OpenStack 10 open for business

Red Hat has launched Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10, the company’s massively-scalable and agile cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution. Based on the upstream OpenStack ‘Newton’ release, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 drives new features that increase system-wide scalability, ease infrastructure management, and improve orchestration, while also enhancing network performance and platform security. Additionally, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 introduces a new software life cycle, with optional support up to 5 years.

 

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; NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Paddy Power Betfair; Produban; Swisscom; UKCloud; and Verizon. Additionally, Red Hat OpenStack Platform is backed by a robust ecosystem of certified partners, including Cisco, Dell EMC, Fujitsu, Intel, Lenovo, Rackspace, and NetApp for enterprise businesses, as well as Ericsson, Nokia, NEC, Huawei, Cisco and others from the telecommunications industry.

 

Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 delivers a reliable cloud platform built on the proven, enterprise-grade backbone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Integrated with Red Hat’s hardened OpenStack community code, Red Hat OpenStack Platform provides the agility to scale and more quickly meet customer demand without compromising availability, performance, or IT security requirements. Also included in Red Hat OpenStack Platform is Red Hat CloudForms, a hybrid cloud management and monitoring platform to oversee not only OpenStack infrastructure components but also the workloads running on a given OpenStack cloud. Additionally, 64 TBs of storage capacity is provided with Red Hat Ceph Storage, enabling users to better evaluate the flexible, massively scalable properties of Ceph’s leading storage solution for OpenStack environments.

 

New enhancements and updates to Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 include:

 

·        A more streamlined user experience driven by an easier-to-use graphical user interface (GUI) reduces the complexities of installation and management. Designed for production use, the Red Hat OpenStack Platform director GUI provides several newly integrated functions, such as automatic upgrades and updates (including Ceph), advanced networking configuration, high availability, and the option to deploy file sharing via the Manila service, using the integrated drivers available from NetApp and Red Hat Ceph Storage.

 

·        Improved flexibility for greater scalability through the introduction of customizable services and administration roles using Red Hat OpenStack Platform director. Cloud operators are now able to control their OpenStack environment at a more granular level by customizing OpenStack services to run and scale independently of each other. This offers greater flexibility when deploying services to match individual organizations’ unique workload requirements.

 

·        Greater data assurance through new security-related enhancements, such as improved high availability (HA) for large scale deployments. Additionally, optional object storage encryption and ephemeral security tokens improve security measures and lower risk of data access due to theft.

 

·        Improved performance for network-intensive workloads through the new data plane developer kit (DPDK) component of Open vSwitch, and single-root input/output virtualization (SR-IOV), results in network performance that is comparable to bare metal. Additionally, network routing is now more flexible and faster, allowing customers to choose between centralized routing or distributed routing (DVR).

 

·        A new “ready state” hardware certification program, based on OpenStack Ironic. While Red Hat already supports certified hardware plug-ins for several OpenStack components, the new program is designed to expand the ecosystem of hardware options for automated bare-metal configuration. Dell EMC is the first Red Hat partner to be certified for Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 ready-state, with several more coming soon.

 

Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 also introduces distributed continuous integration (DCI) to key partners, such as Dell EMC, NEC, and Rackspace. This collaborative approach to testing can help partners more effectively prepare for new Red Hat OpenStack Platform releases, and provide customers with greater stability and higher quality cloud solutions that have been tested many times over with their uniquely integrated cloud system than previously offered.

 

New lifecycle offers up to 5 years support

To help customers achieve long-term stability required by their specific workload requirements, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 introduces a dual support life cycle model that offers greater subscription flexibility for mission-critical operations. This new model gives customers the option of standardizing on a new “Long Life” version of Red Hat OpenStack Platform, offering a three year product lifecycle and optional two additional years of extended life cycle (ELS) support available for purchase. Customers can also choose to focus on consuming new feature functionality by using rolling upgrades to follow the latest releases of Red Hat OpenStack Platform every six months to one year.

 

Long Life versions of Red Hat OpenStack Platform will be offered every third release, starting with Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10. Versions in between will include one year of life cycle support.