all things open

Life isn’t easy for IT organizations today. They find themselves on the receiving end of demands for new capabilities that public cloud providers are delivering at increasing speed. While solutions within the datacenter are beginning to deliver these same capabilities in the private datacenter the IT organization doesn’t want to build yet another silo. Red Hat’s Open Hybrid Cloud Architecture is helping IT organizations adopt next generation IT architectures to meet the increasing demands for public cloud capability while helping them establish a common framework for all their IT assets. This approach provides a lot of benefits across all IT architectures. To name a few:

• Discovery and Reporting: Detailed information about all workloads across all cloud and virtualization providers.
• Self-Service: A single catalog which could provision services across hybrid and heterogeneous public and private clouds.
• Best-Fit Placement: Helping identify which platform is best for which workload both at provision and run-time.

The engineers at Red Hat have been hard at work on the next release of CloudForms which is scheduled for General Availability later this year. I’ve been lucky enough to get my hands on a very early preview and wanted to share an update on two enhancements that are relevant to the topic of bridging present and future IT architectures. Before I dive into the enhancements let me get two pieces of background out of the way:

1. Red Hat believes that the future IT architecture for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is OpenStack. That shouldn’t come as a big surprise given that Red Hat was a major contributor to the Grizzly OpenStack Release and has established a community for it’s distribution called RDO.
2. There is a big difference between datacenter virtualization and clouds and knowing which workloads should run on which is important. For more information on this you can watch Andy Cathrow’s talk at Red Hat Summit.

Two of the enhancements coming in the next release of CloudForms are the clear distinction between datacenter virtualization and cloud providers and the addition of OpenStack as a supported cloud provider.

In clearly separating and understanding the differences between datacenter virtualization (or infrastructure providers as it’s called in the user interface) and cloud providers CloudForms will understand exactly how to operationally manage and standardize operational concepts across Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, VMware vSphere, Amazon EC2, and OpenStack.

Cloud Providers

Infrastructure (Datacenter Virtualization) Providers

Also, as you noticed in the previous screens CloudForms will support OpenStack as a cloud provider. This is critical to snapping in another piece of the puzzle of Red Hat’s Open Hybrid Cloud Architecture and providing all the operational management capabilities to OpenStack that IT organizations need.

OpenStack Cloud Provider

These two enhancements will be critical for organizations who want a single pane of glass to operationally manage their Open Hybrid Cloud.

Single Pane Operational Management of RHEV, vSphere, AWS EC2, and OpenStack

Stay tuned for more updates regarding the next release of CloudForms!