Red Hat and eNovance to Deliver Carrier-Grade OpenStack

DUBAI, UAE - 19th May, 2014 - Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, and eNovance, a global leader in the open source cloud computing market, today announced a new collaboration to drive Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and telecommunications innovations into OpenStack. The upstream alliance is aimed at delivering the industry’s most complete, carrier-grade telecommunications offering based on Linux, Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), and OpenStack.

Red Hat and eNovance plan to collaborate with the open source community and contribute NFV innovations to the OpenStack upstream, including work on Linux, KVM and libvirt enhancements to create an efficient VM for virtualized network functions (VNFs), and on accelerated packet processing and service chaining. The intended result is that all OpenStack community participants will benefit from the output of Red Hat’s and eNovance’s open NFV collaboration, as compared to a proprietary extensions add-on approach resulting in further vendor lock-in.

In November 2013 at the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong, Red Hat and eNovance announced that the companies were partnering to deliver OpenStack integration services to joint customers around the world. Red Hat has been the number one contributor to OpenStack for the past three community releases, while eNovance has consistently ranked as one of the top ten contributors. The scope of these upstream contributions reflect the two companies combined OpenStack domain expertise, which enables the collaboration to deliver unique and compelling value to end customers.

In addition to the upstream collaboration, Red Hat and eNovance are announcing an Early Adopter Program for carriers and telecommunications service providers interested in exploring the benefits of OpenStack-based clouds for NFV projects. The goal of the program is to work with independent hardware (IHVs) and software vendors (ISVs) to test, quality assure and certify complete solutions aiming to bring telecommunications service providers significant cost savings through the use of commodity compute, network and storage equipment. Telecommunication service provider end customers can benefit from a comprehensive NFV-capable Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform that enables them to be more agile and innovative when it comes to development of applications, and mobile applications in particular, that require VNF.

Supporting Quotes

Nick Barcet, vice president, Products, eNovance

“The modern form of NFV standardization and interoperability should come from a common open source code base, thereby eliminating an innovation bottleneck from slow moving standards bodies and avoiding proprietary lock-in. Both Red Hat and eNovance are deeply committed to the upstream OpenStack community and we believe that fracturing upstream into proprietary forks undermines the fundamental value of collaborative development. With nearly every NFV vendor coming with its own version of OpenStack and requirements, carriers should demand a robust and scalable common underlying infrastructure capable for distributing VNF where and when needed. “

Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager, Virtualization and OpenStack, Red Hat

"NFV and OpenStack are collaborating with the aim of revolutionizing the way telecommunications networks are being built and operated. With the growing dominance of KVM in NFV and telecommunications, driving upstream improvements will be a key focus of our collaboration with eNovance. Red Hat has deep experience in the telecommunications industry, with global communications service providers among the leading adopters of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, and now Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. By bridging that experience with eNovance’s expertise and unique tools and methodology on interfacing various types of cloud applications with OpenStack, we’re believe that our companies are bringing a unique value proposition to carriers looking to modernize their network infrastructure.”