Red Hat upgrades enterprise Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering

Red Hat, Inc. has introduced Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6, featuring updates designed to serve as the foundation for building OpenStack-powered clouds for enterprise businesses with advanced cloud users, telecommunications companies, Internet service providers (ISPs), and public cloud hosting providers.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform delivers the foundation for a production-ready cloud, integrating Red Hat’s hardened and agile OpenStack technology with the security and stability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform sets a new standard for OpenStack deployments, with customers in production in every region, spanning industry verticals and enterprises of various sizes in education, financial services, government, healthcare, retail, and telecommunications.

Building on its innovative co-engineered design, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6 strengthens Red Hat’s production-ready cloud platform through advancements in both the Linux and OpenStack components. Interoperability and ease of use continue to be at the forefront, starting with updates to Red Hat’s intuitive graphical installer and management tools that create greater efficiency and reduce the complexities of a cloud deployment.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6 is based on the OpenStack Juno release and includes several new features aimed at easing enterprise deployments of OpenStack technology within existing datacenters and capabilities specific to telecommunications providers to enable Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) deployments among carriers, including:

· IPv6 support, for both provider and tenant networks, enabling customers to assign IPv6 addresses across physical networks and OpenStack Networking (Neutron) virtual routers in stateless and stateful modes.
· Neutron High Availability offers an upgraded OpenStack experience with Neutron agents in “active-active” mode for high availability configuration. This availability improves redundancy for networking, providing service uptime and improving stability for larger-scale production clouds.
· Single root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) networking, supported by a new driver, enables users to execute network switching directly on their hardware, bypassing the hypervisor and virtual switch levels.
· Support for Multi-LDAP backends and domains, all within a single Identity service node, easing the installation and configuration processes for the platform, as well as long-term daily operations.
· Full support for data processing, moves the Sahara service from tech preview to a fully supported feature that enables big data workloads.
· Deeper Ceph integration with new capabilities for OpenStack Compute (Nova) and OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder), including full support for ephemeral volumes backed by the Ceph block device. This enables ‘diskless’ compute nodes and near-instantaneous booting of new virtual machines.
· New tech preview features, highlighting Red Hat’s continued innovation in the OpenStack space with feature debuts of unsupported technology previews, including bare metal provisioning and TripleO deployment and management.

Interoperability
Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6 furthers Red Hat’s commitment to enabling customers to avoid vendor lock-in and achieve interoperability. With continued integrated support for Red Hat CloudForms hybrid management platform, Red Hat recently announced a new Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform cloud management API and a certification process for third-party cloud management tools, expanding the company’s commitment to open platform development and customer choice.