Red Hat and Cisco - Collaborating to standardize the Metapod OpenStack Managed Service on Red Hat OpenStack Platform

Today, we are thrilled to announce yet another milestone on the cloud journey with the availability of Cisco’s Metapod 4.0, now powered by Red Hat OpenStack Platform. Together, we are committed to developing cloud innovations in an even more real and meaningful way for our customers while pushing the limits of “what’s possible” in this evolving digital world. Customers continue to be our driving force as we strive to build industry-leading cloud solutions.

OpenStack has emerged as a leading platform for powering open cloud infrastructures across the globe. Red Hat and Cisco share an aligned vision to drive maturity and ubiquitous adoption of OpenStack by delivering solutions that meet the customers’ needs to improve agility, flexibility and efficiency.

Cisco’s Metapod being re-based on Red Hat OpenStack Platform for its 4.0 version demonstrates Cisco’s commitment to delivering innovation to customers. By standardizing Cisco’s Metapod managed service offering for OpenStack on Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Cisco is now able to apply resources to innovate and build even more capabilities to enhance customer experience, ease of use, and integrate feature requests into an accelerated solution roadmap. Cisco’s Metapod already supported Red Hat Ceph Storage, offering customers a converged compute/storage subscription offering based on Ceph, the highly scalable, open software-defined storage platform that is also the leading storage platform for OpenStack deployments.

This release is another example of the close collaboration between Red Hat and Cisco. With engineering collaboration in OpenStack for several years, the market now has a portfolio of solutions for both leading enterprise IT companies as well as many top telco and communication service provider (CSP) customers.

Having a portfolio of solutions helps lower the barrier to entry for customers to adopting private cloud. Metapod’s fully managed offering  is designed to address a market that wants a more simple to deploy and easier to maintain OpenStack, or OpenStack-as-a-Service, which both Cisco and Red Hat consider to be an important opportunity for the OpenStack market.

For the enterprise, Cisco and Red Hat have collaborated on a portfolio of solutions including the newly released Metapod 4.0, Cisco Unified Computing System Integrated Infrastructure for Red Hat OpenStack Platform (UCSO), and FlexPod for OpenStack. But we haven’t stopped there.

In February, Cisco and Red Hat helped address the ever growing and demanding needs of the telco and CSP industry with the announcement of Cisco NFV Infrastructure, powered by Red Hat OpenStack Platform. Now, service provider customers can deploy network functions virtualization (NFV) more rapidly and reliably with the Red Hat and Cisco NFV infrastructure solution. Cisco NFV Infrastructure, powered by Red Hat OpenStack Platform, is pre-integrated and  tested to help simplify the deployment of NFV and increase stability, security, and reliability of the solution. With high service availability and an optimized, workload-agnostic design, telecommunications companies and CSP can deliver a variety of virtual network functions (VNFs) to customers. Integrated management software unifies administration and automates common tasks, helping to reduce costs and increase staff productivity. To learn more, read Cisco’s newly released TCO whitepaper.

Simplifying datacenter and cloud deployments remain important to customers. Red Hat was an inaugural Cisco ecosystem partner at the launch of Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) in January 2014. Together we continue to innovate on extending the application policy model which is at the center of ACI, to OpenStack. With the development of a Group Based Policy model, Cisco enables customers to govern how applications are deployed, scaled, recovered as well as help better secure them against threats. With the announcement of the Cisco Tetration Analytics product on June 15, we see even more opportunities to collaborate with Cisco around ACI and security.

There is a foundation of support offered to customers and more is yet to come. Be sure to learn more about what we are doing together this week at CIsco Live US.

• More on Red Hat + Cisco: www.redhat.com/cisco
• More on Red Hat OpenStack Platform: https://www.redhat.com/en/insights/openstack
• Cisco blog on Metapod 4.0: http://blogs.cisco.com/cloud/introducing-metapod-4-0-now-powered-by-red-hat
• Red Hat blog on Metapod: https://www.redhat.com/en/about/blog/red-hat-and-cisco-collaborating-enable-pervasive-adoption-openstack