Red Hat Powers Cloud-Scale DevOps with the General Availability of Red Hat Cloud Suite and Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8

Latest Red Hat hybrid cloud solutions offer improved hybrid management, security, and performance via integration with Linux containers, Red Hat CloudForms and Red Hat Ceph Storage

RALEIGH, N.C.--()--Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today 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 organizations are building private clouds1, to give them massively scalable and modern infrastructure, while maintaining increased security and control. According to the Red Hat Global Customer Tech Outlook 2016, a global survey of Red Hat customers, 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, adds optimized 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.

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

Forming the backbone of Red Hat’s hybrid cloud offerings is Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8, the latest version of the company’s highly scalable IaaS platform based on the OpenStack community “Liberty” release. A co-engineered solution that integrates the proven foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Red Hat’s OpenStack technology to form a production-ready cloud platform, Red Hat OpenStack Platform is becoming a gold standard for large production OpenStack deployments. Hundreds of global production deployments and even more proof-of-concepts are underway, and in the information and telecommunications industry, a strong ecosystem of industry leaders are rallying around Red Hat OpenStack Platform for transformative network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) deployments.

With the debut of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8, Red Hat’s core OpenStack offering now natively includes:

  • Automated upgrades and updates; easily upgrade major point releases and minor updates. A component of the Red Hat OpenStack Platform director, it automatically performs the 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 minimizing downtime.
  • Infrastructure and workload management included; 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, 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. The most popular storage solution for OpenStack clouds2 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 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

Now available, Red Hat Cloud Suite combines the award-winning container application platform OpenShift Enterprise, with a massively scalable cloud infrastructure in the form of Red Hat OpenStack Platform, and a common management framework through Red Hat CloudForms. Red Hat Cloud Suite enables users to accelerate new cloud-based services for private cloud and application development and optimize existing workloads through improved virtualization and performance. This enables a modern cloud environment where application delivery teams can focus on development, testing, and deployments using modern cloud-based containerized microservice solutions, while maintaining control and visibility.

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 catalog 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 allows operators to manage their Linux containers as a single system.
  • KVM-based virtualization platform with the newly updated Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, 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.

Supporting Quotes

Tim Yeaton, senior vice president, Infrastructure Business, Red Hat

“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.”

Jim Ganthier, vice president and general manager, Engineered Solutions, HPC and Cloud, Dell

“Most organizations 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, organizations have the opportunity to modernize their IT infrastructure with a production-capable OpenStack cloud platform to capitalize 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.”

Stephen O’Grady, principal analyst, RedMonk

"With the dramatic rise of public cloud has come the demand for private infrastructure to mirror many of its capabilities, from dynamic provisioning to scalability, and OpenStack was created especially for this purpose. Red Hat is not only offering enterprise-grade support for the open source IaaS project, it's extending it by adding Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) capabilities."

Odd Wallér, Manager, Java Hosting Service Design, Volvo IT

“A strategic priority for our team is to introduce new, cloud-based connected services that can innovate our offerings, including mobile apps, a cloud user portal and call center services, and more. To do this, we needed a standardized cloud infrastructure that would enable us to deploy our newly-built applications anywhere. An open hybrid cloud, based on Red Hat OpenStack Platform and CloudForms, enabled us to create a multi-tier architecture that could support our continuous integration and DevOps model. And, as an open source solution, we found that an OpenStack-based cloud gave us the additional flexibility we needed to meet our goals.”

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Red Hat, OpenShift, Ceph, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux are trademarks of Red Hat, Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. Linux® is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries. The OpenStack Word Mark is either a registered trademark/service mark or trademark/service mark of the OpenStack Foundation, in the United States and other countries and is used with the OpenStack Foundation's permission. We are not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by the OpenStack Foundation, or the OpenStack community.

1 IDC, “IDC Forecasts Worldwide Cloud IT Infrastructure Market to Grow 24% Year Over Year in 2015, Driven by Public Cloud Datacenter Expansion,” available at http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS25946315

2 OpenStack User Survey, October 2015, available at https://drive.google.com/a/redhat.com/file/d/0B4vq3W3Lm2-4RWszZlBqVmxfWWs/view

Contacts

Red Hat, Inc.
Anna Eusebio, +1-919-754-4519
aeusebio@redhat.com

Release Summary

Red Hat today announced the general availability of two new solutions - Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8 and Red Hat Cloud Suite.

Contacts

Red Hat, Inc.
Anna Eusebio, +1-919-754-4519
aeusebio@redhat.com