Red Hat’s released its dual-support mode OpenStack Platform 10, for rapid cloud adoption.

The branded OpenStack box continues Red Hat’s drive to reduce the headache of installing and running the open-source cloud for those of us who are not rocket scientists.

But OpenStack Platform 10 also accompanies a shift in build, partnering and support from Red Hat to catch an edge on rival Linux distros also boxing OpenStack.

As revealed by The Reg, here, OpenStack Platform 10 introduces two support options, one and three years - the latter can be extended to five.

The former will see Red Hat target Agile shops wanting latest features in the newest OpenStack releases but with the safety of a support hand to hold.

Also new in OpenStack Platform 10 is Distributed Continuous Integration (DCI) for key partners – first sign-ups are Dell, NEC and Rackspace.

DCI will see partners test their hardware as new versions of OpenStack Platform evolve so systems are ready sooner, rather testing at the end of Red Hat’s build process.

Long term, DCI could be extended to include customers.

DCI follows a re-structuring of Red Hat engineering to shorten the development and test time of OpenStack Platform – from five months to two on version 10.

The goal is to move to “within weeks” in future.

Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager of OpenStack at Red Hat, told The Reg: “This is our moment to cement our leadership from an OpenStack perspective.

“We have the largest number of paid distribution customers across the globe so by responding to needs of fast-moving customers and via managed services partners addressing customers who don’t have the skill set, we want to gain much more rapid and broad-based adoption of [Red Hat] OpenStack.”

Red Hat is targeting existing RHEL customers, newbies to OpenStack but lacking the technical chops in this Linux for the cloud, and rival OpenStack spinners.

Target customers with OpenStack Platform 10 are enterprises and partners in telco and network function virtualization (NFV).

Balakrishnan claimed Red Hat’s received interest from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Helion customers in the wake of that giant’s software sale to MicroFocus and the passing of HP’s own branded OpenStack development to fellow Linux spinner SUSE.

OpenStack Platform 10 continues the drive of all in this game, including Red Hat, of eliminating the rocket science from installing and managing OpenStack.

Features include customizable service and administration roles via Red Hat OpenStack Platform Director. This lets you scale different components such as compute or storage at different times rather than go for a big-bang rollout.

The Data Plane Developer Kit (DPDK) component of Open vSwitch has been added with Single Root Input/Output Virtualisation (SR-IOV) to speed performance of network-intensive workloads.

The DPDK and SR-IOV duet will, Red Hat claims, lead to speeds comparable with bare metal.

Dell is the first Red Hat partner to be certified ready for Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 – Red Hat promised “several more coming soon.” ®