Dell and Red Hat join forces for private cloud
Sat 18 Apr 2015
Computer making giant Dell has teamed up with open source firm Red Hat to offer jointly-engineered, enterprise-grade, private cloud solutions based on OpenStack.
The Dell Red Hat Cloud Solution will be powered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. The deal will enable Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings that enterprise customers need to build public, private and hybrid cloud environments.
Dell and Red Hat aim to provide enterprise customers at various stages of OpenStack evaluation and use with an enterprise-grade software life cycle experience and greater stability, predictability and rigor to the community-published OpenStack updates.
They claims to address enterprise customer demand for more flexible, elastic and dynamic IT services to support and host non-business critical applications – including mobile, social and analytics – and dev/test environments. These solutions are available today, and have been optimised and validated by Dell and Red Hat to provide rapid on-ramps to OpenStack private clouds:
There is a Pilot Configuration designed for testing cloud applications, and for customers beginning a production environment. The pilot configuration is capable of supporting cloud scale applications across six OpenStack compute and three storage nodes. The pilot configuration can be expanded with pre-configured compute, storage and infrastructure blocks.
For customers seeking massive scale-out designs, Dell Cloud Services will engage with customers to design and architect OpenStack-based clouds.
Red Hat’s PaaS offering, OpenShift, provides secure, scalable, Linux Container-based multi-tenancy via Red Hat Enterprise Linux Gears. Dell and Red Hat will work together within the OpenShift community to build OpenShift solutions that provide support for enterprise application developers looking for ways to make their current and future data and applications more portable and accessible.
Dell claims its OpenShift integration is a step toward it and Red Hat co-engineering next-generation Linux Container enhancements from Docker. This will aim to enable compatibility for PaaS offerings within enterprise environments, and developers to write applications using any language to be portable across public, private and hybrid cloud environments.
The OpenShift-based solution will provide support for customers to use within their frameworks and databases, through the use of Docker-based images and cartridges, with the goal of enabling integration with any other platform that supports Docker, including public clouds. Dell and Red Hat claim this capability gives developers the freedom to choose their application development language to build a portable application that can exist in any cloud environment.
Dell will integrate these capabilities across its hardware and software offerings to enable a complete PaaS solution from Linux to OpenStack to OpenShift, including platform management.
Paul Cormier, president, products and technologies at Red Hat said: “Cloud innovation is happening first in open source, and what we’re seeing from global customers is growing demand for open hybrid cloud solutions that meet a wide variety of requirements. Whether it is enterprise-grade private cloud solutions, or DevOps solutions to build applications for both public and private clouds, through our expanded work with Dell, we’re focused on delivering the flexible solutions that meet these varied needs.”
Sam Greenblatt, vice president, enterprise solutions group technology strategy at Dell said: “Dell is a long-time supporter of OpenStack and this important extension of our commitment to the community now will include work for OpenShift and Docker, which we think will help customers with choice in cloud resources, and application development and optimization. We are building on our long history with open source and will apply that expertise to our new cloud solutions and co-engineering work with Red Hat.”
The offerings are now available in the US, Canada, UK, Germany, France and the Netherlands.
Chris Wheal
