Red Hat Unveils OpenStack Distribution Preview Release

Red Hat, Inc., the open source solutions, today announced the immediate availability of the preview release of Red Hat’s OpenStack distribution based on the popular open source OpenStack framework for building and managing private, public and hybrid Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds. With this, Red Hat delivers the next step in its plans for the industry’s only enterprise-ready OpenStack distribution with Red Hat’s award-winning commercial support, certified ecosystem of hardware and application vendors and leadership in delivering trusted open source clouds for organisations worldwide requiring enterprise-grade solutions and support.

OpenStack is an open source framework for building private and public IaaS clouds that complements Red Hat’s portfolio of open source cloud solutions. The core software projects provide compute, storage and networking management services, with a shared identity service and dashboard. Red Hat has long been contributing to OpenStack and has steadily increased its participation and contributions over time.

The OpenStack project has quickly developed into an open source solution capable of providing organisations with performance, features and functionality for their private and public clouds. The announcement of the forthcoming OpenStack Foundation accelerated this development, as well as highlighted the need for commercial supportability to accelerate enterprise adoption. 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. Red Hat’s OpenStack distribution will further extend and complement the company’s open hybrid cloud portfolio, which today includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation, Red Hat CloudForms, Red Hat Storage and Red Hat OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

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 now seeks to work with a wider group of customers to further develop Red Hat’s OpenStack distribution and its usage with other Red Hat products. In addition, Red Hat is working closely with key partners such as Rackspace to provide fully managed Red Hat OpenStack-powered clouds in the future.