Archive
NOW AVAILABLE: The Dell Red Hat Cloud Solution, powered by RHEL OpenStack Platform!
.
This is a duplicate of a blog I posted on del.ly/60119gex.
This week, those of us on the OpenStack and Red Hat OpenStack teams are partying like its 1999! (For those of you who don’t get that reference, read this first.)
Let me provide some context…
In 1999, when Linux was still in the early days of being adopted broadly by the enterprise (similar to an open source cloud project we all know), Dell and Red Hat joined forces to bring the power of Linux to the mainstream enterprise space.
Fast forward to today, and we see some interesting facts:
- Red Hat has become the world’s first billion dollar open source company
- 1 out of every 5 servers sold annually runs Linux
- Enterprise’s view of open source is far more receptive than in the past
So today – Dell and Red Hat are doing it again: this time with OpenStack.
Today, we announce the availability of the Dell Red Hat Cloud Solution, Powered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform – a hardware + software + services solution focused on enabling the broader mainstream market with the ability to run and operate OpenStack backed by Dell and Red Hat. This is a hardened architecture, a validated distribution of OpenStack, additional software, and services / support to get you going and keep you going, and lets you:
- Accelerate your time to value with jointly engineered open, flexible components and purpose engineered configurations to maximize choice and eliminate lock-in
- Expand on your own terms with open, modular architectures and stable OpenStack technologies that can scale out to meet your evolving IT and business needs
- Embrace agility with open compute, storage, and networking technologies to transform your application development, delivery, and management
- Provide leadership to your organization with new agile, open IT services capable of massive scalability to meet dynamic business demands
Here is one more data point to consider – Dell’s IT organization is using the RHEL OpenStack Platform as a foundational element for incubating new technologies with a self-service cloud infrastructure. Now, that is pretty strong statement about how an OpenStack cloud can help IT drive innovation in a global scale organization.
At the end of the day, both Dell and Red Hat are committed to getting OpenStack to the enterprise with the right level of certification, validation, training, and support.
We’ve done it before with RHEL, and we’re going to do it again with OpenStack.
Until next time,
JOSEPH
@jbgeorge
The “Open” Trend in Cloud…

"Yes We're Open!"
C’mon – all the cool kids are doing it…
Going “open” that is.
How many announcements have we seen in the last few months having something to do with open technology when it comes to the cloud space? With a great mix of business benefits AND customer / end user benefits, going open is certainly the latest trend.
I think this is a great and overdue market direction – standards are needed in this space, and I’m hopeful that this level of vendor response will help get us there. Additionally, its important that we understand that open technology, while enabling users, should also benefit vendors, so that they can continue to invest in and support open products.
Here’s a sampling of all the fantastic-ness.
—-
OpenStack
This one is near and dear to my heart since I’m the OpenStack business lead at Dell. But my view is that OpenStack really kicked off this season’s “open” trend. Announced last July, it’s an open source cloud platform that has gained serious momentum with over 60 vendors in the community and quite a few developers world wide. With the latest release of their code base (codenamed Cactus), and their recent Design Summit (at the Hyatt Regency in Santa Clara – where else?), service providers and large enterprises are taking a serious look at OpenStack as a viable cloud solution. (Learn more at www.OpenStack.org. Also shameless plug for www.Dell.com/OpenStack.)
—-
OpenCompute
Facebook helped launch this initiative as they strove to build a low cost, yet highly efficient computing infrastructure. Partnering with other industry stalwarts like Dell and Rackspace, Facebook opened up the specs on the efficient servers that make up their environment, in an effort to encourage other companies to build energy efficient infrastructures. (Learn more at www.opencompute.org.)
—
VMware Cloud Foundry (Open PaaS)
With its aquisition of the SpringSource Java development framework, and of RabbitMQ, the cloud messaging technology, VMware makes a bold move into the cloud space by unveling Cloud Foundry as an open source “Platform as a Service”. Focused on Java application developers , Cloud Foundry supports Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, and Rails, and allows developers a quick and easy way to get development platforms up and available.
Another plus – my good buddy Dave McCrory (@mccrory) is helping drive this initiative at VMware. 🙂
(Learn more at www.cloudfoundry.com)
—

openshift.redhat.com/app
OpenShift
Speaking of open PaaS, Red Hat announced its OpenShift Platform as a Service today. Their focus is to produce exportable workloads that can be used via private cloud or public cloud, such as Amazon. OpenShift will support Java, PHP, Python, and Ruby. Ironically, the open source is not yet open source, but will be shortly.
(Learn more at openshift.redhat.com/app.)
—
OpenFlow
How can I continue without mentioning OpenFlow? As many experts agree, the network will be one of the most critical components to cloud success. Created to help drive innovation in networking, a number of vendors are investigating ways to add OpenFlow as a feature to their networking portfolio. Dell, Nicira, and others are some interesting names in this space. I’m hopeful we’ll hear some interesting news about commercial networking providers and OpenFlow as Interop kicks off next week.
(Learn more at www.openflow.org.)
—-
So what do you think should be next here? Do you feel open sourcing cloud technologies advance us as an industry?
Drop me a line or leave a comment – would love to hear your thoughts.
Until next time.
JOSEPH
@jbgeorge