Red Hat drives cloud infrastructure upgrades with latest version of production-ready OpenStack platform

Boston - Openstack Summit 2017 — May 8, 2017: Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced Red Hat OpenStack Platform 11, the latest version of Red Hat’s massively-scalable and agile cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). Based on the OpenStack “Ocata” release, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 11 delivers enhanced support for upgrades with composable roles, new networking capabilities, and improved integration with Red Hat CloudForms for cloud management.

"As OpenStack deployments grow in scale and scope, enterprises need a clear path forward to embrace new innovations without sacrificing their existing deployment structure. Red Hat OpenStack Platform 11 helps to provide this path forward, with Red Hat OpenStack Platform Director helping to maintain stability through the upgrade process, while also adding new networking features, management capabilities, and storage support, bringing the powerful innovations of the OpenStack community to mission-critical enterprise deployments." Radhesh Balakrishnan general manager, OpenStack, Red Hat

Red Hat OpenStack Platform 11 delivers a reliable cloud platform built on the proven, enterprise-grade backbone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux . Based on OpenStack community code, Red Hat OpenStack Platform is a tested, certified and fully-supported version of OpenStack that provides the agility to scale and more quickly meet customer demand without compromising availability, performance or IT security requirements. Red Hat OpenStack Platform also includes Red Hat CloudForms to ease day-to-day management operations. It serves as a hybrid cloud management and monitoring platform to oversee not only OpenStack infrastructure components but also the workloads running on a given Red Hat OpenStack Platform cloud.

Additionally, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 11 maintains its tight integration with Red Hat Ceph Storage and introduces the co-location of Red Hat Ceph Storage with OpenStack compute nodes. Previously in tech-preview, this release also enables storage mirroring to help simplify data replication between sites, improving disaster recovery for customers.

Improved Upgradability

Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 introduced composable roles, which allow operators to create customized profiles for individual services and processes to suit their unique needs. This helps to improve operation and efficiency by allowing operators to scale and manage the individual services they need at any moment, rather than scaling the entire cloud.t While this makes it easier for enterprises to customize OpenStack deployments to fit their specific needs at scale, it also introduces challenges in upgrading to new versions of the platform. To address this, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 11 now supports upgrades for composable roles, making the deployment and upgradability of Red Hat OpenStack Platform more adaptable and consistent while retaining the important aspects of lifecycle management.

In addition, OpenStack services can now be composed individually and assigned, enabling operators to place components such as databases, proxies, or messaging services on specific nodes based on their unique requirements. This includes adding customized roles post-deployment to a running cloud, providing more flexibility to customers or partners as they become more successful with their cloud services.

Expanded networking and network function virtualization support

Networking and network function virtualization (NFV) support remains a key function of OpenStack deployments, and Red Hat OpenStack Platform 11 delivers several new capabilities, designed for standard networking use cases as well as extreme workloads such as those required by information and communication technology services providers. New features include:

• Full support for VLAN-aware virtual machines (VMs) , OpenStack-based VMs can now send and receive VLAN encapsulated traffic while being deployed over Open vSwitch (OVS) or OVS Data Plane Development Kit (OVS-DPDK).
• Additional telecommunications provider enhancements with upgrades to OVS and DPDK to provide latest features and functions, resulting in increased performance optimizations.

Enhanced management with Red Hat CloudForms

Red Hat OpenStack Platform 11 improves its integration with Red Hat CloudForms, Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud management solution, to better support management requirements for day-to-day operations of a Red Hat OpenStack Platform-based cloud. Included with Red Hat OpenStack Platform 11, Red Hat CloudForms can now access and control OpenStack regions, multiple domains, and host aggregates for a more unified controller view of cloud health and efficiency. Storage management has also been enhanced, as Red Hat CloudForms can now perform volume snapshot management functions like creation, listing and deletion, further streamlining the overall management of the cloud platform.

Partner and customer success

Red Hat OpenStack Platform provides a proven, enterprise-grade solution for building, deploying and scaling cloud deployments across geographic and industry boundaries. Hundreds of customers rely on Red Hat OpenStack Platform to power their hybrid and private clouds for a variety of mission-critical deployments, including BBVA ; Cambridge University ; FICO ; Massachusetts Open Cloud ; NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory ; Oak Ridge National Laboratory ; Paddy Power Betfair ; Produban ; Swisscom ; UKCloud ; and Verizon . And, Red Hat OpenStack Platform is backed by a robust ecosystem of partners, including Cisco, Dell, Intel, Lenovo, NetApp, Rackspace, Ericsson, HPE, IBM, and many more.

Innovation paired with support

Red Hat OpenStack Platform 11 is the second release covered by Red Hat’s varying support life cycle model. Under this model, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 11 will be supported for one year with customers being able to leverage Red Hat’s award-winning global support team for help with migrations and upgrades to future vers ions.

Availability

Red Hat OpenStack Platform 11 will be available in the coming weeks via the Red Hat Customer Portal and as a component of the Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure and Red Hat Cloud Suite solutions.

Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager, OpenStack, Red Hat: “As OpenStack deployments grow in scale and scope, enterprises need a clear path forward to embrace new innovations without sacrificing their existing deployment structure. Red Hat OpenStack Platform 11 helps to provide this path forward, with Red Hat OpenStack Platform Director helping to maintain stability through the upgrade process, while also adding new networking features, management capabilities, and storage support, bringing the powerful innovations of the OpenStack community to mission-critical enterprise deployments.”

Armughan Ahmad, senior vice president and general manager, Solutions and Alliances, Dell EMC: “Dell EMC and Red Hat share the same mission – to deliver complete, trusted solutions to help our customers quickly and easily transform their business for success in the digital economy. With the release of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 11, customers can take advantage of network function virtualization (NFV) features, improved upgrade capabilities and other enhancements on industry-leading Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, leveraging contributions of more than 2,500 developers worldwide. Dell EMC is proud of our long-standing, strategic collaboration with Red Hat to streamline deployment through open hybrid solutions, taking the guesswork out of solution design for customers.”

Imad Sousou, vice president and general manager, Open Source Technology Center, Intel: “Massive growth in cloud services and connected devices require the data center to analyze and transform data at unprecedented scale. Working together to enable key technologies such as Intel® Resource Director Technology (Intel® RDT) and the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), Intel and Red Hat are helping accelerate the adoption of OpenStack as a platform for innovation, readying it for new multi-cloud and communications network environment strategies that deliver security and agility while containing costs.”

Kip Compton, Vice President Cloud Platform and Services Group, Cisco: “Our collaboration with Red Hat and the use of Red Hat OpenStack Platform within our Metacloud and NFVi solutions enables Cisco to bring world-class product and services to our customers. We are excited about the Red Hat OpenStack Platform 11 release and are looking forward to bringing these new advancements to our customers."