Red Hat Releases CloudForms 3.0, Partners on OpenStack Solutions

Enterprise Linux distribution provider Red Hat announced its cloud management platform, CloudForms, has added new functionality in version 3.0. The company has also been partnering and delivering certified OpenStack solutions at a feverish clip. A slew of news of Red Hat news was generated during the OpenStack Hong Kong Summit this week. Continue to follow the OpenStack event at the hashtag - #OpenStack.

Cloud Management Platform Gets New Features, Enhanced Capabilities

Red Hat announced the next release of its cloud management platform, Red Hat CloudForms 3.0, based on a robust feature set stemming from Red Hat’s acquisition of ManageIQ in 2012. The new release adds enterprise-grade management capabilities for Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform as well as enhanced management capabilities for Amazon Web Services.

CloudForms already provides management and automation for VMware vSphere, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and AWS.

CloudForms 3.0 expands support of these features to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, providing cloud administrators and operators with both new capabilities for managing OpenStack as well as the ability to integrate OpenStack into existing environments through unified management. CloudForms 3.0 also expands its support for AWS, enabling users to seamlessly manage workloads running in public clouds together with workloads in their private clouds. With CloudForms 3.0, organizations now have greater choice and flexibility in building both their private and hybrid clouds.

Its features automate OpenStack and other cloud infrastructure platforms, and provide seamless self-service portals, advanced chargeback, quotas and metering with detailed usage tracking. Continuous discovery and insight from automatic, agent-free discovery of OpenStack instances and relationships and capacity and utilization. And Unified Operations management, offering multi-site federation that provides a 'single pane of glass' view across cloud and virtual infrastructures.

Growing Partner Ecosystem

Since June 2013, the Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network has experienced 30 percent growth in partner participation, and more than 900 certified solutions are now included in the Red Hat Marketplace, which enables customers to easily find technologies and solutions that have achieved Certification with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, or with other products in Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud portfolio. Partners who recently achieved new storage, networking and compute product certifications include Brocade, Huawei, Mellanox, Midokura, NEC, NetApp, SolidFire, Stratus Technologies, and Unisys.

The Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network connects both business and technical resources to third-party technology companies who are aligning with Red Hat’s OpenStack product offerings. Since the launch of the program in April 2013, hundreds of software, plug-ins, and hardware systems have been added to the list of certified and supported OpenStack commercial solutions. The partners building these solutions work closely with Red Hat to offer customers an enterprise-ready and commercial-grade OpenStack infrastructure, with complementary technologies integrated across compute, networking and storage.

The Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network has also expanded beyond the initial original equipment manufacturer (OEM), independent hardware vendor (IHV) and independent software vendor (ISV) partners to include several additional types of partners including system integrators (SIs), managed service providers (MSPs) and communication service providers (CSPs).