Launch of Red Hat’s OpenStack Draws Closer
Launch of Red Hat’s OpenStack Draws Closer by UCStrategies Staff
OpenStack plans from Red Hat moved towards the preview stage, and comes with a 90-day free evaluation program for those adopting it early.
The open source vendor released plans for the program at the OpenStack Summit, and stated that it would be based on the OpenStack Folsom release that was launched in September and included networking (code named Quantum) and block storage (code named Cinder) parts. The former Essex release was the basis for the preview version of Red Hat.
A community-supported OpenStack distribution (RDO) was also announced, and this runs in addition to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora and other provisions from those; it is ready for download. Those new to OpenStack will be able to interact and share advice on the best way to deal with the comprehensive deployment process, as a result of the RDO. Furthermore, a community of knowledge sharing will be developed.
RDO also comes with components for cloud application orchestration (code named Heat) and resource management and monitoring (code named Ceilometer), further to the core OpenStack technologies. In addition, a new installation tool has been developed by Red Hat (PackStack), and will be used in the distribution of RDO.
RDO has been described in a press release as being a “pure upstream OpenStack experience with the latest stable release from OpenStack.org, packaged, integrated and easy to deploy on Red Hat platforms.”
The co-founder and CTO of Tempe, Arizona-based TrueCloud, Dave Rice, said that the evaluation of Red Hat will bring more OpenStack cloud customers to the cloud service provider. Rice also stated that the open versus proprietary cloud may not be an issue in the future.
He said: “"In the next three to five years, these questions about [open vs. proprietary] infrastructure will disappear. I see this evolving the way electricity evolved: Initially, every factory had a power plant, and they had to be concerned with electrical engineering. Now no one cares [because] electricity just works.”
It was last August that Red Hat unveiled plans for a commercial OpenStack product for enterprise, and it had been suggested that a Folsom-based commercial OpenStack product would be available earlier this year. It is expected that OpenStack will launch it by the end of 2013.
OpenStack’s “Grizzly” launch took place earlier in the month, and provides support for VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors. The top code contributor to Grizzly is now Red Hat, according to the company, and support will be provided in its commercial OpenStack release.
The OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network will also be launched by Red Hat, and will hire hardware, software and services partners to adopt the company’s cloud infrastructure offerings. (CY) Link