Dan's Take

Red Hat Delivers RHEL OpenStack Platform 7

The key selling point is its 350-plus partner ecosystem.

• By Dan Kusnetzky
• 08/05/2015

Red Hat continues to both ride the OpenStack wave, and to bring it ever more tightly into its worldwide ecosystem with the delivery of Red Hat Enterprise OpenStack Platform 7.

Red Hat Enterprise OpenStack Platform 7 is based on the OpenStack community "Kilo" release, the fifth iteration of this platform. It's built on the foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which the company describes as a "proven and trusted foundation." This means it supports Red Hat's access, application, processing, networking and storage virtualization technology.

Dan's Take: It's the Ecosystem, Baby
While Red Hat appears to be putting the technology up front, the real story Red Hat is telling is of its large, worldwide ecosystem that consists of nearly all major hardware, software and services providers. This, the company points out, allows it distinguish what it's doing from other OpenStack suppliers.

Red Hat proudly proclaims Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform is backed by one of the largest OpenStack ecosystems, with more than 350 certified partners for OpenStack compute, storage, networking, and independent software vendor (ISV) applications and services. The company then ties OpenStack into its larger community that uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Is this enough to put Red Hat in front? I'm sure that Mirantis, SUSE, Oracle, Dell and other suppliers of OpenStack technology would point out that they're heavily involved, too. What is clear is that if an enterprise or s service provider is seeking a highly integrated, supportable release of OpenStack, Red Hat's offering should be on the short list.