While much of the virtualization market’s attention this week is focused on the VMworld event taking place in San Francisco, Linux vendor Red Hat wants people to remember that VMware isn’t the only virtualization vendor in town. This week, Red Hat announced updates to its OpenStack Platform as well the CloudForms cloud management technology.
Red Hat first announced its OpenStack Platform (OSP) 5.0 on July 8, building enterprise-grade stability on top of the OpenStack Icehouse release. Now Red Hat is updating that release with additional tools for enabling OpenStack deployments in production.
“We’re really talking about production-level features for installation,” Tim Yeaton, senior vice president of infrastructure at Red Hat, told eWEEK.
One of the big new additions is based on an initiative that Red Hat developers had originally called Project Staypuft. The Staypuft effort provides additional installation and deployment components, leveraging the Foreman project.
Additionally, Yeaton noted that the new updates to Red Hat OSP 5.0 also include a high-availability option for those customers that need a more sophisticated configuration for production deployment.
CloudForms
Looking beyond just OpenStack clouds, Red Hat has a technology called CloudForms that is all about enabling multicloud management. Red Hat publicly demonstrated the CloudForms 2.1 release at VMworld 2013 and renumbered the product as CloudForms 3.0 when it became generally available in November 2013.
In May of this year, Red Hat open-sourced its ManageIQ technology, which it acquired in a $104 million deal in 2012. The ManageIQ technology is now helping to form the base of innovations in the new CloudForms 3.1 release, which debuts today.
“We don’t just manage Red Hat; we now have support for vSphere, and our Amazon capabilities have been extended substantially,” Yeaton said. “Our Microsoft support has been rewritten to take advantage of new things that Microsoft has done over the last year.”
Yeaton emphasized that CloudForms 3.1 now spans all the various cloud virtualization footprints that can exist both inside and outside of an enterprise firewall.
From a competitive perspective, Yeaton said that what Red Hat is trying to do is help enterprises think through what it takes to deploy clouds at scale. Having management tools and multiple years of support is a key part of the Red Hat value proposition.
“With OSP 5, we extended the support length to three years, and our intention as the technology matures is to keep pushing that further and further out,” he said.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.