Together, Towards The Open Hybrid Cloud

The Heterogeneous, Hybrid Future
We are excited to be joining Cisco today in the launch of their Cisco InterCloud. At Red Hat, we share the same belief as Cisco that the world is evolving towards a heterogeneous, hybrid cloud model. Just as enterprises have always sourced services and capabilities from a variety of vendors and providers, they will need to continue to do so as they move towards the cloud.

Therefore, it is paramount that next-generation enterprise cloud architectures can incorporate a diversity of technologies without any lock-in and with full interoperability and portability. Otherwise, all the promised benefits of cloud—increased efficiency, agility, and productivity—become weighed down by the heavy burden of managing cloud sprawl and complexity across many different silos of incompatible clouds. And furthermore, these cloud architectures must not only support a diversity of technologies but do so in a way that drives fundamental developer and application value that businesses can realize.

Building The Open Hybrid Cloud
We are  pleased that Cisco also shares our view that an open hybrid cloud is the best approach to addressing heterogeneous environments. Indeed, Cisco cites as key properties of its InterCloud hybrid cloud approach:

• No Vendor Lock-In
• Any Hypervisor to Any Provider
• Heterogeneous Infrastructure
• End-to-End Security
• Unified Workload Management and Governance
• Workload Mobility Across Clouds

These are many of the same properties that Red Hat is focused on delivering towards its customers as well. For example, Red Hat provides a rich software portfolio to help enterprises build a complete cloud, from Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Storage at the Infrastructure-as-a-Service-level to Red Hat JBoss Middleware and OpenShift at the Platform-as-a-Service-tier, to Red Hat CloudForms for cloud management.

Not only does Red Hat provide a comprehensive software stack for enterprises to build and manage their clouds,  but we also support interoperability and portability with other providers . For example, Red Hat CloudForms manages not just our own Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, but a variety of other providers, from VMware to Amazon—all with a single pane of glass. We certify Red Hat Enterprise Linux guest workloads not just on our KVM hypervisor, but across ESX, Hyper-V and a diversity of public clouds as well. And, we even support data portability across hybrid clouds with our software-defined storage product, Red Hat Storage, through capabilities such as a global namespace and efficient multi-geography replication. All this combines together so that enterprises can build a full-featured OpenStack-powered cloud and also integrate that with a variety of other providers across a choice of physical, virtual, and cloud systems with interoperability and no lock-in.

Empowering Developers In the Open Hybrid Cloud
One example of how Red Hat and Cisco are collaborating together to deliver an open hybrid cloud is in the area of PaaS. At Red Hat, we provide OpenShift, a full-featured, award-winning PaaS that empowers developers to build new applications in a rich and highly productive environment.

Because OpenShift builds on standard Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat JBoss Middleware, it provides an open developer platform with full support for a wealth of languages and frameworks, from Python to Ruby to PHP to full Java EE. And, since these are the same open source, enterprise platforms developers already love and use, developers are not locked into OpenShift with their applications. They can bring existing workloads to OpenShift, and they can take applications out of OpenShift to run in other environments, such as production bare-metal systems. This, plus advanced features such as auto-scaling, strong security and efficiency, integrated productivity tools, and an extensible platform is why developers around the world have deployed more than 1.5 million applications onto OpenShift to date.

We are pleased to share that as part of our work with Cisco, we have created a Cisco Validated Design (CVD) that incorporates OpenShift into Cisco's latest Intelligent Automation for Cloud and Virtualized Multiservice Data Center (VMDC) releases. This means that enterprises now will be able to build a powerful PaaS with everything from underlying Cisco server and networking hardware to OpenShift. Furthermore, we have integrated OpenShift with Cisco's Prime Service Catalog so that developers can have a single portal for requesting all their services.

This joint offering between Cisco and Red Hat builds upon our shared success in deploying OpenShift for Cisco's own internal development. Indeed, Cisco was an early adopter of OpenShift Enterprise for its own application development, and we are thrilled to bring the developer productivity benefits we have realized within Cisco to service providers, public sector and other enterprises .

A Deep Collaboration
Cisco and Red Hat share a common view and approach towards next-generation IT architectures, and our work together on OpenShift is just one example of how these two leaders in cloud are collaborating. Indeed, through the combination of the fastest growing server and leading networking provider in Cisco and the open source leader in Linux and OpenStack in Red Hat, we are collaborating in a variety of ways to deliver industry-defining solutions for the open hybrid cloud. We look forward to sharing additional details of our work together in a future update.