Red Hat, Nuage Networks, OpenStack, and KISS

The reality is that IT is serious money – IDC estimates that the Internet of Things (IoT) market alone will hit $7.1 trillion by 2020![1]  But a lot of that money is due to the IT industry practice of “lock-in” – trapping a customer into a proprietary technology and then charging high costs, in some instances up to 10X cost, for every component   For some reason, customers object to having to pick one vendor’s approach, being subject to limitations – whether technological or otherwise, paying high markups for every incremental extension, then having to pay high switching costs for the next solution at end of life in five years or less.

As a consequence, many of those customers are taking a good, hard look at open source software (OSS) that can minimize vendor lock-in. OSS communities also encourage the development of software solutions that run on industry-standard and reasonably priced hardware. In particular, OpenStack has been well received by businesses of all sizes, and the OpenStack community is growing by leaps-and-bounds with 625% more participating developers and 307% more business members as of its fourth birthday![2] Since OpenStack can orchestrate operations for an entire datacenter, it offers a vision of the future where  customers are free from server, network, and storage lock-in.

However, legacy naysayers have always articulated three catches with OSS:
1)    Making it enterprise-grade in terms of scalability, reliability, and security
2)    Ensuring that the code base grows over time so that others can move the ball forward
3)    Getting enterprise-class support for the code base

That’s where Red Hat and Nuage Networks come in. By working together, both companies rely on one anothers pedigree of being a leader in their respective data center functions – server, storage and middleware for Red Hat, and networking for Nuage.  The net result is a true enterprise-grade and integrated OpenStack solution designed to work for any cloud.

Both companies have well-developed reputations for enabling real scalability of their technologies, up to service provider levels. These scalability requirements are a critical requirement to truly enable cloud environments for multi-national enterprises.

Both companies are also strong contributors to OpenStack. Red Hat products begin in the upstream communities, building from an open source technology landscape that is ever changing. Being a top code contributor to OpenStack helps Red Hat best represent our customers’ needs and requirements with regards to the various OpenStack components, as well as the Linux Kernel, the KVM hypervisor, Ceph storage, and other dependencies. All combined, Red Hat is uniquely positioned as a community contributor and developer of open technologies to provide maximum value to our OpenStack customers.

For its part, Nuage Networks has significantly increased contributions to the Juno OpenStack release (Juno) with more to come...

Lastly and most importantly, both company’s business is based on providing support. Of all the issues above, support is probably the top concern for enterprises as they start adopting OSS platforms. Red Hat and Nuage Networks provide world-class, 24x7 support for their products. Hence, the KISS rule for OpenStack is “Keep It Superbly Supported”!

Stay tuned for more information about Red Hat and Nuage Networks in the very near future.

[1] IDC, “The Internet of Things Moves Beyond the Buzz: Worldwide Market Forecast to Exceed $7 Trillion by 2020, IDC Says”, press release, 6/3/2014, at: http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24903114

[2] http://thoughtsoncloud.com/2014/07/openstack-anniversary-birthday/