Red Hat, Inc., a provider of enterprise open source solutions, announced new initiatives within Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, including the introduction of the Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and a Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Promotional Offering.
The Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Infrastructure-as-a-Service, a new training and certification offering, will cover essential OpenStack skills, including installing and configuring a Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform deployment; configuring and managing images; and managing storage using Object Storage (Swift) and Block Storage (Cinder). The certification process for this training offering will be performance-based, with candidates performing tasks on a live system to utilize real-world experience.
The move to OpenStack, the open source private cloud infrastructure, represents a new approach to enterprise cloud computing, Andrew Cathrow, senior product manager at Red Hat, told 5 Minute Briefing. “The first wave of virtualization was taking physical machines and bolting on virtual machines,” he explains. “It was very simply consolidation and cost savings in terms of buying hardware. VMs are still very much like physical counterparts, but you can deploy them in a more agile fashion. Most customers are doing it that way today.”
Many of today's cloud implementations, Cathrow says, are simply virtualization solutions bolted onto existing infrastructures. “Cloud is virtualization with self-service with some chargeback mechanisms. That’s not really cloud; it's just a better-managed, more efficient virtualized infrastructure.” The transformative effects kick in when elasticity is introduced into workloads, he adds. “OpenStack is designed for elastic apps. You can't just forklift your traditional workflows onto OpenStack.”
For some time to come, enterprises will be concerned with managing both traditional IT workloads, as well as the elastic workloads handled by OpenStack, Cathrow says.
Red Hat also announced a new product offering intended to integrate its enterprise Linux platform with Red Hat’s virtualization management system for servers and desktops. The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Promotional Offering will be offered as a single subscription offering that will be available in the fall, the vendor says.
For more details, visit www.redhat.com.