Red Hat’s Updated Enterprise OpenStack Platform Promises To Simplify OpenStack Deployments

Red Hat today launched its Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 into general availability. The distribution combines Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server, the latest OpenStack release (“Kilo”), and the company’s services for installing and managing OpenStack Clouds into a single product.

Red Hat says this update will make it easier for cloud operators who want to use OpenStack to manage their deployments. Using the new OpenStack Platform director, which is based on the TripleIO OpenStack project, users can now use a graphical interface to manage their day-to-day operations and provision resources from a single tool. The director also helps operators provision bare-metal servers automatically to make it easier to deploy and repurpose hardware resources as needed.

As Tim Yeaton, who oversees Red Hat’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service business, tells me, the focus on director is also due to the fact that the company is now seeing more enterprises move from OpenStack pilots to production use. It’s one thing to set up a pilot infrastructure, after all, but production environments have different requirements. Because of this, the director feature now makes it easier to install bug fixes, new features and — as new versions of OpenStack are released — upgrades.

Also new in this update is the ability to create high-availability compute clusters thanks to the built-in monitoring and failover service from Red Hat Enterprise Linux, IPv6 and other networking enhancements, and support for incremental backups. All of these are also features that enterprise users have been asking for.

As Yeaton also noted, many of the new OpenStack features have been inspired by the needs of telecom companies, who were some of the earliest adopters of the platform.

“The interest in a lot of these telco features has come front and center,” he told me. “And I think what we’ll see is a lot of capabilities that are being contemplated for telcos will help with more broad-based enterprise adoption.” He specifically noted that OpenStack’s focus on its networking stack and network functions virtualization (NFV) was driven by the telcos, but is now also being adopted by enterprises.