Build a foundation for your private cloud - A Red Hat Summit session recap

Red Hat Summit 2014 marked the 10^th anniversary for the annual Red Hat conference. The Summit offers an opportunity for our customers, partners, and other stakeholders to interact face to face with Red Hatters who bring to life some of the products that help their organizations to innovate and to gain a competitive edge. Speaking of customers, I was privileged to moderate a panel titled “Build a foundation for your private cloud”. The panelists included Nirmal Mehta, Lead Technologist, Booz Allen Hamilton; Bernard Lee, Group head of IT and VP of Process and Innovation, YTL Power; Melvin Soh, Manager, High Performance Computing Centre, Nanyang Technical University; and Venkatesh Jakka, Manager, Systems, Chicago Board of Exchange.

Although the above panelists represent various geographies and industries, they each faced similar challenges: how to update their aging infrastructure, how to embrace IT innovation especially virtualization while leveraging the existing infrastructure and how to deliver services to end users while meeting or exceeding SLAs. Let’s explore these challenges for each of the organizations:

• Booz Allen Hamilton, an IT Consulting firm won a contract from the Department of Defense to revitalize their aging 120 end of life Oracle SPARC machines, to consolidate 80 legacy applications, to overhaul lengthy reporting cycles and to build a private cloud that enabled resource automation
• YTL Power, a Malaysian conglomerate won a contract from the Ministry of Education to transform education services by enabling 10,000 primary and secondary schools to access a cloud based virtual learning infrastructure equipped with 4G internet access and available 24 hours, 7 days a week, all within 12 months. This service needed to be reliable, cost-effective, highly available and highly scalable to accommodate unpredictable surges especially around examination times
• Nanyang Technical University (NTU), an academic institution that serves 33,000 undergraduate and graduate students, needed to equip their High Performance Computing Center (HPCC) with an agile and highly scalable infrastructure to enable their research community to securely and efficiently gain seamless access to IT resources. Due to the nature of their work such as weather forecasting, researchers have unpredictable and volatile resource demands
• Chicago Board of Exchange (CBOE), the largest US options derivatives exchange wanted to empower their developers to gain self-service capabilities for their test and dev environments. Innovative applications from these developers are key to CBOE’s business model of being a leader in their industry by delivering innovative trading products, trading technologies and unique investor education resources. As CBOE moved its trading platform from Solaris to RHEL, it was imperative to provide all developers with RHEL environments; each DEV environment requires about 43 VMs

Booz Allen Hamilton, YTL, NTU, and CBOE decided to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as their virtualization platform of choice because it provided traditional virtualization benefits such as hardware consolidation, greener datacenters, faster resource provisioning, high availability, cost savings and so on. Moreover, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization delivered industry leading performance as measured by SPECVirt_SC2013, reliability, scalability, security, and flexibility characteristics that enabled them to innovate and meet end user’s demands. Additionally, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization enabled them to build a foundation for their private clouds by deploying many of the self-service capabilities and by leveraging Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager’s API which can be customized to solve unique challenges that are particular to each organization.

Innovation is at the core of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. In its most recent release, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization shares images and networking services with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack (tech preview). In particular, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is integrated with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform Glance and Neutron services. Some of the above customers look forward to taking advantage of this integration. As their business needs evolve, adopting a private cloud based on OpenStack is on the horizon. Taking advantage of shared common services will make this transition seamless.

Red Hat Summit 2015 will be back in Boston and I look forward to highlighting and interacting with more customers who have deployed Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization to build a foundation for their private cloud. Visit the below links for more information.

• Booz Allen Case Study
• YTL Case Study
• NTU’s Case Study
• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Demo
• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Product Page