Red Hat Extends Cloud Management with ManageIQ

Look for Red Hat to step up its portfolio of cloud management wares now that it has acquired ManageIQ. The company today said it has closed the $104 million deal announced last month during the holidays.

Acquiring the New Jersey-based company will let Red Hat flesh out its CloudForms Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) management tooling. Like BMC, CA, Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, RightScale and VMware, among others, Red Hat is looking to offer "single pane of glass management" of public and private cloud infrastructures.

ManageIQ's EVM suite is built on the company's so-called Adaptive Management Platform, aimed at providing common monitoring, administration and view to multiple public and private cloud platforms. It can manage Amazon Web Services EC2 and infrastructure based on OpenStack, as well as VMware's vCloud-based services and virtualization environments from VMware, Microsoft and Red Hat. Furthermore, it has hooks into enterprise management systems from BMC, CA, HP, Microsoft and ServiceNow, and supports virtual desktop infrastructures.

At the core of ManageIQ's EVM is its Virtual Management Database (VMDB), which it describes as a low-latency but scalable engine that simplifies the automation of management tasks by "eliminating the need to federate management databases." The platform provides automated policy management, orchestration and workflows, while tracking relationships and providing directory-based classification and role-based access control.

Red Hat officials said on a webcast today outlining its plans for ManageIQ that the ability to manage multiple clouds, operating systems and VM infrastructures is critical. "It's going to be very important for enterprises, as they move towards this new cloud architecture, that [IT has] the ability to bring in the diversity of infrastructure and the diversity of resources into the same cloud environment," said Bryan Che, general manager of Red Hat's cloud business unit. "Enterprises don't want to be setting up 100 new cloud silos and having to manage them with 100 new different set of management tools, one for every single workload that they want to stand out."

Che, joined by ManageIQ co-founder and chief products officer Joseph Fitzgerald, said the goal is to integrate ManageIQ EVM with Red Hat's CloudForms. In essence, ManageIQ EVM fills holes in CloudForms and vice versa. ManageIQ offers operational management of the virtualized and cloud infrastructure by providing monitoring, orchestration, analytics and chargeback, among other features, Che explained. "These are all capabilities which we have not built out in CloudForms," he said.

CloudForms has enabled the management of cloud infrastructure and aggregating capacity and configuring infrastructure, while offering application lifecycle management capabilities, which were lacking from ManageIQ, Che said. "We think it's a very good fit in terms of how the technologies come together," he said.

Integrating the two should be relatively straightforward, he argued, because both are based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and developed in Ruby on Rails. Che gave no timeframe for when the company will release the integrated platform.

Che also noted that given Red Hat's open source legacy, ManageIQ's technologies will be made available to developers, though he didn't reveal specifics.

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/22/2013 at 12:48 PM