As we start 2014, we're incredibly excited about the journey made across virtualization and OpenStack in the past year and all the more excited about the year ahead. In 2013 we brought our first release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform – an enterprise-ready OpenStack offering architected with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and KVM-based hypervisor technologies – to market. Engaging with early adopter customers during this release gave us the opportunity to see what end users are hoping for from their enterprise OpenStack deployments and how they are planning to make the transition to OpenStack-based clouds. In addition we're thankful to our partners such as Dell, Cisco, Intel, NetApp and Symantec, as well key industry players across Networking and Storage that are working closely with us to test and certify solutions as part of the Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network. Since our announcement introducing our OpenStack ecosystem in the Spring of 2013, we’ve built the world’s largest ecosystem for commercial OpenStack deployments.

Today, building upon that strong foundation, we're excited about refreshing our offerings across traditional datacenter virtualization, OpenStack-powered Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and converged cloud infrastructure solutions. In line with our open hybrid cloud vision, we see four maturity stages in the journey to an open private cloud:

• Traditional datacenter virtualization: Focus on increasing utilization. Our offering: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.
• Managed Virtualization: Automation on top of typically a multi-hypervisor environment. Our offering: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization + Red Hat CloudForms.
• Elastic cloud IaaS: Infrastructure for spiky, typically stateless workloads. Our offering: Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.
• Converged Cloud Infrastructure: Bridge traditional virtualization and elastic cloud silos with a common management. Our offering: Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.3 is now generally available and includes key features such as self-hosted management console and OpenStack shared services.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform also received a makeover with version 4.0, which became generally available in December 2013, and is packed with features including full support of Foreman (a lifecycle management tool for provisioning of both physical and virtual infrastructure resources) for deployment, OpenStack Orchestration (Heat) - a template-based orchestration engine, and OpenStack Telemetry (Ceilometer) for metering and chargeback. In addition, integration with Red Hat Storage and Red Hat CloudForms enables users to stand up an end to end, open, and well-managed cloud infrastructure.

Finally, for customers planning on a converged cloud infrastructure spanning traditional datacenter virtualization and elastic clouds, Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure 4.0, generally available today, offers a single pane of glass via Red Hat CloudForms, and spins up an unlimited number of Red Hat Enterprise Linux guests and for most deployments costs approximately one third of comparable proprietary solutions.

Net-net, we're excited by the offerings geared to help with your journey to an open hybrid cloud, every step of the way. Happy 2014!