Red Hat Summit 2013 Off to a Cloudy Start

The Red Hat Summit is underway this week in Boston, and the open source technology event is showcasing the latest and greatest in cloud computing, platform virtualization, middleware, storage and more. Red Hat (RHT) announced numerous items from the event regarding virtualization, OpenStack offerings, Platform as a Service and industry partnerships. The event conversation can be followed on Twitter hashtag #RedHatSummit.

Enterprise Virtualization 3.2

Red Hat announced the global availability of Enterprise Virtualization 3.2, with fully supported Storage Live Migration and a new third-party plug-in framework. Offered as a mission-critical end-to-end, open source virtualization infrastructure, version 3.2 brings a variety of new features including full support for Intel Haswell and AMD Opteron G5 processors and numerous enhancements in storage management, networking management, fencing and power management, spice console enhancements, logging and monitoring, and more.

The new third-party plug-in framework enables third parties to integrate new features and actions directly into the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization management user interface. The framework continues to evolve based on vendor and community requests, and any vendor may choose to consume the plug-in framework and add unique functionality to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. In support of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.2 environments NetApp, Symantec and HP have all integrated their solutions via the new plug-in.

“Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.2 builds on the industry-leading performance of the KVM hypervisor to offer an enterprise-class datacenter virtualization and management solution to customers looking to save costs as well as implement an open architecture," said Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager, Virtualization, Red Hat. "With the addition of Storage Live Migration and third-party plug-ins from our industry partners, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization’s compelling value proposition to customers virtualizing Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Windows workloads alike gets stronger.”

New OpenStack Powered Products

Red Hat announced two new products with one vision of delivering an Open Hybrid Cloud. Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform delivers a scalable and secure foundation for building a private or public cloud. Integrating Linux and OpenStack, the solution is targeted at advanced cloud users, telecommunications companies, Internet service providers (ISPs), and public cloud hosting providers. It offers several enterprise-grade features to allow organizations to deploy with confidence, including testing and certification for each OpenStack release running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform for broad hardware and software compatibility and performance.

The second product, Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, is designed to allow organizations to build and manage a private cloud IaaS based upon datacenter virtualization and management technologies for traditional workloads, while providing an on-ramp to a highly scalable public-cloud-like infrastructure based on Red Hat OpenStack. Offered as a subscription model, it consists of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Red Hat CloudForms, Red Hat OpenStack, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server.

OpenShift Online

Red Hat announced the commercial availability of OpenShift Online, its public Platform-as-a-Service cloud offering. OpenShift Enterprise was launched last year as a software solution and the new commercial offering will enable OpenShift Online’s users and developers to access Red Hat’s Global Support Services, and complete a full family of open source, online and enterprise on-premise solutions for its OpenShift PaaS.

OpenShift Online enables developers to quickly build, launch and host innovative applications in the public cloud. The elastic, multi-language, PaaS architecture of OpenShift Online automates the provisioning, management and scaling of applications.  OpenShift Online features a streamlined payment system that makes it simple for customers to access the enterprise-class strength and security of Red Hat’s services.

“Red Hat’s global support services are already known worldwide for providing flexible customer choices both through our expert technical support engineers and the award-winning Red Hat Customer Portal," said Marco Bill-Peter, vice president, Global Support Services, Red Hat. "We are committed to supporting the success of our customers and excited to add a new support feature to our robust Platform-as-a-Service offerings. This new PaaS support feature will create even greater accessibility and fast service turnaround for Red Hat enterprise customers."

Red Hat and Mirantis Partner

OpenStack systems integrator Mirantis and Red Hat announced that the two companies will collaborate to optimize Mirantis’ Fuel tools for deployment of Red Hat OpenStack, and deliver OpenStack implementation and integration services to joint customers. Fuel and Red Hat OpenStack will support a joint reference architecture designed by Mirantis and Red Hat for enterprise use. Mirantis’ and Red Hat’s professional services organizations will work together to deliver comprehensive OpenStack consulting and services, including services for OpenStack deployment and integration.

“The combination of Red Hat and Mirantis working together with customers to optimize OpenStack should substantially increase the speed of adoption, success, and overall confidence of companies in using the Red Hat OpenStack distribution and Mirantis’ services and tools,” noted Adrian Ionel, president and CEO of Mirantis.