, offering an initial 64 terabytes of highly flexible object and block storage. This storage solution for OpenStack clouds provides users with a single, efficient platform to support the demanding storage needs of an OpenStack-based cloud.
- Telco-focused preview; Version 8 adds several new and critical tech preview features focused on improving network virtualisation 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 plug-in for customers intending to build a software-defined network.
Red Hat Cloud Suite
Additional products in Red Hat Cloud Suite bring users further management and infrastructure capabilities, including:
- A unified management experience; spanning operations and lifecycle management, self-service, and infrastructure monitoring. These powerful management tools provided by Red Hat Satellite cover rolling updates for deployment, configuration, patch and subscription management. A new self-service catalogue extends to cover the lifecycle, operation, and financial management of services that customers deploy.
- Newly-added infrastructure monitoring with risk management and analytics; proactively collecting infrastructure analytics that enable customers to manage technical risks before they impact operations. Red Hat Insights, a newly-released operations management service, provides these monitoring capabilities spanning Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat CloudForms, and Red Hat Satellite.
- Integrated application development and portability, enabling users to build and deploy applications in a familiar, open source container application platform environment through OpenShift Enterprise by Red Hat. Linux containers built on standard Docker format are dependent on the same operating system kernel, consuming fewer resources and increasing portability. Kubernetes-based container orchestration within Red Hat Cloud Suite also operators to manage their Linux containers as a single system.
- KVM-based virtualisation platform with the newly updated Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation, offering simplified virtual machine-to-virtual machine migrations.
- Open, massively scalable, software-defined storage with the inclusion of Red Hat Ceph Storage as part of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8.
“Most organisations and enterprises are turning to clouds because they open up new opportunities to deliver business results. With the release of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8, organisations have the opportunity to modernise their IT infrastructure with a production-capable OpenStack cloud platform to capitalise on the promise of cloud, and the benefits of open source technologies. Through our close relationship, Dell and Red Hat have integrated Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8 into the latest release of our co-engineered Dell Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Reference Architecture, offering our customers a highly reliable and rapid path to an enterprise-ready OpenStack cloud”, says Jim Ganthier, vice president and general manager, Engineered Solutions, HPC and Cloud, Dell
