Delivering on the Journey to an Enterprise-grade OpenStack solution

16. April 2014Radhesh Balakrishnan

At Dell World in December 2013, we announced a collaboration with Dell centered around co-engineering enterprise-grade OpenStack-powered private cloud solutions. That announcement marked a significant milestone in the longstanding collaboration between the “the world's largest startup” and the #1 enterprise open source solution provider. Since December, the teams from both Red Hat and Dell have been working closely and diligently to align upstream community efforts, product roadmaps, and go-to-market plans toward delivering on the promise of an enterprise-grade OpenStack.

Today, we are excited to share an important milestone in our journey: the availability of Dell Red Hat Cloud Solutions powered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, for customers to adopt a private cloud that enables cost reduction and improved agility. As OpenStack is rapidly maturing, customers are demanding predictable experience across proof-of-concept, pilot and production deployments. The Dell Red Hat Cloud Solutions are pre-tested solutions designed to help address this overwhelming need while removing the guesswork out of the endeavor:

Proof of Concept (POC) Configuration designed for customers looking to explore OpenStack capabilities and deployment options. The POC configuration integrates five Dell PowerEdge R720 servers, configured as OpenStack Manager and OpenStack Controllers with multiple OpenStack (Nova) Compute Nodes and Dell networking.

Pilot Configuration designed for testing cloud applications and for customers beginning to roll out OpenStack in production. The base pilot configuration is capable of supporting cloud scale applications across six OpenStack compute and three storage nodes. The pilot configuration can also be deployed with high availability (HA) for additional controller nodes.

In addition to the above, datacenter scale solutions will be created collaboratively with the customer, building upon the extensive experience Dell and Red Hat have with OpenStack technologies.

We have seen tremendous interest in Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform from customers across a variety of verticals, including financial, government and education sectors. In addition, to address the unique requirements of telecom customers, specifically around Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), Dell and Red Hat are also working together to engineer NFV solutions based on OpenStack.

With the availability of the joint solutions, we are poised to scale our customer engagements, backed by the more than 20,000 Dell sales associates worldwide. These solutions are also being showcased at Dell Solution Centers to help customers to envision the benefits of enterprise-ready OpenStack solutions and accelerate adoption.

Building on the strong relationship we have had with Dell that spans fifteen years of collaboration and the progress we have made to date around co-engineering OpenStack solutions, we are now extending our joint efforts across Linux Containers and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions. Stay tuned to hear more as we deliver on our joint vision in these emerging technology areas.

Bottom line: The solutions we're making available today bring to bear the combination of Red Hat's expertise as the #1 contributor to OpenStack and industry-leading hardware solutions from Dell to help customers realize the benefits of an enterprise-grade OpenStack-powered private cloud.