Dell/Red Hat partnership may highlight new OpenStack momentum in enterprise

Dell recently took up OpenStack as it continues to shift its focus from consumers to enterprises.  The company will work with Red Hat on prepackaged cloud computing services suitable for private and hybrid infrastructure. The move underscores OpenStack’s increased traction within the enterprise, an area in which it has sometimes struggled to compete against solutions such as Amazon Web Services.

Dell became the first OEM to join the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. The two companies are contributing code to OpenStack projects and are also working on a product update that would integrate elements of the Havana release with Red Hat’s virtualization hypervisor. Other focus areas include refinement of software-defined networking and implementation of the OpenStack Telemetry features to monitor services and billing cycles.

The scope of these initiatives demonstrate burgeoning corporate demand for enterprise-grade on- and off-premises cloud computing environments. Although Dell and Red Hat’s projects are oriented mostly toward private clouds, there are signs that OpenStack could provide a way for more enterprises to integrate public services and create secure, scalable platforms.

“Eventually, OpenStack will attract more users than other public offers in multi-cloud environments, and we believe that the first step for this to happen is for public clouds to become more open and available starting in 2014,” stated eNovance vice president Nick Barcet, according to SiliconANGLE.

Currently, OpenStack has strong support from developers and from prominent early adopters such as eBay and PayPal, which use OpenStack to run significant portions of their cloud infrastructure. Still, there’s work to be done in guiding more enterprises toward open management solutions.

Many organizations need technical help with OpenStack, or additional information on its value propositions. SiliconANGLE’s Mellisa Tolentino observed that key OpenStack contributors were meeting Jan. 29 in Mountain View, Cali., to discuss the current state of OpenStack in the enterprise.

2014-01-17T09:40:57+00:00

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