Red Hat Launches OpenStack Platform 9
Red Hat, Inc., an open source solutions provider, announced the general availability of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 9 (RHOP 9). According to the company, it is a highly scalable, open Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform designed to deploy, scale and manage private cloud, public cloud, and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) environments.
“As customers continue to require more advanced workloads capabilities on top of their OpenStack deployments, we have updated Red Hat OpenStack Platform to go beyond just providing a secure, flexible base to build a private cloud. With this release of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 9, we continue to add capabilities to meet the production requirements of enterprises rolling our private clouds and service providers deploying NFV,” said Radhesh Balakrishnan, General Manager, OpenStack, Red Hat.
Critical dependencies are important for those who use production OpenStack environments with service functionality, third-party drivers, system performance and security. The new version of Red Hat's flagship operating system is designed to provide these critical dependencies as well as integrated with Red Hat Ceph Storage 2 and Red Hat CloudForms for a hybrid cloud management and monitoring. This integration enables the platform to tackle 64TBs of free object and block storage via Red Hat Ceph Storage 2 as well as perform deep exploration of OpenStack resources through Red Hat CloudForms.
Based on the latest OpenStack community release, Mitaka, with RHOP 9, the company will be able to provide a more secure and production-ready automated cloud platform through Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2.
Here are the significant updates from the latest release:
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Automated updates and upgrades with Red Hat OpenStack Platform Director: Users can take advantage of the latest OpenStack advancements while preventing downtime for production environments by upgrading their OpenStack deployments through the automation and validation mechanisms of the Red Hat OpenStack Platform Director.
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Live migration improvements and selectable CPU pinning from OpenStack Compute (Nova): A new CPU pinning feature can dynamically change the hypervisor behavior with latency-sensitive workloads such as NFV, meaning more sophisticated performance control. With the new update, the live migration process is faster and amplified as it allows system administrators to observe its progress and even pause and resume the migration task.
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Tech Preview of Google Cloud Storage backup driver in OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder): This new feature is utilizing its existing partnership with Google and enables more secure backups of critical data across the hybrid cloud as now, disaster recovery policies in the platform also incorporate with the public cloud using integrated drivers created for Google Cloud Storage. In other words, this enables users to easily take backups of their important data right on the Google Cloud.
The platform is a collaborative effort by Red Hat and its partners including Dell and Intel. With Red Hat OpenStack Platform 9 the company aims to globally expand deployment of clouds in the business world.
Jim Ganthier, Vice President and General Manager at Dell Engineered Systems, HPC and Cloud, says: “The adoption of OpenStack in production environments has grown and with that, comes increased requirements for enhanced management and seamlessly integrated enterprise capabilities. Dell and Red Hat’s continued close collaboration and joint engineering has both advanced and integrated these capabilities to automate OpenStack updates and upgrades with Red Hat OpenStack Platform 9 and Red Hat OpenStack Platform Director to help our customers achieve their business goals more quickly and easily on their OpenStack powered clouds.”
Just over a week ago the company also announced the general availability of Red Hat Virtualization 4, the newest release of its Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) - powered virtualization platform. Red Hat Virtualization 4 is designed to address the needs of both enterprises which are embarking on a virtualization deployment as well as organizations which have already deployed virtualization technologies, and they can integrate with existing containerized and cloud-native applications. Here are the new capabilities of Red Hat Virtualization 4:
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Performance and extensibility
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Management and automation
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Support for OpenStack and Linux containers
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Security and reliability
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Centralized networking through an external, third-party API
Some analysts believe that if the IT virtualization manager ever shifts from VMware, the alternative will be one of the few credible open source platforms like Red Hat, instead of another proprietary license such as Microsoft's.
Another recent great news item for their community is that Red Hat has been named on Forbes' “World’s Most Innovative Companies” list which consists of firms that investors feel are most likely to come up with the next big innovation. It’s also noteworthy that Red Hat is the only open source software company on Forbes' 2016 list. Red Hat VPs Marco Bill-Peter and Chris Wright explained what makes innovation possible across the Red Hat customer base in the 40-minute keynote at the 2016 Red Hat Summit. Here’s the two-minute video from the keynote:
The development of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 9 is also targeting to update paths for mission-critical operations. The platform is expected to reduce downtime for production environments when businesses move to the latest OpenStack advancements. Although there is cutthroat competition in the OpenStack market, Red Hat’s recent releases such as; RHOP 9, Red Hat Virtualization 4.0 and Red Hat's distribution of OpenStack for on-premises and private clouds, makes the company harder to directly match by the competitors and alternatives.
Venus Tamturk
Venus is the Media Reporter for CMS-Connected, with one of her tasks to write thorough articles by creating the most up-to-date and engaging content using B2B digital marketing. She enjoys increasing brand equity and conversion through the strategic use of social media channels and integrated media marketing plans.