Dan's Take
Red Hat Rolls Out OpenShift Container Platform 3.4
It's focused heavily on software-defined storage.
- By Dan Kusnetzky
- 01/26/2017
Red Hat just launched Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.4. It's based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, plus Kubernetes 1.4 and the Docker container runtime. The goal is to deploy container-based applications an microservices on a "a stable, reliable and more secure enterprise platform."
Here's how Red Hat describes some of the new features:
Next-level container storage with support for dynamic storage provisioning, allowing multiple storage types to be provisioned, and multi-tier storage exposure via quality-of-service labels in Kubernetes.
Container-native storage, enabled by Red Hat Gluster Storage, which now supports dynamic provisioning and push button deployment, enhances the user experience running stateful and stateless applications on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. It makes the consumption and provisioning of application storage easier for developers to use.
With Red Hat Gluster Storage, OpenShift customers get the added benefit of a software-defined, highly available and scalable storage solution that works across on-premises and public cloud environments and one that can be more cost efficient than traditional hardware-based or cloud-only storage services.
Dan's Take: Worth a Look
Containers, (known as operating system virtualization and partitioning in the
Kusnetzky Group model), are being broadly trumpeted by IBM, Oracle, VMware, SUSE and, of course, Red Hat as a useful adjunct to the use of virtual machine (VM) software.
Red Hat and the others are doing their best to help customers, and the industry as a whole, to understand where containers and VMs fit within a broad virtualization strategy. Red Hat and others such as VMware and DataCore also point out that virtual storage is a critical part of a complete virtualized computing environment. To that end, Red Hat stressed virtual storage in this announcement.
I've previously commented on how these different types of technology can fit together. What's different about Red Hat's approach to the adoption of open source projects are its efforts in the selection of the technology; how that technology is set up (e.g., the selection of parameters and options); integration with other projects and Red Hat products; testing of the amalgam of technology that supports a complete solution; and support. SUSE offers packages based on the same pool of open source technology, but takes a different approach: it puts everything together in a big bag and allows users to select the options and parameters for themselves.
If your enterprise prefers to deploy pre-integrated open source technology, Red Hat is worth evaluating.
About the Author
Daniel Kusnetzky, a reformed software engineer and product manager, founded Kusnetzky Group LLC in 2006. He's literally written the book on virtualization and often comments on cloud computing, mobility and systems software. He has been a business unit manager at a hardware company and head of corporate marketing and strategy at a software company.