In this series we have seen the complexity of bridging the gap between existing infrastructure and processes (Mode 1) and new, agile processes and architectures (Mode 2). Each brings its own set of challenges and demands on the organization. In Mode-1 organizations are looking to increase relevance and reduce complexity, and in Mode-2 they are looking to improve agility and increase scalability. In this post we will discuss how Red Hat addresses and solves each of these challenges.

Introducing Red Hat Cloud Suite

Red Hat Cloud Suite is a family of suites from Red Hat that brings together all the award winning products from Red Hat in a consistent way to solve specific problems. It allows IT to accelerate service delivery and optimize their existing assets while allowing them to build their next generation infrastructure and application platforms to support massive scalability and more agile development and operations processes. In other words, it meets them where they are and lays the foundation for where they want to go.

A Different Approach

It should come as no surprise to you that Red Hat is not the only company solving these problems. Red Hat is, however, one of the few companies that can offer a comprehensive solution for these problems because of its broad portfolio of technologies and expertise. Most think of Red Hat as the Linux company. That is true, but Red Hat has been developing new software to its portfolio and has grown acquired expertise and industry leading technology from Software Defined Storage [1][2] to Mobile Development Platforms [3]. These offerings give Red Hat greater depth of capability than most other companies.

An Important Difference

Along with this depth of expertise and capability comes an approach that sets Red Hat apart. Red Hat is the only vendor that uses an open source development model for all of the solutions it delivers. This is important for customers because the world of cloud infrastructure and DevOps were originally designed and built from open source technologies and software. By having a strict open source only mentality customers can have access to industry leading innovation and have confidence that as technologies change they could adopt them more easily because Red Hat can adopt and deliver these technologies. Two great examples of this are how Red Hat adopted the KVM hypervisor [4] and embraced and delivered it’s container platform with support for Docker and Kubernetes [5] – leading open source projects that become popular in a short amount of time. Red Hat is committed to the open source development model, so much so that it even creates communities when it acquires non-open source licensed technologies [6]. Customers should know that when they leverage a solution from Red Hat it is based on open source, offering access to innovation and opportunities for lower exit costs.

Technical Capabilities are Important Too

While philosophical differences are important for making the right long term decisions for an organization, Red Hat is also at the forefront of innovation in cloud infrastructure, applications, and DevOps tools.

True Hybrid Support

The term hybrid cloud has often been overused and abused, but it is important. Enterprises need to be able to run workloads across the four major deployment models that exist today: physical, virtual, private, and public cloud. Equally as important to the deployment model is the ability to support multiple service models, such infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, or even bare metal, virtual machines running on scale-up virtual infrastructure, and public cloud services. When most vendors claim they support “hybrid” cloud they are typically limited to only managing hybrid deployment models. Red Hat supports both hybrid deployment models and hybrid service models. This is important to both Development and Operations teams. For developers, it means being able to develop on a broad choice of languages and frameworks. They could use an Oracle database running on bare-metal or virtual machine, JBoss EAP running on virtual machines on OpenStack, combined with Node.js and Ruby running in Containers on OpenShift. They are not constrained to a single service model that doesn’t give them everything they need. For operations teams, it means being able to manage across heterogenous providers, such as virtualization, private, and public cloud while also being having insight and control over applications running in multiple service models, such as bare metal, virtual machines, and even containers. This ability to manage both horizontally and vertically is important to meet compliance, and service level agreements.

Using Big Data to Optimize IT

Red Hat has been supporting Linux for a long time. In fact, we’ve been supporting Red Hat Enterprise Linux for over 13 years since RHEL AS 2.1’s release in 2002 [4]. There are over 700 Red Hat Certified Engineers in our support organization and they’ve documented over 30,000 solutions while resolving over 1 million technical issues. The Red Hat customer portal has won plenty of awards for helping connect customers searching for resolution to an issue to the right technical solution. With Red Hat Access Insights, Red Hat’s new predictive analytics service, connecting support data to recommendations offers a new level of ease of use. Users can send small amounts of data about their environment back to Red Hat and it will be compared to optimal configurations to find opportunities to improve security, reliability, availability, and performance. This service is already available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and is expected to soon be available for all the technologies in Red Hat’s portfolio through Red Hat Cloud Suite.

An Easy On-ramp and Consistent Lifecycle

Deploying a private cloud is not an easy task. The list of platforms that need to come together from configuration management, to storage, to infrastructure-as-a-service, to platform-as-a-service is large. Each of these has dependencies on sub-components within each of these platforms. For example, to generate new docker images that require secure content, takes integration between the content management system and the image building services. Literally hundreds of these integrations are needed to build a fully functional private cloud. This usually results in one of two options:

Operations requiring lots and lots of time to deliver this private cloud.
An army of high priced consultants arriving to deliver and maintain a private cloud.

Neither of these options are an optimal results for IT. Red Hat Cloud Suite provides an easy on-ramp that allows a single person in operations to deploy a private cloud and it provides the path for ongoing management of that private cloud. This allows developers to begin using the private cloud more quickly and helps operations deliver a private cloud more quickly.

 

Thank you following this 4 part series. In case you missed any of them, here is the summary:

Part 1: The world is changing and businesses need to evolve...

Part 2: What can businesses do with Mode 1?

Part 3: What can businesses do with Mode 2?

Part 4: Red Hat can help deliver a bi-modal infrastructure...

 

Interested in discussing more with us? Be sure to visit us at the OpenStack Summit in Tokyo, October 27-30, booth P7 to meet James and the OpenStack team from Red Hat.

 

References
[1] http://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-acquire-inktank-provider-ceph
[2] http://www.redhat.com/en/about/blog/red-hat-to-acquire-gluster
[3] http://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-acquire-feedhenry-adds-enterprise-mobile-application-platform
[4] http://www.infoworld.com/article/2627019/server-virtualization/red-hat-drops-xen-in-favor-of-kvm-in-rhel-6.html
[5] https://blog.openshift.com/openshift-v3-platform-combines-docker-kubernetes-atomic-and-more/
[6] https://access.redhat.com/articles/3078