Red Hat upgrades Cloud infrastructure offerings

Red Hat, Inc. has announced updates to its OpenStack-powered cloud infrastructure offering, Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure. Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure 4.0 gives enterprises an on-ramp to a highly scalable, public cloud-like infrastructure based on OpenStack while providing infrastructure and cost efficiency. The new version of Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure features tighter integration between its virtualization, cloud and platform components, enabling users to reduce image inconsistencies and duplications by only creating a single set of virtual images.

As an ongoing effort to meet growing business demands, enterprises are quickly realizing the benefits of a cloud infrastructure, in addition to leveraging their existing data center investments. Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure 4.0 provides organizations with a comprehensive Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform that bridges operations over existing traditional virtualization environments, as well as new private and public cloud resources. It offers an alternative traditional virtualization solution based on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for traditional workloads, as well as a tightly integrated OpenStack cloud framework with the world’s most trusted Linux operating environment, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. Finally, it also includes Red Hat CloudForms, a heterogeneous management tool to unify operations for multiple hypervisor environments and cloud technologies, enabling enterprises to deploy traditional and elastic workloads to the private cloud, public cloud, and the datacenter as one cohesive environment. An integrated open private cloud stack is a first step toward building an open hybrid cloud, and Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure 4.0 provides organizations this comprehensive cloud infrastructure as a single-subscription offering.

Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure also includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, which provides enterprises the stability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, backed by Red Hat’s trusted leadership in open source and the OpenStack community. Engineered with Red Hat-hardened OpenStack Havana code, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5, and the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor built on Kernel-based Virtual Machine, Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure 4.0 provides the underlying support enterprises need to meet their unique private cloud needs and was recently named “IaaS/PaaS Product of the Year” by IDG publication TechWorld.

The updates to Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure come at a time when Red Hat has refreshed its portfolio of Cloud Infrastructure offerings to continue delivering on its open hybrid cloud vision. In December 2013, Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 4.0, and along with today's announcement on Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, Red Hat today announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.3. The combined strength of these upgraded virtualization and cloud infrastructure offerings provide a highly secure, full-featured virtualization solution fully equipped to manage heterogeneous cloud environments across Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, VMware vSphere, and Microsoft Hyper-V. The virtualization layer also offers access to more sophisticated networking through integration with Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technologies.

In addition to cloud management, Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure offers a compelling infrastructure for cloud-enabled applications in a variety of environments with the combination of Red Hat CloudForms and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 4.0 with discovery, chargeback, self-service provisioning, and more. Additionally, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform share networking and image library services through Neutron and Glance, respectively, so users can create, edit, and run OpenStack images from one storage repository. In addition to saving on storage hardware costs, a single set of images reduces inconsistencies, streamlines compliance with security regulations, and decreases inefficient rounds of auditing.