Red Hat Aims To Boost Enterprise OpenStack Adoption

Red Hat announced several new products at its annual summit last week, including an extension of its Enterprise Linux product line and a new product designed to help customers make the move to OpenStack-based clouds. The company also announced an update to its Enterprise Virtualization 3.2, including a new third-party plug-in framework.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform targets enterprises that are already advanced cloud users and want to scale up their own private and public clouds by adopting OpenStack in combination with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat's OpenStack platform includes its Enterprise Linux Server, which is certified for running OpenStack workload servers, including compute nodes, storage nodes and controller nodes, plus Red Hat OpenStack.

RedHat Cloud Infrastructure is a single subscription product that includes four core technologies: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, a data center virtualization product for Windows and Linux; CloudForms, an open hybrid cloud management tool that controls heterogeneous virtual infrastructures; Red Hat OpenStack, the company's IaaS software; and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server. Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure is designed to help enterprises already using data center virtualization to improve management further by supporting functionality such as self-service, chargeback, advanced monitoring and metering.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure will be available in July. The company also announced a new training program, Red OpenStack Administration, for system administrators looking to learn how to implement a cloud environment based on Red Hat Open Stack.

Red Enterprise Virtualization 3.2 has a number of new features, including new a third-party plug-in framework that allows other vendors to integrate new features directly into its management interface. Already available are disaster recovery tools from NetApp, Symantec and HP. Other new features include fully supported Storage Live Migration, which enables virtual machine images to be moved from one storage domain to another without disrupting service, and support for Intel's Haswell series and AMD Opteron G5 processors.

Puppet Gets Certified For Red Hat

Puppet Labs rode the Red Hat wave at last week's summit by announcing its cloud automation technology is now certified to run with Red Hat OpenStack. Enterprises can use Puppet Labs' declarative, model-based approach to cloud automation when deploying or scaling their OpenStack-based clouds.

Puppet Labs' technologies have been included in some of the largest OpenStack deployments, including one at CERN, which automates the creation of 250 new virtual machines per day and expects to be managing 150,000 virtual machines running on 15,000 physical servers by 2015.

Portland-based Puppet unveiled one of its first OpenStack implementations back in April 2012, and early this year, VMware extended its investment in the company with a $30 million injection two years after making a small investment of $8.5 million.

Avaya Aids Video Collaboration For SMEs

Avaya unveiled a new video collaboration product aimed specifically at small and midsize enterprises. The Avaya Video Collaboration Solution for IP Office includes desktop, mobile and HD room-system video collaboration capabilities.

Features include: A "virtual conference room" for up to eight people who can join from any standards-based room system, desktop or mobile device; low-bandwidth, HD multiparty videoconferencing and rich data collaboration using native SIP/H.323; and freely distributed mobile and desktop video clients or PCs, Macs and mobile devices running Android and iOS. The new suite also allows for easy, automatic firewall traversal so SMEs can connect to conference participants outside their network.Pricing and availability were not disclosed.

NEXT: New releases from DataCore, Parasoft, and Nutanix

DataCore Updates Storage Virtualization Platform

DataCore Software has added a number of features to the management capabilities of its SANsymphony-V storage virtualization platform. The new features are aimed at helping enterprises take control of virtual machine sprawl and help them better manage the addition of new storage technologies such as SSD to speed up latency-sensitive workloads.

The SANsymphony-V 9.0.3 additions include wizards to provision multiple virtual disks from templates, group commands to manage storage for multiple application hosts and support for higher speed 16-Gb Fibre Channel networking. Also in the new release: storage profiles for greater control and auto-tiering across multiple levels of flash, SSDs and hard disks; a new database repository option for recording and analyzing performance history and trends; and improved remote replication and connectivity optimizations to improve performance.

Detailed technical specs are available online; pricing and availability were not disclosed.

Parasoft Supports Big Iron

Parasoft's latest Service Virtualization tool now includes advanced support for mainframes and complex data structures, allowing development and QA teams to access complete and realistic test environments to run an application through its paces without disrupting high-value mainframe resources.

The Parasoft Service Virtualization supports agile and parallel development and makes it easier to conduct performance testing by simulating interactions with subsystems such as DB2 databases and CISCs regions. Communication can occur over protocols such as MQ, HTTP, TCP/IP and JDBC, and involve payloads such as Copybook, XML, fixed-length or customer message format. In addition to mainframe support, the Service Virtualization can also parameterize virtual asset responses with highly complex data structures, and users can view and manipulate hierarchical data graphically.

Nutanix Launches Two Virtual Computing Platforms

Nutanix has expanded its portfolio of virtual computing platforms to support midsize enterprises and branch offices with the NX-1000, which allows SMEs to create converged infrastructures, and the NX-6000 series, which enables enterprises to scale their Nutanix cluster by adding storage capacity as needed.

The NX-1000 series is a flat data center architecture that eliminates the need for centralized SAN or NAS storage, and, like other Nutanix virtual computing platforms, it includes software-based storage control technology and advanced information lifecycle management capabilities. It comes in a single 2U appliance and runs virtual workloads commonly found in SMEs and branch offices. Pricing begins at $22,500 per node, including server and storage.

The Nutanix NX-6000 Virtual Computing Platform is designed to scale storage resources into a single converged infrastructure. IT administrators can select, provision and expand storage capacity based on demand and avoid underutilization of storage resources. The NX-6000 supports data intensive applications such as SQL databases, Hadoop-driven data analytics and large-scale VDI deployments. It can deliver 35 Tbytes to 70 Tbytes of usable storage in a 2U form factor with pricing beginning at $60,000 per node.