Red Hat: Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Cloud

Red Hat, Inc. introduced Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Cloud, an integrated solution for customers seeking to co-locate compute and storage functions in OpenStack environments.

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This offering combines the company’s OpenStack Platform 13 and Ceph Storage 3 in a single user experience, supported by a common lifecycle for operational and organizational efficiency.

Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Cloud offers an open platform to improve application portability between the datacenter and the edge, especially critical to enterprises that historically didn’t have any choice outside of inflexible, proprietary systems. In addition, nodes in an OpenStack deployment are interoperable, giving customers the choice to use non-hyperconverged nodes across their networks, with hyperconverged nodes at the edge, further improving resource utilization. By using existing skill sets in building private and hybrid cloud deployments, customers can innovate faster to address next-generation requirements for the edge.

This announcement marks the release of the second component in the company’s hyperconverged portfolio, following the introduction of Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Virtualization in June 2017, which combines Virtualization and Gluster storage.

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Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Cloud provides a smooth customer experience from procurement to day three operations by delivering a pre-packaged solution with socket-pair pricing.

The primary customer benefits can include:

• Unified lifecycle management – Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Cloud helps create standardized private cloud building blocks, making it easier to enable continuous operations and manage OpenStack and storage functions as a single unit with configuration consistency across the supported lifecycle of the solution.

• Lower cost and operational flexibility – This offering allows organizations to run dedicated compute and storage layers at the center with hyperconverged nodes at the edge all running on industry-standard hardware. In addition, all OpenStack services are containerized leading to additional cost savings, and more efficient resource management.

• Broader organizational efficiency – Customers can use existing knowledge and assets around private cloud infrastructure while taking advantage of the benefits offered by OpenStack technology. Hyperconverged infrastructure has great appeal with IT generalists, who are rapidly replacing siloed specialist roles in the modern enterprise. In addition, edge technicians who may lack deep knowledge of OpenStack deployment and configuration can benefit from the unified lifecycle and user experience.

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Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Cloud can benefit customers implementing systems for NFV (network functions virtualization) infrastructures to deploy more functionality at the edge of network. In addition to the lifecycle and operational benefits, it also includes all the networking capabilities of the firm’s OpenStack Platform 13 such as Real-time KVM and OpenDaylight. Communication service providers (CSPs) and network equipment providers (NEPs) looking for innovation at the datacenter and the mobile edge can benefit from this solution as they roll out highly performant, agile, and scalable platforms for 5G.

The company is the primary contributor to the open source Ceph and OpenStack communities, and supports an open ecosystem of compute platforms and hardware vendors.

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Cloud is planned for availability in June 2018.

Ranga Rangachari, VP and GM, storage, Red Hat, said: “Customers looking to build a common foundation across datacenter and edge deployments now have the confidence to enable faster rollout of services to their customers. Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Cloud provides customers with the power and versatility of hyperconvergence in the hybrid cloud.“

Henry Baltazar, research VP, 451 Research, said: “In our recent Voice of the Enterprise Servers & Converged Infrastructure survey, 71% of respondents were using hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) to simplify infrastructure management and maintenance, while 60% were looking to benefit from accelerated provisioning and automation through the use of HCI. Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Cloud provides the infrastructure consolidation and simplified lifecycle management which many OpenStack customers are looking for to accelerate their private cloud deployments at the edge and in datacenters.“

Ruben Sousa, CTO, ITCenter, said: “The opportunity for streamlined appointment of Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage has opened new doors for our business. Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Cloud now serves as the open cloud architecture for our telco platform and enables the cost efficiencies, reduced footprint, and simplified lifecycle management demanded by our customers.“

Resources:
Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure
Red Hat Ceph Storage
Red Hat OpenStack Platform
Red Hat Storage videos on YouTube