Red Hat Updates Cloud Product Portfolio, Adds More OpenStack Components

Open source software giant Red Hat has launched new versions of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) and Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure (RHCI) products, as part of its hybrid cloud strategy.

The first offers expanded datacentre virtualisation and management tools, allowing deployment of traditional and elastic workloads without the need to duplicate infrastructure layers. The second promises tighter integration between virtualisation, cloud and platform components.

Both products enable OpenStack-ready cloud infrastructure, and add support for recently released OpenStack Glance and Neutron components.

Hybrids are coming

RHEV 3.3 enables customers to deploy a common set of OpenStack services that can be used by their datacentre virtualisation platform, along with private clouds set up through the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.

The latest version of RHEV adds a new self-hosted engine, allowing the manager to be deployed as a virtual machine on the host, thus reducing hardware requirements. It also includes a new backup infrastructure with integrated APIs, third-party plugins from HP, NetApp and Symantec, and support for OpenStack Glance and OpenStack Neutron.

Glance enables users to store their virtual machine templates, while Neutron helps create advanced networking configurations with a shared infrastructure between private clouds and the datacentre.

RHCI 4.0 is a comprehensive Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform that gives businesses access to a public cloud-like infrastructure based on OpenStack. It includes Red Hat CloudForms, a management tool that governs virtualisation and enables enterprises to deploy traditional and elastic workloads to the private cloud, public cloud, and the datacentre as one cohesive environment.

The latest version of RHCI also includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, which provides all the stability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5, re-designed for the OpenStack community.

“Red Hat is excited about the updated offerings to meet the datacentre virtualisation and elastic cloud needs of customers structuring their journey to an open hybrid cloud,” commented Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager of virtualisation at Red Hat.

“These offerings are engineered to help build a more productive and efficient open private cloud and provide a more reliable infrastructure for IT and cloud operators. Now backed by the world’s largest OpenStack partner ecosystem, Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure helps IT to bridge datacentre infrastructure silos and more effectively meet user needs.”

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