Red Hat advances OpenStack, OpenShift cloud platforms for enterprise
Red Hat has yet to provide a commercially-supported release of OpenStack but is making progress on the enterprise cloud front by providing an updated preview of OpenStack with support for "Folsom" and an on-premise version of OpenShift.
The updated OpenStack distribution, which was announced on November 20, runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 and includes a subscription for a three-node trial for 90 days. The previous preview, which was based on Essex, required customers had RHEL 6 running in-house.
The commercial version, which will be based on OpenStack Folsom, is due in early 2013.
Before Red Hat embraced OpenStack, it was positioning its homegrown CloudForms product to fill IaaS needs. CloudForms is now positioned as a hybrid cloud management platform.
"OpenStack lets IT organizations stand up clouds that look and act like a cloud service provider. This Infrastructure-as-a-Service approach differs from and complements the virtualization management offered by Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, which is more focused on enterprise use cases," said a Red Hat statement. "Both OpenStack and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization manage hypervisors and offer self-service—among other features—but they're doing so in service of different models of IT architecture and service provisioning."
"Red Hat CloudForms then provides open, hybrid cloud management on top of heterogeneous infrastructure providers, whether an on-premise IaaS like OpenStack, public IaaS clouds like Amazon Web Services or Rackspace or virtualization platforms like Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization or VMware vSphere," Red Hat announced. "CloudForms enables IT administrators to create application blueprints (for both single- and multi-tier/VM applications) that users can access from a self-service catalog and deploy across that hybrid cloud."
Meanwhile, the company also offers JBoss Middleware for building cloud applications, Red Hat Storage for hybrid cloud data access and storage and Red Hat OpenShift for PaaS.
On that front, Red Hat announced that it has made available a version of its OpenShift PaaS for on-premise enterprise use, which it claimed to be the industry's first open on-premise PaaS. OpenShift Enterprise, which was originally promised last May, is an "enterprise-ready PaaS product ... designed to be installed on-premise within customer datacenters or private, public or hybrid clouds."
"OpenStack complements all these capabilities by enabling enterprises and service providers to build an open source IaaS capacity as a part of an open hybrid cloud," Red Hat also recently announced.