Red Hat introduces latest version of OpenStack Platform

Red Hat has introduced Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13, the latest version of Red Hat’s massively scalable and agile cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution. Based on the OpenStack “Queens” release, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 provides a powerful foundation for enterprises using hybrid cloud for digital transformation strategies, helps to minimize the growing pains often involved with new technology adoption with its new Fast Forward upgrades feature, and is designed to also improve integration across the emerging technology stack.

 

The fast-paced, competitive digital landscape facing many organizations often requires new methods of business differentiation where success can involve transformed IT service delivery. A key component of modern IT is to provide faster access to IT resources while delivering new capabilities and innovations to developers. Red Hat OpenStack Platform is designed to accelerate the delivery of applications and services by empowering organizations to innovate with greater confidence through an extensible, production-ready private cloud. With Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13, enterprises can evolve their IT infrastructure into a more agile and efficient environment -- one ready to capture opportunities presented by the emerging digital marketplace.

 

Accelerate operational efficiency through enhanced agility

Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 enables users to build an on-premises cloud architecture that provides resource elasticity, scalability, and increased efficiency. To help enterprises achieve this goal, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 features greater cross-portfolio integration with Red Hat’s extensive portfolio of hybrid cloud technologies. This includes:

l  Red Hat CloudForms to better ease day-to-day management tasks for hybrid cloud infrastructure.

l  Red Hat Ceph Storage for massively scalable, integrated storage, which enables organizations to more quickly provision hundreds of virtual machines from a single snapshot and build a fully-supported storage solution.

l  Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform helps Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 serve as an extensible platform for cloud-native workloads, providing a single architecture that brings the power of Linux containers on Kubernetes orchestration to scalable Openstack infrastructure.

Simplified release updates with Fast Forward upgrades

To help further simplify the upgrade process between long-life releases, Red Hat OpenStack 13 introduces Fast Forward upgrades, a feature that enables IT teams to more consistently deliver the latest OpenStack innovations to their environments while minimizing operational risk. Delivered through Red Hat OpenStack Platform director, Fast Forward upgrades give customers the option to stay on a faster upgrade path and receive new features from the upstream community every six months, or remain on a supported release for a longer period of time. Starting with this latest release, customers who are currently on Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 can upgrade to Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 with fewer reboots and without the need for additional hardware.

 

Innovation at the speed of business demand

Through open, community-powered innovation delivered at enterprise-scale and backed by Red Hat’s expertise and support, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 is designed to deliver a cloud platform that pairs innovation and agility with the enterprise demand for stability, availability, and increased security. Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 enables organizations to deliver innovations faster and more reliably through:

l  Containerization of OpenStack services: Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12 introduced the containerization of OpenStack services, helping to increase flexibility for upgrades, rollback, and service management while reducing cloud management complexity for operators. Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 builds upon this capability by containerizing all OpenStack services, including networking and storage, for the first time in a Red Hat OpenStack offering.

l  Upgraded OpenStack security capabilities: Through the integration of security related projects such as OpenStack Barbican, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 provides tenant level lifecycle management of secrets, such as passwords, security certificates and keys. With the introduction of Barbican, encryption related use cases are now available, such as Cinder encrypted volume support, Glance image signing and Swift object encryption. Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 also features increased TLS coverage for internal communication flows for services such as VNC, OpenDaylight and Redis. The introduction of these features can enable customers to better comply with security standards such as FedRAMP, SecNumCloud, and other industry specific risk management frameworks.

 

Empowering customers and partner across industries

Red Hat OpenStack Platform, combined with Red Hat’s open source leadership, can provide a consistent experience across services, support, consumption model and lifecycle management, helping to empower IT teams across industries. Hundreds of customers rely on Red Hat OpenStack Platform to power their hybrid and private clouds for a variety of deployments, including BBVA; Cambridge University; FICO; Massachusetts Open Cloud; Turkcell; Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Paddy Power Betfair; UKCloud; Cathay Pacific; and IAG.

 

Red Hat OpenStack Platform is also backed by a robust ecosystem of partners for enterprises businesses including Dell EMC, Intel, Lenovo, NetApp, and Rackspace, and also enjoys broad support in the telecommunications industry, with Cisco, Ericsson, Huawei, NEC, and Nokia, among others. Building on this ecosystem, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 is designed to deliver innovations that communications services providers can use to deploy, run, and develop critical applications and end-user services, including:

 

l  Integration and support for OpenDaylight, a modular open source platform for customizing and automating a software-defined network, through Red Hat OpenStack Platform director. This integration is designed to help customers benefit from an adaptable networking solution based on open software.

l  Real-time KVM compute role, powered by the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Real Time Kernel for environments where ultra-low latency is a requirement.