Red Hat OpenStack Early Adopter Program and Establishment of Open Source RDO Community to Help Customers Realize the Benefit of Community-Powered Innovation

Red Hat has updated its OpenStack enterprise and community technologies and roadmap, including the advancement of its enterprise Red Hat OpenStack offering into an Early Adopter Program and the availability of RDO, a community-supported distribution of OpenStack that runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora and their derivatives. In addition, Red Hat today also announced Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network, a global ecosystem of technology and services partners to help accelerate the adoption of Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure solutions.

Red Hat OpenStack Early Adopter Program

In August 2012, Red Hat announced the availability of the preview release of its Red Hat OpenStack distribution, based on the popular OpenStack framework for building and managing private, public and hybrid Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds. With this, Red Hat delivered on the first step in its plans for the industry’s only enterprise-ready OpenStack distribution with Red Hat’s award-winning commercial support, certified ecosystem of hardware and application vendors and leadership in delivering trusted open source clouds for organizations worldwide requiring enterprise-grade solutions and support.

Today, Red Hat announces that its Red Hat OpenStack distribution has advanced from the preview version into an Early Adopter Program. The Red Hat OpenStack Preview was based on the community Essex release. Today’s Red Hat OpenStack Early Adopter Program is based on the community Folsom release, of which Red Hat was the second top corporate code contributor. In the OpenStack.org community’s most recent release this month, Grizzly, Red Hat moved to become the number one corporate code contributor.

Red Hat OpenStack provides a foundation for organizations to build a private or public IaaS cloud for cloud-enabled workloads. Red Hat OpenStack allows customers to leverage OpenStack technologies, while maintaining the security, stability and enterprise readiness of a platform built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Open Source RDO Community Launched

Accessible beginning today, RDO is a freely available, community-supported distribution of OpenStack that runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora and their derivatives. It offers a pure upstream OpenStack experience with the latest stable release from OpenStack.org, packaged, integrated and easy to deploy on Red Hat platforms. The community at openstack.redhat.com offers the opportunity to interact with other users of OpenStack on Red Hat platforms, to share knowledge and build capacity.

RDO brings the core OpenStack components – Nova, Glance, Keystone, Cinder, Quantum, Swift and Horizon – as well as incubating projects Heat, for cloud application orchestration, and Ceilometer, for resource monitoring and metering. Installation is made easy with the Red Hat-developed installation tool, PackStack.

In addition to providing a set of software packages, RDO is also a place for users of the cloud computing platform on Red Hat operating systems to get help and compare notes on running OpenStack. Users of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its derivatives now have a place where they can get official packages of the latest software released by the upstream OpenStack project, for their platform of choice.  

Availability

RDO is available for download today. Customers interested in the Red Hat OpenStack Early Adopter Program can contact their Red Hat sales representative. The Red Hat OpenStack Early Adopter code is now available via a free 90-day evaluation.

“OpenStack represents an ideal example of community-powered innovation in the cloud, and Red Hat is committed to bringing a community-to-subscription model around the OpenStack technology that aims to redefine IT. We support the OpenStack ecosystem through software development and community engagement and are excited to continue advancing these technologies with the community through RDO and for our enterprise customers with advancements with our Red Hat OpenStack distribution today,” said Brian Stevens, CTO and vice president, Worldwide Engineering, Red Hat.

“As open source projects mature, one of the key factors in their wider adoption becomes packaging. With its RDO distribution, Red Hat is clearly looking to streamline the implementation process for OpenStack thus widening the project's market.” said Stephen O'Grady, principal analyst, RedMonk.