Red Hat Updates Integrated OpenStack Cloud Platform

Red Hat (RHT) has brought together three of the open source world’s latest software products—Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.5, OpenStack Havana and the KVM virtualization hypervisor—to build Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 4.0, which is out this week. Here’s what to expect from the newest integrated cloud computing platform.

Announced Dec. 19, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 4.0 combines the latest version of RHEL, which the company released in November, with the most recent release of OpenStack, code-named Havana, which also debuted this fall. It adds KVM, Linux’s native hypervisor, into the mix to deliver open source-friendly virtualization.

Red Hat’s new integrated OpenStack platform introduces several features, among them support for The Foreman, a tool for managing server deployment and configuration. It also offers full support for the key components that make up OpenStack, including Heat (the OpenStack orchestration engine), Neutron (for networking) and Ceilometer (for OpenStack data collection), as well as integration with other Red Hat products for servers and the cloud, namely CloudForms and Red Hat Storage Server.

Red Hat also is actively building a partner community around OpenStack through a certified partner ecosystem that it launched in November, which it says is the largest of its kind within the OpenStack world.

Through product integrations and partnerships, Red Hat is investing heavily in forging a comprehensive OpenStack ecosystem. And with little doubt, it has been far more successful in achieving that goal than any of its competitors. While other major open source vendors, including SUSE and Canonical, have done little more than package OpenStack for their respective Linux distributions, Red Hat is already offering integrated solutions. The company may drive the future of OpenStack more than anyone realized when the cloud computing platform first exploded into the channel a couple of years ago.