Partnering to accelerate the path to hybrid cloud via open innovation

CIOs are increasingly demanding new thinking about the datacenter infrastructure and are actively planning their organizations' journey to a hybrid cloud infrastructure. In this context, OpenStack has emerged as the open source alternative to power the next-generation datacenter infrastructure.

 

To date, most of the successful OpenStack infrastructure deployments have been achieved by public cloud service providers or very large enterprise customers that are recognized early-adopters of technology. Many of these cloud pioneers confidently embarked on their journey because they have the skilled and experienced talent on their technical staff. And, they like to lead and deploy disruptive technologies to be more competitive in their respective markets.

Our customers have told us that they seek ways to harness the apparent synergies that are inherent within the traditional enterprise networking sector and the rapidly evolving cloud computing software arena. As forward-looking early adopters, some IT leaders have already engaged in proof of concept (PoC) OpenStack deployments that span these closely related fields.

Others have been eager to participate, but were waiting for the right environment to materialize – where the perceived OpenStack complexity barriers had been lowered to their satisfaction.

To that end, we’re focused on helping customers to simplify the planning process and provide the consultative guidance to help accelerate the broad-based enterprise adoption of OpenStack. We’ve delivered and continue to deliver on product experience, predictable lifecycle and certified ecosystem to remove the mystery and advance customers' understanding of the benefits of implementing an open cloud infrastructure powered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.

To achieve that goal, during the last 24 months, we’ve been engaging with our key partners – knowing that these cloud leaders and champions share our passion for the opportunity to deliver value to customers, and to structure the path to delivering the necessary pieces that need to come together for the next generation datacenter infrastructure.

That’s why we’re delighted that Red Hat has expanded its relationship with Cisco to offer industry transforming enterprise-grade open cloud solutions powered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. Together, we believe that our differentiated hybrid cloud offerings will open a significant window of technology-enabled opportunities for a broad cross-section of our mutual customers globally. We detailed our plans for expanded collaboration with Cisco to deliver these hybrid cloud offerings, including Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure for Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform in a press release today.

As you may know, independently, Cisco and Red Hat have been actively formulating forward-looking open hybrid cloud platform development scenarios for some time. We’ve both supported employees that choose to freely contribute their best creative ideas, and pragmatic resolutions to some of the toughest coding problems, as engaged volunteer participants of the OpenStack project upstream community. With the most recent OpenStack IceHouse release, Red Hat was the leading contributor to OpenStack, and Cisco was among the top contributors, showing deep commitment from both companies.

Moreover, we’ve both invested the time and effort to establish and nurture relationships with an extensive ecosystem of savvy channel partners that add value to our own developmental efforts. Since its launch, Cisco has been an alliance partner in the Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network. Today, the Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network is the industry’s largest ecosystem in support of commercial OpenStack deployments, featuring nearly 270 industry partners.

Besides, as we looked across the vast landscape of emerging open source projects, there were other early-stage technologies where we uncovered a common interest – once again, where our customers nudged us in a similar direction of research and development exploration. As an example, Red Hat recently acquired Inktank, the commercial company supporting Ceph, the de facto storage standard for OpenStack deployments.

We are particularly excited about Cisco’s announcement today about significant updates to the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) product line -- across cloud-scale, edge-scale and data-intensive computing. With core changes in IT being driven by mobile, big data and the Internet of Things, I believe these advancements are indicative of the new thinking about datacenter infrastructure that progressive CIOs are demanding as they both adapt and future-proof their organizations. It’s also yet one more example of where Cisco’s open innovation creates the environment for a quantum leap in the design of application architectures and IT delivery models.

We look forward to working closely with Cisco and our mutual customers to harness these new capabilities. Indeed, these are exciting times for all stakeholders that are planning to deploy platforms for the next generation of scale-out workloads.

To learn more about our current solutions, explore the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform capabilities and discover how you can start the journey to embrace an open hybrid cloud infrastructure for your organization.

Act now. Contact your Red Hat representative if you’re ready to deploy your first solution, upgrade an existing cloud service deployment, or if you have questions about pricing or availability in your region.