Company cites interoperability and portability as key underpinnings to practical cloud infrastructure.
Red Hat Inc. has announced new developments in its Cloud Foundations portfolio that promotes consistency between enterprise applications and the cloud. Red Hat has the infrastructure capable of delivering an open source, flexible cloud stack, incorporating operating system, middleware and virtualization. Furthermore, this stack is designed to run consistently across physical servers, virtual platforms, private clouds, and public clouds. Red Hat's comprehensive solution set enables interoperability and portability, according to the company. The solution recognizes that customers have IT architectures composed of many different hardware and software components from various vendors. Red Hat's Cloud Foundations is offering capabilities that allow customers to use multiple clouds effectively, according to the company.
Red Hat introduced Cloud Foundations last June during the Red Hat Summit in Boston. Cloud Foundations includes Red Hat's comprehensive line of products for implementing a private cloud, coupled with a detailed reference architecture and implementation cookbook, consulting services, and training offerings. Based on Red Hat's experience building public and enterprise clouds with its products, the solution was well-received by enterprises looking to build real clouds, the company says. Select customers are already previewing the technology in Red Hat's next release of Cloud Foundations.
“In our extensive research, we've found that open APIs and interoperability are essential to customers considering the cloud,” says Gary Chen, research manager, Enterprise Virtualization Software at IDC. “Our research shows that 80 percent of enterprises cite the lack of interoperability standards as a challenge in adopting cloud computing services. With Cloud Foundations, Red Hat is on the right track with cloud by accelerating interoperability and portability to prevent cloud lock in."
Red Hat's cloud solution uniquely emphasizes portability, providing customers with flexibility and choice across private and public clouds. Red Hat's next release of Cloud Foundations seeks to provide comprehensive portability for customers with the delivery of new technologies and offerings across four key areas:
Portable Computing
Red Hat's cloud management capabilities offer the tools a customer will need to implement and manage a cloud, according to Red Hat. The platform provides scalability, robust resource management and portals through an included cloud engine, self-service portal, tools and Deltacloud APIs. The solution allows customers to move computing to their choice of virtualization technology or public cloud virtual machines.
Red Hat has recently submitted the API specification for Apache Deltacloud to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) as part of its participation in the DMTF Cloud Management Work Group. The submission is a step forward in the company’s effort to offer users of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds the benefits of portability across cloud computing deployments.
The Apache Deltacloud project is an open source implementation of a RESTful web service API abstracting common proprietary IaaS cloud management APIs. The project began in September 2009 and was moved earlier this year to the Apache Incubator allowing it to grow and evolve within a community built on Apache’s well-known values of openness and meritocracy. Innovation in the Deltacloud project has been instrumental in the progress of Red Hat Cloud Foundations, Red Hat reports.
“As cloud computing continues to expand into today’s enterprises, interoperability and portability become increasingly important,” says Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager, Cloud Business at Red Hat. “We’re excited to submit the Deltacloud API to DMTF to help bring this level of interoperability to all clouds. Red Hat is continuing to help enterprises build real cloud today.”
The Deltacloud project provides DMTF with one of the only open cloud APIs in development today, according to Red Hat. With this, the project brings the principles of open source, such as user-driven innovation, to the users of today’s cloud computing APIs.
“As we continue making strides toward establishing open management standards for cloud computing, contributions from industry leaders like Red Hat help drive consistency and ease of use for all cloud users,” says Winston Bumpus, DMTF president. “We’re pleased to receive Red Hat’s submission of the Deltacloud API specification and look forward to their ongoing collaboration in our work to facilitate interoperable cloud management.”
To interact, participate or find more information on the Apache Deltacloud project, visit http://incubator.apache.org/deltacloud/.
Portable Applications
Red Hat's application builder provides cloud application lifecycle management, letting customers build assemblies to manage the complexities of creating, versioning, configuring, tracking and updating applications for the cloud. With portability of applications and workloads, customers can write an application once and deploy it anywhere. Red Hat's application builder allows customers to manage applications more consistently across physical, virtual and cloud deployments.
