Dan's Take

Red Hat Integrates More Closely With OpenStack

The goal, says Dan, is to make it a "serious enterprise tool" with its deep hooks into the open source, private cloud platform.

• By Dan Kusnetzky
• 02/23/2015

OpenStack is at the center of a frenzy of engineering and marketing activity, and Red Hat is one of the major players making OpenStack an area of strength.  The company just announced the sixth version of its OpenStack-based platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6.

First, highlights from Red Hat's announcement:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6 is based on the OpenStack Juno release and includes several new features aimed at easing enterprise deployments of OpenStack technology within existing datacenters and capabilities specific to telecommunications providers to enable Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) deployments among carriers.

It's clear that Red Hat is doing its best to lead with its major standing in the Linux market, and with the strong ecosystem it's built over the years.

Dan's Take: Brides and Corpses
As mentioned in a previous article, suppliers want to be, in the words of Robert Heinlein, the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral: always in the hearts and minds of their customer base, and be seen as a good solution to just about every IT problem. One way to do this is to be viewed as an important member of just about every movement or trend.

OpenStack is a set of open source projects that has become the center of a great deal of market activity. Many suppliers are doing their best to make "OpenStack" synonymous with their own brands, including the Linux suppliers Red Hat and SUSE; the hardware suppliers Dell, HP and IBM; the software suppliers VMware and Oracle; and quite a number of collocation and cloud services suppliers.

All of this intense focus is a good thing for the market as a whole. Each of these suppliers is investing heavily in improving the base technology and how it integrates into its own ecosystem.

This announcement by Red Hat indicates that the company is doing its best to make its distribution of the OpenStack components the best integrated, offering the highest levels of performance; the goal is to make it a serious enterprise tool for its customers.

If your organization relies on Red Hat for Linux, virtual machine software, Hadoop, open source database technology, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6 should be on your short list. It would also be wise to take a look at what the others are doing as well before making your selection.