Dell, Red Hat Team on OpenStack Cloud Solution

Red Hat (RHT) and Dell announced the launch of the companies’ latest edition of the Dell Red Hat Cloud Solution, an enterprise-grade private-cloud solution based on OpenStack.

The latest version of the joint effort is expected to help customers build scalable clouds using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and Dell’s PowerEdge R630 and R730xd racker servers, part of the company’s 13th generation PowerEdge portfolio, according to the announcement. The solution was unveiled during Red Hat’s North America Partner Conference this week in Orlando.

The latest iteration of Dell Red Hat Cloud Solution is available in several flavors, with configurations for compute, infrastructure, networking and multiple storage options. Dell said the solution was designed to allow customers to scale their servers based on anticipated organizational growth in an effort to future-proof against additional storage needs.

“Enterprise customers are requiring robust and rapidly scalable cloud infrastructures that deliver business results,” said Jim Ganthier, vice president and general manager of Dell Engineered Solutions and Cloud, in a statement. “Dell and Red Hat continue to jointly deliver cost-effective, open source-based cloud computing solutions that provide greater agility to our customers, and this newest version of the Dell Red Hat Cloud Solution leverages best-of-breed technology from both companies to do so.”

Red Hat said the new solution will include increased density to allow administrators to minimize their data center footprint for OpenStack, and will include a 20 percent VM density increase in addition to a 30 storage capacity increase. Solid state drives incorporated into the Dell PowerEdge portfolio will increase Ceph data processing speeds, with additional security and stability thanks to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. Customers will also have extended lifecycle support for up to three years of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform support and updates, according to the press release.

“Red Hat’s ongoing collaboration with Dell to co-engineer enterprise-grade cloud solutions is further enhancing OpenStack to be production-ready,” said Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager of OpenStack at Red Hat. “End customers continue to benefit from Red Hat’s strategic partnership with Dell as we deliver joint solutions that streamline deployment and accelerate time to innovation.”

Dell is one of Red Hat’s oldest partners—it was the first to OEM Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, in 2013. Dell’s global channel chief Frank Vitagliano took the stage during the North America Partner Conference to discuss the company’s efforts to leverage OpenStack solutions and co-engineer private cloud solutions for joint partners.