A Closed Hybrid Cloud
Red Hat is at VMworld this week, where much of the buzz is expected to center on hybrid cloud. We agree that an all public cloud isn't the answer as VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger acknowledges. This is a conversation Red Hat has been leading for some time now. However, we do not buy into the premise that a private or a hybrid platform based on one vendor's technologies and products is the answer either. That goes against the compelling industry trends of openness and choice that have increasingly put customers in control of their own destinies and strategic direction. Instead, we are focused on delivering what we believe customers really want: an open hybrid cloud.

An Open Hybrid Cloud
Enterprises have always run a heterogeneous set of technologies, and they will continue to do so as they move to the hybrid cloud. Just as today's data centers run a mix of Microsoft, VMware, Red Hat, and other technologies across physical, virtual, and cloud topologies, so will tomorrow's hybrid cloud environments. Existing applications aren't going away just because the cloud is here—we still have mainframes at many enterprises!

So then, for cloud to be a fundamental and transformative IT foundation rather than just yet another technology from some vendor, it needs to work across all of an enterprise's resources.  In other words, for an enterprise to realize fully the value of a hybrid cloud, that hybrid cloud needs to work across that enterprise's entire business and IT—not just a portion that is running on a homogeneous software stack.

Red Hat's cloud portfolio provides enterprises the ability to build a comprehensive, cohesive cloud that spans across a diversity of technologies and topologies. Do you need a cloud that works across Red Hat, Microsoft, VMware, and Amazon? Do you need interoperability and portability across these environments so that you're not managing cloud sprawl? Do you need to build a cloud that serves everyone from developers to business application owners? Do you need unified management and self-service across all your offerings? Are you running VMware today but want to add OpenStack for future workloads? This is what Red Hat's open hybrid cloud solutions deliver.

Managing an Open Hybrid Cloud
One of the most important aspects of moving to cloud computing is having the ability to operate and mange a cloud environment. Red Hat's CloudForms product provides an extremely robust and powerful set of capabilities for cloud management. It provides a comprehensive cloud service catalog, chargeback and metering, service orchestration, policy and governance, reporting and forecasting, and a host of other powerful capabilities. And, it can do this all not only on a Red Hat-powered cloud environment, but it can do so across a diversity of resources—from VMware to Red Hat to Amazon—all with a single pane of glass.

This means, then, that with CloudForms, you can build and manage a hybrid cloud that spans not just Red Hat technologies or VMware technologies but a choice and diversity of providers. And, you can do this all with a unified and interoperable set of tools and interfaces. In an open hybrid cloud, your cloud is not locked in to a single vendor or technology stack; rather you can build and manage a cloud that spans all your important assets in an integrated and seamless way.

Come See an Open Hybrid Cloud
Our CloudForms product builds on the capabilities of a company that we acquired in December 2012, ManageIQ. We had been following ManageIQ for many years, but the impetus for Red Hat's acquisition of ManageIQ came one year ago at VMworld 2012. ManageIQ had won a best of VMworld recognition at that event. I recall going by the ManageIQ booth first to check out their recent updates and then to grill their product manager for over an hour on their capabilities. Happily, their product manager gave an excellent demonstration, and both the company and its products are now at Red Hat and a part of CloudForms.

This year, the ManageIQ team will again be at VMworld, but this time as a part of a broader Red Hat contingency. We are proud to announce that we will be demonstrating at VMworld in the Red Hat booth our new beta release of CloudForms 2.1, which is due to become GA in the Fall. With this release of CloudForms – which is also a key component of our recently launched Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure offering, we have added many new capabilities, including an enhanced user interface, new models for supporting different types of clouds, additional features for managing complex services, and perhaps most notably—OpenStack support.

At our Red Hat booth, you can come to see a demonstration of an open hybrid cloud which spans not just one vendor's technologies—VMware in the private cloud to VMware in the public cloud or Red Hat in the private cloud to Red Hat in the public cloud—but of CloudForms managing a hybrid cloud spanning technologies from vSphere to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization to Amazon to OpenStack. So, if you are running VMware for your virtualization today but want to add OpenStack or Amazon or some other technology tomorrow, come check us out and see how an open hybrid cloud can help you deliver the IT and business that you are seeking to build.

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