Dell and Red Hat have coengineered a set of enterprise-grade private cloud solutions based on OpenStack.
Known rather cleverly as the "Dell Red Hat Cloud Solution", this is a RHEL OpenStack platform for elastic and dynamic IT services to support and host non-business critical applications — including mobile, social, and analytics — and dev/test environments.
These solutions include "rapid on-ramps" to OpenStack private clouds for Proof of Concept Configuration — designed for customers looking to explore OpenStack capabilities; and Pilot Configuration — designed for testing cloud applications, and for customers beginning a production environment.
The pilot configuration is capable of supporting cloud scale applications across six OpenStack computes and three storage nodes. The pilot configuration can be expanded with pre-configured compute, storage, and infrastructure blocks.
For customers seeking massive scale-out designs, Dell Cloud Services will engage with customers to design and architect OpenStack-based clouds.
Red Hat's OpenShift PaaS offering provides Linux Container-based multi-tenancy via Red Hat Enterprise Linux Gears. Dell and Red Hat say they will now work together within the OpenShift community to build OpenShift solutions that provide support for developers looking for ways to make their current and future data and applications more portable and accessible.
Dell VP Sam Greenblatt explains that OpenShift integration is a necessary step toward Dell and Red Hat coengineering next-generation Linux Container enhancements from Docker. "This PaaS platform from Red Hat, and solutions to be coengineered by Dell and Red Hat, will aim to enable compatibility for PaaS offerings within enterprise environments, and developers to write applications to be portable across public, private, and hybrid cloud environments, compatible with any operating system and using any language."
The OpenShift-based solution will provide support for customers to use within their frameworks and databases, through the use of Docker cartridges, with the goal of enabling integration with any other platform that supports Docker, including public clouds. This capability is hoped to give developers the freedom to choose their application development language to build a portable application that can exist in any cloud environment.
As pointed out by Clayton Coleman on OpenShift.com blogs, "For those who aren't yet familiar with Docker, it takes the power of Linux containers (the ability to isolate software on a Linux system so that it can't see other software), pairs them with an efficient file system abstraction for delivering the exact libraries you need to any server, and then makes it all ridiculously easy to use."
Dell will integrate these capabilities across its hardware and software offerings to enable a complete PaaS solution from Linux to OpenStack to OpenShift, including platform management.
Red Hat's Paul Cormier says that cloud innovation is happening first in open source. "What we're seeing from global customers is growing demand for open hybrid cloud solutions that meet a wide variety of requirements. Whether it is enterprise-grade private cloud solutions, or DevOps solutions to build applications for both public and private clouds, through our expanded work with Dell, we're focused on delivering the flexible solutions that meet these varied needs."
