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Red Hat is at the center of many IT systems with its widely deployed Enterprise Linux stack, but the company with the instantly recognizable red fedora logo isn’t often mentioned in the same context when enterprises look to update data storage.
After all, companies such as EMC, NetApp, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle and Dell rule the roost when it comes to storage, which now accounts for about 40 percent of all annual data center costs.
However, with numerous research studies pointing out that hybrid clouds–cloud systems that combine public subscription services and make them available within a fire-walled private cloud and attach to local storage–are the favored way to go at this point, Red Hat now can have more conversations with storage admins.
At its annual Red Hat Summit and JBoss World conference in Boston June 29, the North Carolina-based company unveiled a gaggle of new software products that allow enterprises to deploy and manage open-source-based hybrid clouds.
The primary new release is Red Hat Storage Server 2.0 for commodity-type x86 machines. This is optimized to manage unstructured data, such as documents, spread sheets, video, audio and other non-databased content.
Bundle, Bundle and More Bundles
Red Hat also has conjoined its virtualization and cloud-management tools by bundling its enterprise virtualization toolset with its CloudForms management kit.
Overall, Red Hat was busy in the data center controls sector at the conference, announcing a new infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platform that integrates the aforementioned Cloud Forms, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.
This all adds up to centralized control of the data, something we at eWEEK have been emphasizing for months as the catchphrase for how an efficient data center is now run.
This control happens whether it is in a physical machine (server or storage array), a virtual machine, or in someone else’s cloud to which the enterprise–or a department thereof–subscribes.
Using these Red Hat tools, enterprises will need fewer specialists to deploy and maintain these systems. Instead, companies with large IT systems will have less routine grunge work to do, which allows administrators more time for power-efficiency implementation, return on investment (ROI) improvements, system and disaster recovery testing, and other high-level duties that often get overlooked due to lack of personnel time.
New Platform as a Service Offering
Also at the summit conference, Red Hat unveiled its OpenShift Enterprise PaaS Solution, which integrates Red Hat CloudForms, RHEL, RH virtualization tools and JBoss Enterprise Middleware into a platform as a service (PaaS) for open and hybrid clouds.
Red Hat also said it wants to grow this platform into a sort of software development kit for PaaS environments that would be compatible with OpenShift.com’s Public PaaS.
Finally, Red Hat said that all these new cloud and virtualization software packages will become available in several weeks.