Red Hat Bolsters OpenStack Support with New Platforms, Certification

Showing a huge amount of love for the OpenStack cloud platform, Red Hat (RHT) has announced two new platforms designed to enable users to build or migrate to OpenStack-powered clouds.

The two new offerings, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, were created to accommodate the growth of OpenStack in the enterprise “just as we did with KVM,” said Paul Cormier, president, Products and Technologies at Red Hat, speaking at a press conference during the Red Hat Summit this week in Boston.

“Thenew platforms are an extension of RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), “he said. “Now OpenStack and Linux are starting to intertwine and depend on each other, and the key here is from the physical to the virtual to the cloud, companies now have the ability to have application consistency across all those footprints.”

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform combines Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server and Red Hat OpenStack platform, enabling users to deploy an OpenStack cloud while utilizing the enterprise-grade features of RHEL, including military-grade security and a “broad ecosystem of certified partners for compute, storage, networking, ISV software, and deployment and customization services,” according to the company.

Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, meanwhile, was built to accommodate companies that want to shift from virtual to cloud environments without a major overhaul. The platform enables them to build and manage a private-cloud IaaS based on data center virtualization and management technologies for their current workload but provides the foundation for an OpenStack cloud.

“Some customers want to migrate over time to another environment while others want to run both (virtual or cloud) environments together,” Cormier said. “We are pulling this out with a complete package our customers need to run a complete environment—It’s a drop-and-play cloud infrastructure for the customers’ environment.

“We want to make cloud consumable by the masses like we did with RHEL,” he added. “Now we’re doing the same with the OpenStack platform.”

Red Hat also announced its OpenStack Certification, which helps customers identify third-party solutions that have been tested and certified with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform as well as Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure.