Red Hat Shows Hybrid Cloud Software

At its annual Red Hat Summit and JBoss World conference in Boston on 29 June, the North Carolina-based company unveiled a gaggle of new software products that allow enterprises to deploy and manage open source-based hybrid clouds.

The primary new release is Red Hat Storage Server 2.0 for commodity-type x86 machines. This is optimised to manage unstructured data, such as documents, spread sheets, video, audio and other non-databased content.

Red Hat also has conjoined its virtualisation and cloud-management tools by bundling its enterprise virtualisation toolset with its CloudForms management kit.

Hybrid clouds

Red Hat is at the centre of many IT systems with its widely deployed Enterprise Linux stack, but the company with the instantly recognisable red fedora logo isn’t often mentioned in the same context when enterprises look to update data storage. Companies such as EMC, NetApp, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle and Dell rule the roost when it comes to storage, which now accounts for about 40 percent of all annual data centre costs.

However, with numerous research studies pointing out that hybrid clouds – cloud systems that combine public subscription services and make them available within a firewalled private cloud and attach to local storage – are the favoured way to go at this point, Red Hat now can have more conversations with storage admins.

Overall, Red Hat was busy in the data centre controls sector at the conference, announcing a new Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform that integrates the aforementioned Cloud Forms, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation.

This all adds up to centralised control of the data, something central to how an efficient data centre is now run.

This control happens whether it is in a physical machine (server or storage array), a virtual machine, or in someone else’s cloud to which the enterprise – or a department thereof – subscribes.

Fewer specialists needed

Using these Red Hat tools, enterprises will need fewer specialists to deploy and maintain these systems. Instead, companies with large IT systems will have less routine grunge work to do, which allows administrators more time for power efficiency implementation, ROI improvements, system and disaster recovery testing, and other high-level duties that often get overlooked due to lack of personnel time.

Also at the summit conference, Red Hat unveiled its OpenShift Enterprise PaaS Solution, which integrates Red Hat CloudForms, RHEL, RH virtualisation tools and JBoss Enterprise Middleware into a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for open and hybrid clouds.

Red Hat also said it wants to grow this platform into a sort of software development kit for PaaS environments that would be compatible with OpenShift.com’s Public PaaS.

Finally, Red Hat said that all these new cloud and virtualisation software packages will become available in several weeks.

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