Dell, a longtime Red Hat partner—in fact, the first household name IT vendor to hook up with Red Hat more than 20 years ago—may have made bigger headlines on June 28, Day 1 of the Red Hat Summit in San Francisco, than the host company itself.
Dell’s Red Hat Cloud Solution, now in its fifth generation and built on Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8, has integrated its latest generation PowerEdge server platforms with powerful new Intel Xeon E5-2600 V4 processors. That additional computing power is helping Dell to accelerate its initiative to move customers new and old to hybrid cloud systems.
Dell Enterprise is focusing a large portion of its efforts on building hybrid clouds for its users, Jim Ganthier, vice president and general manager of Dell Engineered Systems, told eWEEK.
“Working with Intel and Red Hat, we have completed phase one in our ‘Onramp to Cloud’ program that developed and refined enterprise capabilities for virtual machine migration, Instance HA and Host maintenance capabilities in OpenStack,” Brent Doncaster, a Dell global product marketing manager, wrote in the corporate blog.
Dell also introduced two new validated extensions for its OpenStack cloud solution powered with Red Hat OpenStack Platform:
— OpenShift by Red Hat: Platform as a service (PaaS) enables developers to develop, deploy and run applications easily. It integrates with a standardized container model-powered Docker and Kubernetes to provide container-based write-once/run-anywhere capabilities.
— Red Hat Cloud Forms: This technology implements a unified management framework with advanced lifecycle management and hybrid cloud capabilities across OpenStack and other infrastructure and cloud platforms.
“Extensions to our core architecture are all thoroughly validated, just like the core architecture, to ensure a consistent seamless cloud environment that just works,” Doncaster said. “Guidance for implementing and optimizing all of the validated extensions is provided in technical guides posted on Dell Tech Center.”
Storage-wise, Dell has been integrating Red Hat Ceph software, known as InkTank Storage before its acquisition by Red Hat, into its solutions for a number of years. Ceph is designed for implementing software-defined storage (SDS) environments.
“It has been a fun journey to work with the Inktank and Ceph teams and watch Ceph evolve and grow into a de facto standard for open source storage,” Doncaster said. “Dell has probably the widest set of solution offerings with Ceph in the industry. At Red Hat Summit, we are showcasing Ceph in multiple solutions.”
For example, Ceph is the default storage environment in Dell’s OpenStack Cloud Solution. Ceph offers massively scalable block and object storage; the architecture has been engineered to bring together the combination of a scalable core architecture with a portfolio of validated extensions, Doncaster said.
Red Hat Summit continues through June 30 at Moscone Center in San Francisco.