Dell and Red Hat package OpenStack for service developers

As the OpenStack bandwagon starts to gather some speed, its potential user based spreads beyond the technically adroit afficionadoes that have developed skills in implementing it in pilot and production environments. That, in turn, drives the need for more pre-packaged versions of the platform, which is what systems maker, Dell, and Linux operating environment supplier, Red Hat, have put together between them.

The pair have come up with a set of co-engineered, enterprise-grade, private cloud solutions based on OpenStack. Known as the Dell Red Hat Cloud Solution, they are powered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.

The companies also have extended their collaboration to enable the compatibility, portability and reliability for Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings that enterprise customers need as they build public, private and hybrid cloud environments.

Through a new private cloud solutions and extended alliance between the pair, Dell and Red Hat aim to provide enterprise customers at various stages of OpenStack evaluation and use with an enterprise-grade software life cycle experience, and greater stability, predictability and rigour to the community-published OpenStack updates.

Two versions of the Dell Red Hat Cloud Solution have been made available, both aimed at users in the throes of system and service development. They have been co-engineered to address enterprise customer demand for more flexible, elastic and dynamic IT services to support and host non-business critical applications – including mobile, social and analytics – and development and test environments.

The Proof of Concept Configuration has been designed for customers looking to explore OpenStack capabilities, research deployment options, pilot application deployments, and begin the development of an OpenStack cloud environment.

The Pilot Configuration is aimed at users further along the road to implementing a production environment. It has been designed for testing cloud applications, and for customers beginning a production environment. It is capable of supporting cloud scale applications across six OpenStack compute and three storage nodes. The pilot configuration can be expanded with pre-configured compute, storage and infrastructure blocks.

If customers then decide they are then seeking massive scale-out designs, Dell Cloud Services will engage with them to design and architect OpenStack-based clouds, building upon the experience Dell and Red Hat have with OpenStack technologies.

Red Hat’s PaaS offering, OpenShift, is built on Enterprise Linux, and provides secure, scalable, Linux Container-based multi-tenancy via Red Hat Enterprise Linux Gears. Dell and Red Hat will work together within the OpenShift community to build solutions that provide support for enterprise application developers looking for efficient ways to make their current and future data and applications more portable and accessible.

Dell’s OpenShift integration is a necessary step toward Dell and Red Hat co-engineering Linux Container enhancements from Docker. This platform, and solutions to be co-engineered by Dell and Red Hat, will aim to enable compatibility for PaaS offerings within enterprise environments, so that developers can write applications using any language and make them portable across public, private and hybrid cloud environments.

The OpenShift-based solution will provide support for customers to use within their frameworks and databases, through the use of Docker-based images and cartridges, with the goal of enabling integration with any other platform that supports Docker, including public clouds. This capability gives developers the freedom to choose their application development language to build a portable application that can exist in any cloud environment.

Dell will integrate these capabilities across its hardware and software offerings to enable a complete PaaS solution from Linux to OpenStack to OpenShift, including platform management. “Dell is a long-time supporter of OpenStack and this important extension of our commitment to the community now will include work for OpenShift and Docker, which we think will help customers with choice in cloud resources, and application development and optimisation,” said Dell’s Vice President of Enterprise Solutions Group Technology Strategy, Sam Greenblatt. “We are building on our long history with open source and will apply that expertise to our new cloud solutions and co-engineering work with Red Hat.”