Red Hat Delivers Functionality Updates across Multiple OpenStack Services with General Availability of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 9

DUBAI, UAE – 6th September, 2016 – Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 9, its highly scalable, open Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform designed to deploy, scale and manage private cloud, public cloud, and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) environments. Based on the OpenStack community “Mitaka” release, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 9 offers customers a more secure, production-ready automated cloud platform integrated with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2, Red Hat Ceph Storage 2, and Red Hat CloudForms for a hybrid cloud management and monitoring.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform has emerged as a proven solution to power private clouds across hundreds of customers worldwide, such as BBVA; Cambridge University; FICO; NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Paddy Power Betfair; Santander Bank; and Verizon. It is backed by a robust ecosystem of partners, including Cisco, Dell, Intel, Lenovo, Rackspace and more. Red Hat co-engineers and integrates its OpenStack platform with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and the KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) virtualization layer from the recently updated Red Hat Virtualization. Earlier this month, Red Hat was named a “Visionary” in the 2016 Gartner Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform 9 builds on the proven, trusted foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to provide critical dependencies needed in production OpenStack environments centered around service functionality, third-party drivers, and system performance and security. It is among the only production-ready OpenStack distributions that offers automated upgrade and update paths for mission-critical operations. Red Hat OpenStack Platform 9 brings significant updates from the upstream Mitaka version to nearly every OpenStack service:

Automated updates and upgrades with Red Hat OpenStack Platform Director - Red Hat to enables users to upgrade their OpenStack deployments through the automation and validation mechanisms of the Red Hat OpenStack Platform Director, based on the upstream community project TripleO (OpenStack on OpenStack). This in-place upgrade tool offers a simplified means to take advantage of the latest OpenStack advancements, while preventing downtime for production environments.

Live migration improvements and selectable CPU pinning from OpenStack Compute (Nova) -- The Compute component now offers a faster and enhanced instance of the live migration process, helping system administrators to observe its progress and even pause and resume the migration task. A new CPU pinning feature can dynamically change the hypervisor behavior with latency-sensitive workloads such as NFV, enabling more fine-grained performance control.

Tech Preview of Google Cloud Storage backup driver in OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder) -- As part of Red Hat’s continued collaboration with Google, new disaster recovery policies in Red Hat OpenStack Platform 9 now extend to the public cloud using integrated drivers created for Google Cloud Storage. This new feature enables more secure backups of critical data across the hybrid cloud.

Management for OpenStack

To help accelerate service delivery and enable self-service for system administrators building OpenStack private clouds, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 9 connects with Red Hat CloudForms to provide a consistent, automated cloud deployment environment. Included with a Red Hat OpenStack Platform subscription, Red Hat CloudForms provides inherent discovery, monitoring, and deep inspection of OpenStack resources, enabling policy-based operational and lifecycle management over all OpenStack infrastructure components, as well as virtualized workloads running on OpenStack.

Additionally, the updated Red Hat OpenStack Platform Director can also deploy Red Hat Ceph Storage, the industry-leading, integrated software-defined storage solution for Red Hat OpenStack Platform private clouds. Red Hat OpenStack Platform 9 includes 64TB of free object and block storage for customers evaluating a robust, scale-out cloud storage solution.

Supporting Quotes

Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager, OpenStack, Red Hat

“As customers continue to require more advanced workloads capabilities on top of their OpenStack deployments, we have updated Red Hat OpenStack Platform to go beyond just providing a secure, flexible base to build a private cloud. With this release of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 9, we continue to add capabilities to meet the production requirements of enterprises rolling our private clouds and service providers deploying NFV.”

Jim Ganthier, vice president and general manager, Dell Engineered Systems, HPC and Cloud

“The adoption of OpenStack in production environments has grown and with that, comes increased requirements for enhanced management and seamlessly integrated enterprise capabilities. Dell and Red Hat’s continued close collaboration and joint engineering has both advanced and integrated these capabilities to automate OpenStack updates and upgrades with Red Hat OpenStack Platform 9 and Red Hat OpenStack Platform Director to help our customers achieve their business goals more quickly and easily on their OpenStack powered clouds.”

Jonathan Donaldson, vice president, Software Defined Infrastructure, Intel
“Enterprises and comms service providers are seeking a hardened OpenStack distribution to fuel their cloud deployments, and OpenStack optimization has been a central focus of Intel’s Cloud for All initiative. Our long history of collaboration with Red Hat has extended to delivering enterprise optimization upstream as well as work to ensure that the Red Hat OpenStack Platform takes full advantage of Intel Architecture capabilities downstream. The delivery of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 9 is the latest advancement in our collaboration to accelerate deployment of tens of thousands of clouds.”