Red Hat continues Cloud Infrastructure momentum

Red Hat, Inc. has announced continued momentum for Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, including a new industry-leading performance benchmark, the introduction of the Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and a Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Promotional Bundle. Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, a comprehensive offering designed to support organizations on their journey from traditional datacenter virtualization to OpenStack-powered clouds, has emerged as a high performing offering with greater value as organizations look to build and manage private cloud IaaS.

According to the latest cloud computing market overview analysis from 451 Research’s Market Monitor, IaaS is expected to grow at a 37 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2016. As cloud and IaaS adoption grows, research also indicates that open source cloud infrastructure solutions are taking the lead. According to the 2013 “State of the Cloud” survey, among the 64 percent of respondents who plan to include a private cloud as part of their cloud portfolio, 41 percent plan to use only open source-based private cloud options, while another 29 percent plan to use a hybrid combination of open source and proprietary solutions.

Red Hat and Bull Achieve Top Performance Benchmark Results
Red Hat also announced new top performance records on SPECvirt’s industry-standard benchmark SPECvirt_sc2010 highlighting the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor’s lead as the industry’s top-performing hypervisor. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 with its KVM hypervisor enabled the Bull SAS novascale bullion server to run 768 Virtual Machines, a performance confirmed as the fastest and most efficient virtualization test on an x86 server.

This SPECvirt_sc2010 score represents the highest number of performant virtual machines and the highest performance score overall recorded on a single x86 server for this benchmark. This also solidifies Red Hat's hypervisor performance leadership as Red Hat’s KVM powers the top 2-socket and 4-socket scores, and the only recorded 8-socket and 16-socket scores.

Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Infrastructure-as-a-Service
Additionally, Red Hat today announced a new training and certification offering, the Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Infrastructure-as-a-Service. As interest in OpenStack grows, enterprise customers require experienced IT professionals who can deploy and manage OpenStack. This new class and certification aims to meet this demand by representing the industry’s highest standard for OpenStack-based training certifications and enabling participants to gain a growing knowledge of the changes happening in the IaaS space. The class will cover essential OpenStack skills, including installing and configuring a Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform deployment; configuring and managing images; and managing storage using Object Storage (Swift) and Block Storage (Cinder). The certification process for this training offering will be performance-based, with candidates performing tasks on a live system to utilize real-world experience.

New offering: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Promotional Bundle
As part of the announcement, Red Hat introduced a new product offering that will integrate the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, and Red Hat’s virtualization management system for servers and desktops in a Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Promotional Bundle, providing exceptional agility for Linux and Microsoft workloads.
The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Promotional Bundle will be offered as a single subscription offering that combines:
- Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, an ideal platform on which to base large-scale virtualization initiatives and internal / private cloud deployments, featuring an enterprise management system that enables customers to centrally and effectively manage their entire virtual environments.
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server, providing a secure and certified foundation for running the OpenStack workload servers (compute nodes, storage nodes, and controller nodes) as well as a scalable, high performance Linux operating system for guest virtual machines.