Red Hat Releases New Integrated Hybrid Cloud Stack

Red Hat has announced the general availability of Red Hat Cloud Suite and Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8 to support efforts for development and operations teams to leverage the scale of cloud computing. 

With the new platform releases, Red Hat now offers an integrated hybrid cloud stack with a container application platform (OpenShift by Red Hat), scalable infrastructure (Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8) and unified management tools (Red Hat CloudForms), all available individually or through a single deployable solution with Red Hat Cloud Suite.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8 is the newest version of Red Hat’s OpenStack offering, adding optimized storage and management capabilities through the native inclusion of Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat CloudForms.

Offering a scalable IaaS platform based on the OpenStack community “Liberty” release, OpenStack Platform 8 is a co-engineered solution that integrates the foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Red Hat’s OpenStack technology to form a production-ready cloud platform, 

With the release of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8, Red Hat’s core OpenStack offering now natively includes:

- Automated upgrades and updates: Upgrade major point releases and minor updates. A component of the Red Hat OpenStack Platform director, it automatically performs the necessary system-wide updates to both the core OpenStack services, as well as the director tool itself, helping to deliver a healthy and stable OpenStack cloud while minimizing downtime.

- Infrastructure and workload management included: Use Red Hat CloudForms for lifecycle and operational management over OpenStack infrastructure and workloads. CloudForms can manage Linux and Windows workloads running on top of OpenStack, including lifecycle management, usage monitoring and reporting, multi-node orchestration, and governance and policy-based access control.

- Software-defined storage: Red Hat Ceph Storage, Red Hat’s scalable, software-defined storage solution, is now included with Red Hat OpenStack Platform, offering an initial 64 terabytes of highly flexible object and block storage. The storage solution for OpenStack clouds provides users with a single platform to support the storage needs of an OpenStack-based cloud.

- Telco-focused preview: Version 8 adds several new and tech preview features focused on improving network virtualization functions. With this release there is more assured predictable latency with real-time KVM, improved network I/O performance with DPDK- accelerated Open vSwitch; and an OpenDaylight networking plugin for customers intending to build a software-defined network.

Red Hat Cloud Suite offers a pre-integrated set of Red Hat’s cloud technologies combining the container application platform OpenShift Enterprise, with a scalable cloud infrastructure in the form of Red Hat OpenStack Platform, and a common management framework through Red Hat CloudForms. 

Red Hat Cloud Suite enables users to accelerate new cloud-based services for private cloud and application development and optimize existing workloads through improved virtualization and performance. This enables a modern cloud environment where application delivery teams can focus on development, testing, and deployments using modern cloud-based containerized microservice solutions, while maintaining control and visibility.

Highlights of the release include:

- A unified management experience: Spanning operations and lifecycle management, self-service, and infrastructure monitoring, these management tools provided by Red Hat Satellite cover rolling updates for deployment, configuration, patch and subscription management. A new self-service catalog extends to cover the lifecycle, operation, and financial management of services that customers deploy.

- Newly-added infrastructure monitoring with risk management and analytics: Proactively collects infrastructure analytics that enable companies to manage technical risks before they impact operations. Red Hat Insights, a newly-released operations management service, provides these monitoring capabilities spanning Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat CloudForms, and Red Hat Satellite.

- Integrated application development and portability: Enables user to build and deploy applications in a familiar, open source container application platform environment through OpenShift Enterprise by Red Hat. Linux containers built on standard Docker format are dependent on the same operating system kernel, consuming fewer resources and increasing portability. Kubernetes-based container orchestration within Red Hat Cloud Suite also allows operators to manage their Linux containers as a single system.

- KVM-based virtualization platform with the newly updated Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization: Offers simplified virtual machine-to-virtual machine migrations. Open, scalable, software-defined storage is provided with the inclusion of Red Hat Ceph Storage as part of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8.