Portable Services
The cloud services from Red Hat provide customers with the technologies needed to implement commonly used application features, a key need for deploying private clouds. With Red Hat's cloud services, customers are also able to move these features together with their associated workloads between multiple clouds. For example, storage services provide data persistence, and messaging services enable data to be moved in and out of the cloud.
Portable Programming Models
Red Hat recently announced its vision for a comprehensive Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution as part of Cloud Foundations. Based on JBoss Enterprise Middleware, Red Hat PaaS is designed to be the solution within the portfolio that will allow enterprises, cloud service providers, ISVs and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers to take existing assets and develop new applications and deploy them to a wide range of public and private clouds.
Red Hat's Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution is designed to protect a company's application investment, by allowing developers to build once and deploy everywhere: on traditional servers, on virtualized servers, on private clouds, and in public clouds.
“We are focusing on all four of these areas for portability in the cloud because they form an essential whole,” said Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager, Cloud Business at Red Hat. “If you can migrate your computational power anywhere [that] you want but your data is tied to a particular cloud, you are still stuck there. At Red Hat, we aim to offer customers the tools they need for the cloud combined with real portability and choice.”
Red Hat plans to bring the JBoss Enterprise Middleware strategy of Open Choice to the cloud through flexible deployment options in addition to a choice of development frameworks and languages. Red Hat's next-generation PaaS solution will be designed to simplify the development of new simple Web applications as well as complex, transactional enterprise applications and integrate them into an enterprise. Additionally, Red Hat PaaS is expected to offer a comprehensive reference architecture to enable existing applications to be re-purposed within a wide choice of private and public clouds, protecting existing investments. With Red Hat PaaS, enterprises, cloud service providers, ISVs, and SaaS providers will have the opportunity to leverage their existing skills without rewriting applications.
"Application infrastructure (middleware) is a key technology layer in enterprise computing, and it is of equal role and importance in cloud computing as well, says Yefim Natis, vice president, Distinguished Analyst, Gartner, Inc.. "To achieve the full cost, agility, productivity, and scale benefits of cloud computing, applications must be deployed over a native cloud-enabled application infrastructure. Mainstream organizations must prepare to evaluate a full range of deployment options, including cloud, when planning their future application infrastructure investments," he says.
“Our enterprise customers leverage the JBoss Open Choice strategy today to protect existing investments while retaining the ability to choose the right developer environment for the problem at hand and skill set,” says Craig Muzilla, vice president and general manager, Middleware Business Unit at Red Hat. “With growing interest in the benefits of cloud computing, enterprises are looking to leverage cloud deployment of existing applications as well as develop new applications in the cloud. We believe that Red Hat PaaS will be ideally suited to deliver the flexibility required by CIOs to respond to business needs with rapid development and deployment and simplified management.”
Over time, Red Hat PaaS is expected to expand to areas such as testing and QA services, automated elasticity, provisioning, deployment services for building multi-tiered, multi-service applications, and metadata management across services.
Red Hat also announced that DreamWorks Animation SKG will utilize its Cloud Foundations to help produce future animated feature film releases.
“At DreamWorks Animation, cutting-edge technology is a key enabler to our creative ambition,” said Ed Leonard, DreamWorks Animation’s CTO. “Red Hat’s Cloud Foundations provides a compelling platform to enable our cloud strategy, giving us the ability to quickly scale our compute needs to meet the demands of our productions.”
To learn more about this announcement, watch the Red Hat and IDC press conference webcast here.
About Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions and an S&P 500 company, is headquartered in Raleigh, N.C., with over 65 offices spanning the globe. CIOs ranked Red Hat as one of the top vendors delivering value in Enterprise Software for six consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value survey. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with virtualization, applications, management and service oriented architecture (SOA) solutions, including Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.
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