Red Hat launches Hybrid Iaas, Cloud Bundles with one price per VM guest

Red Hat's almost singular goal this week is to position itself as the most open, robust and least expensive cloud provider, in spite of its fairly recent decision to switch to OpenStack as a standard open source cloud platform

At its annual summit in Boston, the Raleigh, NC based Linux leader said OpenStack is important but it is only one piece of the overall cloud stack.

To that end, Red hat will deliver a line of integrated prepackaged solutions that integrate virtualization, cloud management, operating system and public cloud capabilities that will be available later this summer, executives said Wednesday.

The four solutions include two Red Hat OpenShift Enterprise PaaS offerings, the Red Hat Hybrid Iaas and Red Hat Cloud with Virtualization Bundle.

The solutions will be offered as one price per guest -- at $500 per guest for one of those solutions-- to simplify ROI analysis.

Red Hat claims that price is less expensive than what it costs to deploy one VM guest on VMware's VSphere virtualization platform with no cloud capabilities.

"Build an open hybrid cloud out of all your resources," said Bryan Che, a senior director at Red Hat, noting that customers ought to have a choice of their infrastructure, hypervisor and public cloud provider. "It's one SKU to buy and one SKU to manage ... We'll make it easy to consume and use."

"OpenStack is extremely popular and Red Hat is a Platinum sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation," Che said during his address at the summit. "OpenStack should be part of a broader open hybrid cloud. You can't just put out a cloud and migrate everything to it."

When asked publicly, however, Red Hat would not say when its anticipated OpenStack enterprise Linux distribution will ship,

Red Hat's virtualization and cloud portfolio is growing rapidly, as evidenced by key announcements this week and more recently.

In recent weeks, the Linux leader -- which debuted Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 for Servers and Desktops in January -- announced in June alone availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 and CloudForms as well as new OpenShift pricing and models.

Red Hat also launched at the summit this week its forthcoming set of integrated cloud solutions as well as Red Hat Storage 2.0  and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1.

"You can move to the cloud for what VMware charges you for virtualization,"Che said. "It's $500 per guest for cloud mmanagement included. vSphere pricing is about $510 just for virtualization technology."

This week, Red Hat announced global availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 with enhanced virtualization, scalability, security and developer capabilities.

Version 6.3, for instance offers "Virt-P2V tools that can easily convert a Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Microsoft Windows system running on physical hardware to run as KVM guests," Red Hat announced.in a press release.

It also  offers more scalability " by increasing the maximum number of virtual CPUs (vCPUs) per guest to 160 from 64. This is significantly higher than the 32 vCPU per guest limit for VMware ESX 5.0."

The Red Hat OpenShift PaaS, which competes aginst VMware's Cloud Foundry, has been available in developer preview since May of 2011 and the company has announced its fee-based service will be available this fall.

In addition, Red Hat said it would make available three models of PaaS to serve various enteprise application development needs on its public OpenShift Paas or implementing a Private PaaS solution with OpenShift on-premise: a devOps model, an ITOps model, self-managed .

The company also plans to debut soon RHEV Manager 3.1 with enhancements to web administration, quotes, task management, permissions, storage, network reports, SDK and CLI, Red Hat's web site detailed.

At the summit, Red Hat also announced an expanded relationship with SAP to help migrate enterprise SAP applications on Red Hat servers running its virtualization and cloud offerings.

Additionally, Red Hat's JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) 6.0, which became generally available last week, is now available in OpenShift.com’s developer preview, the company announced.