Red Hat Unveils New Offerings, Cloud Certification at VMworld

The open source solutions provider is showing off demos of its forthcoming CloudForms 2.1 cloud management technology at VMworld in San Francisco. It also announced a new product that integrates Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server as well as a new training and certification program for OpenStack.

With VMworld 2013 in full swing in San Francisco, Red Hat wasted no time today showing off its upcoming cloud and virtualization offerings. The open source solutions provider unveiled demos of its forthcoming CloudForms 2.1 cloud management technology, a new product designed to integrate Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server, and a new training and certification offering for deploying and managing OpenStack.
"We agree that an all-public cloud isn't the answer, as VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger acknowledges," says Bryan Che, general manager of Red Hat's Cloud Business Unit.
"This is a conversation Red Hat has been leading for some time now. However, we do not buy into the premise that a private or a hybrid platform based on one vendor's technologies and products is the answer either, says Che That goes against the compelling industry trends of openness and choice that have increasingly put customers in control of their own destinies and strategic direction. Instead, we are focused on delivering what we believe customers really want: an open hybrid cloud."
For that to happen, Che says, a hybrid cloud can't just run on a homogeneous software stack. It needs to work across the enterprise's entire business and IT, spanning Red Hat, Microsoft, VMware and Amazon. That's where OpenStack comes in.
OpenStack is free open source software—actually a series of interrelated open source projects for controlling pools of processing, storage and networking resources through a datacenter—supported by a wide array of vendors, from Red Hat and IBM to Rackspace and HP.
CloudForms is Red Hat's answer to operating and managing an OpenStack environment. Its capabilities include a comprehensive cloud service catalog, chargeback and metering, service orchestration, policy and governance, reporting and forecasting and more. And, as Che notes, it can provide these capabilities from a diverse array of cloud environments—VMware, Red Hat, Amazon—all from a single pane of glass.
"This means, then, that with CloudForms, you can build and manage a hybrid cloud that spans not just Red hat technologies or VMware technologies but a choice and diversity of providers," he says. "And, you can do this all with a unified and interoperable set of tools and interfaces. In an open hybrid cloud, your cloud is not locked into a single vendor or technology stack; rather you can build and manage a cloud that spans all your important assets in an integrated and seamless way."
Red Hat also introduced a new product offering: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Promotional Offering. It integrates Red Hat's enterprise Linux platform with its virtualization management system for servers and desktops. The Enterprise Virtualization Promotional Offering will be made available as a single subscription offering in fall 2013.