Red Hat CloudForms 4 Expands Hybrid Cloud Management with Microsoft Azure Support, Advanced Container Management and Enhanced Self-Service

DUBAI, UAE, 16th December, 2015 - Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat CloudForms 4, the latest version of its award-winning hybrid cloud management solution. Built on an open platform, Red Hat CloudForms 4 goes beyond self-service, offering a consistent experience and comprehensive lifecycle management across platforms spanning virtualization, private cloud, public cloud and containers.

Support for Microsoft Azure and expanded container management

The release of Red Hat CloudForms 3.2 debuted the industry’s first open source cloud management platform to manage OpenStack infrastructure and workloads from a single platform, and with CloudForms 4, Red Hat continues to add functionality for the platforms and tools that developers and operators demand.

Support for Microsoft Azure – Following Red Hat and Microsoft's recent partnership announcement, Red Hat CloudForms now expands its collection of managed platforms to include Microsoft Azure, enabling Azure customers to manage those workloads and resources within CloudForms.
Support for containers – As more enterprises plan to run their workloads inside containers, they want introspection into these new configurations. CloudForms 4 adds management for container architectures, giving customers visibility into workloads running in OpenShift Enterprise by Red Hat and the infrastructure hosting OpenShift. In this manner, CloudForms can manage the relationships from the container through the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) layer to the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) layer or the physical host.
Improved self-service and operations – Improved dashboards and charts within CloudForms enable users to better see the relationships between different cloud platforms and container hosts running in production.

Red Hat CloudForms continually discovers and automatically inspects new resources, providing operational insight into platforms including: Amazon Web Services; Hyper-V; Microsoft Azure; OpenShift by Red Hat; OpenStack; Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and VMware. Red Hat CloudForms also applies automated policy to manage corporate compliance and governance of resources from a single operational interface.

ManageIQ Community Momentum

Red Hat CloudForms 4 is the third release based on the ManageIQ open source project, which was launched in June 2014 by Red Hat based on the code from the acquisition of ManageIQ, Inc. The ManageIQ community brings together developers, service providers, systems integrators, researchers and users to collaborate and drive innovation in the unified management of hybrid cloud environments. Since the last release of CloudForms, the community has gained significant traction, with contributions from:

Booz Allen Hamilton, who contributed code to integrate Project Jellyfish, its open source cloud broker, with ManageIQ. Booz Allen launched Project Jellyfish in 2014 with the goal of making smarter, more intuitive cloud service management and brokering more readily available. Project Jellyfish forms the basis for the new self-service user interface in Red Hat CloudForms 4.
Nuage Networks, who is building a provider for CloudForms to manage software-defined networking (SDN), planned for inclusion in a future CloudForms release.
Produban, the IT organization of Grupo Santander, is contributing improved chargeback and billing support to the ManageIQ project.

Availability

Red Hat CloudForms 4 is immediately available for customers with a subscription to download.

Supporting Quotes

Joe Fitzgerald, vice president, Cloud Management, Red Hat

"CloudForms 4 marks a milestone in hybrid cloud management. The addition of container management will enable CloudForms to provide a unified management experience across a wider variety of cloud platforms. We are also pleased to both continue building Red Hat’s strategic relationship with Microsoft and meet customer requests by adding management capabilities for Microsoft Azure. With Red Hat CloudForms 4, customers can find the industry’s broadest hybrid cloud management solution built on open source technologies.”

Jarid Cottrell, chief technologist, Booz Allen Hamilton

“The integration of Project Jellyfish with ManageIQ is a testament to Booz Allen’s long-standing relationship with Red Hat. We have worked together to advance and lead true end-to-end, open cloud solutions. Users will begin to see the integration of Project Jellyfish with ManageIQ in CloudForms 4’s new self-service capabilities, with more exciting features planned for subsequent releases. Through our Strategic Alliance with Red Hat, we’re engaging in more innovative ways of doing business, beyond the Project Jellyfish and ManageIQ collaboration.”

Corey Sanders, director of Compute for Microsoft Azure

“By integrating Red Hat CloudForms management capabilities with Microsoft Azure, we are extending our commitment to choice and flexibility across the Red Hat and Microsoft ecosystems. We’re pleased to further extend our strategic alliance with Red Hat in order to meet customer demands in today’s hybrid, heterogeneous world.”

Sunil Khandekar, CEO, Nuage Networks

“We are excited to be collaborating with Red Hat and the ManageIQ community to bring software defined networking capabilities into CloudForms. As our customers embrace cloud platforms, they are looking to simplify and consolidate operations management, and extending that to meet their networking requirements. Bringing the network service abstraction and automation capabilities of Nuage Networks Virtualized Services Platform (VSP) into CloudForms can enable progressive cloud-builders to orchestrate both the compute resources and the networking resources from a single system."

Juan Antonio de la Fuente, engineering director, Produban

“As the technology company for Grupo Santander, one of the world’s largest banks, we are under constant pressure to bring innovative solutions to the business that allow us to keep our competitive edge. By working with Red Hat in the ManageIQ community, we sidestep the classical 'buy vs build' decision and choose both options. We jointly innovate with Red Hat building solutions that have help us to solve some of our business problems, which we can then buy as off the shelf products that have none of the disadvantages of a custom 'build.' The joint innovation partnership with Red Hat has proven extremely valuable to us.”