Red Hat Flexes Private Cloud Muscles

At the OpenStack 2015 Summit this week Red Hat (RHT) announced it is bringing together various elements of its portfolio to create a suite of software that makes it simpler to build a private cloud.

Red Hat Cloud Suite for Applications combines the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform with the OpenShift by Red Hat platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment with Red Hat CloudForms IT management software to create a comprehensive private cloud stack.

In addition, Red Hat this week also announced version 3.2 of Red Hat CloudForms, which adds support for the latest Kilo release of OpenStack. At the same time, Red Hat also previewed at the conference an implementation of the Red Hat Gluster Storage system that incorporates storage provisioning software developed under the auspices of the OpenStack Manila project.

Rob Cardwell, vice president of Application Platforms at Red Hat, said that while the company plans to make it easier to deploy integrated private clouds using its software on premise or in dedicated hosting environments, it also plans to continue offering each of the modules that make up Red Hat Cloud Suite for Applications separately. The primary difference will be that if organizations opt for Red Hat Cloud Suite for Applications, the process associated with deploying and updating the entire private cloud will be a lot smoother, he said.

While not every organization is choosing to deploy an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform and PaaS environment at the same time, there’s enough coordination of those efforts to entice vendors to create bundles such as Red Hat Cloud Suite for Applications or partner with other vendors to create something similar.

From a solution provider perspective, the race to implement OpenStack as the IaaS platform clearly is on. A survey of 310 IT decision makers published this week by Red Hat finds that 75 percent of them are planning to use OpenStack for at least one of their cloud initiatives. Whether they choose to adopt the rest of the private cloud stack from a single vendor remains to be seen. But history would suggest that the vendor that implements their distribution of OpenStack is likely to have the inside track when it comes to owning the rest of the private cloud stack.

By now it should be apparent that a fierce brawl is about to ensue for control of the next-generation data center environments that are being built around private clouds. It’s far too early to say who might actually win that fight. But Red Hat is clearly starting to flex some muscle now that it has all the private cloud pieces it needs to potentially win.