Red Hat Makes OpenStack, Linux Hybrid Cloud Push Official

The age of the OpenStack hybrid cloud has arrived, and traditional datacenter virtualization is passé. So says Red Hat (RHT), which on Wednesday rolled out  Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure to drive hybrid deployments

RHEL OpenStack Platform, is “designed to meet the needs of advanced cloud users, telecommunications companies, Internet service providers (ISPs), and public cloud hosting providers,” according to Red Hat. Available as a subscription service, the product combines Red Hat’s enterprise Linux distribution with its OpenStack cloud platform in an integrated package.

Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, by trast, allows customers to build their own cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) as a replacement for traditional datacenter virtualization. The key value to the offering, as Red Hat is pitching it, is the ability for organizations to leverage the flexibility and scalability traditionally associated with public clouds while keeping data more secure and manageable on their own infrastructure.

Like Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure is a subscription-based product with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenStack at its core. In addition to those technologies, however, the OpenStack Platform also integrates Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Red Hat CloudForms.

Red Hat first described the products in June and announced their general availability this Wednesday, July 10.  The company has also indicated that it will be building a partner program around these cloud offerings, beginning with “a small set of pilot solution provider and systems integration partners in select geographies” and scaling up from there.

This latest news from Red Hat follows similar efforts by Rackspace (RAX) last month to push the hybrid cloud as a more secure and flexible platform than traditional virtualization and public-cloud strategies. While the public cloud may not be going anywhere just yet, the winds are changing, and OpenStack-powered hybrid clouds are looking more and more like the wave of the future.