Red Hat Issues OpenStack Preview

Red Hat Software released the Technology Preview of its OpenStack software targeted at service providers and enterprises looking to build infrastructure as a service (IaaS) clouds based on the open source framework.

An early supporter of the two-year-old OpenStack project, Red Hat has kept a low public profile on its commitment to the effort. In its announcement Monday, the company pointed out it was the #3 contributor to the current Essex release of OpenStack.

"Our current productization efforts are focused around hardening an integrated solution of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenStack to deliver an enterprise-ready solution that enables enterprises worldwide to realize infrastructure clouds," said Brian Stevens, RedHat CTO and vice president for worldwide engineering, in a statement.

Red Hat sees IaaS and OpenStack complimenting its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization software. While the former provides the infrastructure to manage hypervisors in a self-service provisioning cloud model, RHEV targets servers, SANs and provides typical enterprise virtualization functions, the company said in a blog post.

OpenStack is a component of Red Hat's cloud stack. While it addresses, IaaS, Red Hat's cloud portolio also includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux, RHEV, its JBoss application middleware and OpenShift, which provides the company's framework for platform as a service (PaaS).

Red Hat plans to deliver its OpenStack release next year. The Technology Preview is available for download.

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on August 16, 2012 at 11:59 AM