Ramping up enterprise OpenStack Adoption

In October 2013, Intel and Red Hat launched a collaborative program designed to accelerate the adoption of OpenStack in the enterprise called the “On-Ramp to Enterprise OpenStack.” Under this program, Intel and Red Hat have provided organizations OpenStack education via instructor-led training and hands-on workshops as well and hosted environments that organizations can use to build proofs of concept and demonstrations to evaluate Red Hat’s OpenStack offerings. To date, Intel and Red Hat have trained over five hundred OpenStack professionals at thirty-two workshops worldwide and have hosted eleven successful proofs-of-concept with fifty more planned.

Today, Intel and Red Hat are extending this program to cover the joint development of key enterprise features in OpenStack. The focal areas for the joint development have been drawn from features identified by the OpenStack community as necessary for the successful deployment, operation and management of OpenStack clouds. Specifically, Intel and Red Hat have applied engineering resources to address features that simplify the deployment and update of clouds as well as features that deliver resiliency and high-availability:

Ease of Deployment and Upgrade

Customers value the speed and agility that an OpenStack cloud can bring to their environment. To deliver on that opportunity, OpenStack must be quick and easy to deploy and easily scale to meet growing service demands. At the same time, the rapid development pace of the OpenStack community makes it hard for IT departments to keep up with the latest features.

Intel and Red Hat’s On-ramp efforts are focused on a deployment management capability designed to make the OpenStack installation process trouble-free, with a smooth growth path as demand for cloud resources increases. Likewise, the collaboration is working towards OpenStack upgrades with zero downtime by utilizing rolling upgrades. The realization of these features will make it possible for enterprises to quickly establish and grow their OpenStack clouds and keep them refreshed with the latest features.

High Availability of OpenStack Services and Tenants

Mission critical workloads demand continuous operation, and fast recovery if there is a failure. OpenStack provides the redundant resources needed to make cloud applications, which are designed to tolerate faults, highly available, but maintaining continuous availability for more traditional workloads can be a challenge. Not only do you have the occasional unplanned system failure, but you must also deal with planned downtime such as replacing or updating hardware.

Intel and Red Hat’s On-ramp activities seek to alleviate the problems with traditional workloads on OpenStack by building high availability features into Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. With these new features, cloud operators can evacuate hosts that are impacted by hardware failures or scheduled for hardware upgrade. They can also simply move workloads to consolidate host usage. They can do this via automated recovery of the virtual machine workloads, reducing the impact on end users and their applications. Bringing high availability to OpenStack services and workloads will enable companies to run the most critical traditional applications alongside cloud applications.

The extension of the On-Ramp collaboration represents a continuing commitment by Intel and Red Hat to drive adoption of OpenStack solutions in the mainstream enterprise market. While the collaborative development will focus on landing the identified features in the upstream OpenStack community starting with the Kilo release, enterprise customers can get them as a part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. Intel and Red Hat plan to continue to collaborate with our partners like Dell to integrate and validate these same features in the Dell Red Hat Cloud Solution powered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and Cisco Unified Computing System Integrated Infrastructure for Red Hat OpenStack.

Intel and Red Hat are proud of the work that the collaboration has produced already and look forward to delivering the innovation in a truly open way to address enterprise requirements and deliver enterprise-hardened Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform to enable broader adoption of OpenStack.