Cloud conquered: How far can businesses push their use of on-demand IT? Watch Now

How serious is Red Hat about OpenStack? Serious enough that when it announced Red Hat OpenStack Platform 11, the latest version of of its massively scalable and agile Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud, at OpenStack Summit, it based it on February's OpenStack "Ocata" release.

Red Hat's love affair with OpenStack continues with enhanced support for upgrades with composable roles, new networking capabilities, and improved integration with Red Hat CloudForms for cloud management. This latest OpenStack distribution delivers a reliable cloud platform built on the proven backbone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Additionally, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 11 maintains its tight integration with Red Hat Ceph Storage. This release moves the combination of Ceph Storage and OpenStack compute node from tech-preview to mature feature. Ceph enables storage mirroring to simplify data replication between sites. This improves disaster recovery functionality.

OpenStack enables its users their own private cloud service mix. This makes it easier for enterprises to customize OpenStack deployments to fit specific needs, but it also makes it challenging in upgrade. To address this need, Ocata, and thus, OpenStack Platform 11, now make in-place upgrades much easier.

In addition, OpenStack services can now be deployed individually. This enables your DevOps team to place components such as databases, proxies, or messaging services on specific nodes based on your company's unique requirements. So, you can, for example, add customized roles after deployment to a running cloud.

As always, networking and network-function virtualization (NFV) support remains a key OpenStack feature. Red Hat OpenStack Platform 11 delivers several new capabilities, designed both for standard networking use cases and telecomms' extreme workload. These new features include:

Full support for VLAN-aware virtual machines (VMs), OpenStack-based VMs can now send and receive VLAN encapsulated traffic while being deployed over Open vSwitch (OVS) or OVS Data Plane Development Kit (OVS-DPDK).

Additional telecommunications OVS and DPDK provider enhancements provide latest features and functions. This produces increased performance optimizations.

One feature, which is unique to Red Hat's OpenStack distribution, is its its integration with Red Hat CloudForms. CloudForms is Red Hat's open hybrid-cloud management solution. This helps run day-to-day management of a Red Hat OpenStack-based cloud. In this update, CloudForms can now control OpenStack regions, multiple domains, and host aggregates for a unified controller view of cloud health and efficiency. Storage management has also been enhanced. Red Hat CloudForms can now perform volume snapshot management functions like creation, listing, and deletion.

This release is covered by Red Hat's new varying support life cycle model. Under this model, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 11 will be supported for one year with customers being able to leverage Red Hat's award-winning global support team for help with migrations and upgrades to future versions.

This new cloud will be available in the coming weeks via the Red Hat Customer Portal and as a component of the Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure and Red Hat Cloud Suite solutions.

While Red Hat also has many partners, it should be noted that with this release, Dell EMC is on board from the start. In a statement, Armughan Ahmad, Dell's senior vice president and general manager of Solutions and Alliances, said, "With the release of OpenStack 11, customers can take advantage ofNFV features, upgrade stability and for the first time Converge node support on Dell EMC servers, leveraging contributions of more than 2,500 developers worldwide. Dell EMC is proud of our long-standing, strategic collaboration with Red Hat to streamline deployment through open hybrid solutions, taking the guesswork out of solution design for customers."

Want to know more? Check out Red Hat OpenStack Plarform 11 release notes. Since Ocata was designed to make OpenStack more stable, Red Hat OpenStack users should be sure to take a long, close look at this release.

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