Red Hat offers up OpenStack preview, supported version planned for '13
Red Hat today released a preview version of its much anticipated OpenStack cloud platform distribution based on its Enterprise Linux 6 and announced that a fully supported version will ship next year.
The Linux leader, which will take on VMware, Microsoft and Citrix (which backs the Apache-based CloudStack release) in the cloud Infrastructure-As-A-Service (IaaS) arena, originally planned to position its own cloud offering as the de facto standard in the open source cloud market but did an about-face after the OpenStack distribution conceived by Rackspace and NASA received major endosrements in the industry.
Red Hat will now push its Apache-sponsored DeltaCloud API and CloudForms as tools for enterprises to build hybrid cloud platforms and is rallying around OpenStack, which is fast becoming the de facto open source standard for cloud computing.
Last spring, Red Hat switched course, announced its would back OpenStack and joined the still-developing but independent OpenStack Foundation as a platinum member. Today, Red Hat is the No. 3 contributor to OpenStack.
"With this preview release of Red Hat’s OpenStack distribution, Red Hat delivers on the next step in its commitment to deliver a trusted enterprise distribution of OpenStack, leveraging its long track record of providing supported commercial-grade open source products," the company announced, noting that its open hybrid cloud portfolio includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Red Hat CloudForms, Red Hat Storage and Red Hat OpenShiftTPlatform-as-a-Service (PaaS).
Red Hat cited supportive quotes from Dell, Cisco, Intel and Rackspace about its OpenStack plans.
"Red Hat has been working with an early group of customers who have been strong advocates for a commercial release of OpenStack from Red Hat, and who have been instrumental in providing the feedback and testing required to bring this preview release to completion," the company announced in a press release.
"The unsupported public preview version of Red Hat’s OpenStack distribution based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is available for download immediately at www.redhat.com/tryopenstack. A fully supported release for Red Hat customers is expected to be delivered in 2013."
Brian Stevens, CTO of Red Hat, said the preview version will give enterprise customers a taste of what's to come in 2013.
"Our current productization efforts are focused around hardening an integrated solution of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenStack to deliver an enterprise-ready solution that enables enterprises worldwide to realize infrastructure clouds.