RED HAT ANNOUNCES GENERAL AVAILABILITY OF RED HAT ENTERPRISE LINUX OPENSTACK PLATFORM 5

SOURCE: Red Hat

RALEIGH, N.C. – July 8, 2014 – Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5, the third enterprise release of Red Hat’s OpenStack offering, designed to serve as the foundation for building OpenStack-powered clouds for advanced cloud users, telecommunications companies, Internet service providers (ISPs), and public cloud hosting providers.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform delivers an enterprise-class cloud platform built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, co-engineered and integrated with Red Hat’s OpenStack technologies, offering IT organizations the agility to scale and quickly meet customer demands without compromising on availability, security, or performance.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5 is based on the OpenStack Icehouse release and includes several new features aimed at easing enterprise adoption of OpenStack technology in the existing datacenter and enhancing capabilities to make it a more reliable and dependable cloud platform, including:

Three-year support lifecycle, providing stability and support for enterprise cloud environments. Backed by Red Hat’s award-winning Global Support Services team and the world’s largest certified OpenStack partner ecosystem with more than 250 partners, including joint support relationships with hundreds of certified software, hardware, and services partners, customers can have confidence that they will receive support for their production environments.

Support for integration with VMware infrastructure, encompassing virtualization, management, networking and storage. Customers may use existing VMware vSphere resources as virtualization drivers for OpenStack Compute (Nova) nodes, managed in a seamless manner from the OpenStack Dashboard (Horizon). Additionally, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5 supports the VMware NSX plugin for OpenStack Networking (Neutron) and the VMware Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK) plugin for OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder).

Better placement of workloads across cloud resources. Server groups enable workloads to be spread broadly across the OpenStack cloud for enhanced resiliency of distributed applications, or located proximately for lower communications latency and better performance of complex applications.

Improved support for virtual machines, supporting new cryptographic security requirements from the United States and United Kingdom. Using the para-virtualized random number generator device added in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, cryptographic routines in guest applications will have access to better quality encryption and experience improved performance.

Improved interoperability of networking stacks. The new modular plugin architecture for Neutron eases the addition of new networking technologies to OpenStack deployments. The new architecture provides a path for customers with heterogeneous networking environments who want to use a mix of networking solutions in their OpenStack environment.

Additionally, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5 will offer OpenStack data processing service (Sahara) as a Technology Preview, enabling faster provisioning and easier management of Hadoop clusters on OpenStack. Hadoop is used to store and analyze large amounts of data and when combined with Sahara it provides a powerful platform for rapidly creating data driven applications and deploying them on the open hybrid cloud.

Availability

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5, engineered with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, is available globally now. In the coming weeks, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5, engineered with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, will be available.

Supporting Quotes

Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager, Virtualization and OpenStack, Red Hat “We see momentum behind OpenStack as a private cloud platform of choice from enterprise customers and service providers alike. Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5 not only offers a production-ready, supported version of OpenStack Icehouse, but it brings a number of features that will simplify its use, and enhance dependability for enterprise users. Alongside those new features, we’re extending our support lifecycle for Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, giving users confidence that the solution they deploy will be supported by our global team for the next three years.”

Lew Tucker, VP/CTO of Cloud Computing , Cisco “OpenStack users are deploying applications in multi-tenant clouds that require new levels of isolation, security, performance and agility in an open ecosystem. Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5 with Cisco UCS servers and Nexus 9000 switches lets enterprise customers easily and securely deploy open, high-performance, scalable clouds. And availability of Neutron plugins means Red Hat customers will be able to automatically provision a fully enabled Application Centric Infrastructure.”

Steve Stover, director of product management and marketing, Engineered Solutions, Dell “Dell and Red Hat joint engineering efforts are delivering new capabilities to extend the base functionality of OpenStack for comprehensive and fully integrated private cloud solutions, which will soon incorporate Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5 following its general availability. Dell customers will value the resulting integrated solutions, built to simplify deployment and streamline time to value for production deployments, along with the stability and extended support available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5.”

John Healy, general manager, SDN Division, Intel “Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5 takes advantage of the in-built functionality of Intel’s Enhanced Platform Awareness (EPA) features within OpenStack’s Icehouse release. Intel’s EPA provides greater scale and improved performance for virtualized networking functions (VNF’s) for Enterprise, Telco and Cloud Service Providers. Advanced processor and networking technologies embedded in Intel’s silicon and in PCIe devices provide improved performance that will increase workload efficiency when the VM has access to them. Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5 release enables that access.”