Red Hat, on Thursday announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6, featuring updates designed to serve as the foundation for building OpenStack-powered clouds for enterprise businesses with advanced cloud users, telecommunications companies, Internet service providers (ISPs), and public cloud hosting providers.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6 delivers enterprise-grade and telco-ready features, fueled by deep engagements with hundreds of customers and partners across the globe, to enable an open cloud infrastructure. Backed by our robust partner ecosystem, this release can enable a wider variety of enterprises and cloud service providers to quickly transition to an OpenStack-powered cloud infrastructure,” said Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager, OpenStack, Red Hat.
 
"Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform is embedded in Alcatel-Lucent CloudBand NFV platform since early 2014. Communication service providers (CSPs) are looking to this collaboration to drive NFV features into OpenStack and be able to consume them through our platform. With the latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, we are pleased to see new NFV features that are essential for migration of telecommunication network services to a cloud infrastructure. In addition, open source, which is a critical element to our customers, together with Red Hat's commitment for reliability, performance and security, make our platform a carrier-grade solution,” said Idan Mor, senior director, Strategic Alliances, CloudBand, Alcatel-Lucent.
 
“Cisco is excited to bring the innovations and enhancements of OpenStack’s tenth release (Juno) to our customers through our collaboration with Red Hat. Our joint solution, Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure for Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, offers validated designs and reference architectures for deploying Red Hat’s enterprise-ready distribution on Cisco’s complete turnkey solution for compute, networking and storage. The joint solution also includes coordinated support and consulting services from Cisco, to simplify and accelerate OpenStack deployment,” said Lew Tucker, vice president and Chief Technology Officer for Cloud, Cisco.
 
“As a long-time partner and the first tier 1 server provider to offer Red Hat Linux on servers, Dell and Red Hat continue to provide our mutual customers value with integrated, jointly engineered OpenStack-based offerings. Our combined enterprise experience along with software and hardware leadership has and will continue with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6 to provide customers a differentiated approach to OpenStack with a streamlined, stable and certified solution they can depend on for long-term cloud deployments,” said Jim Ganthier, vice president and general manager, Dell Engineered Solutions.
 
"Intel and Red Hat continue to drive enterprise-class capability into OpenStack to simplify implementation and deliver higher value for enterprises and communication service providers. With state-of-the-art support for NFV, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6 provides an open, broadly-supported platform for deploying and orchestrating the next-generation of agile, efficient clouds and networks – with open source cost models and without limiting end-user flexibility or choice,” said Mauri Whalen, vice president, Software and Services Group and director of Core System Development, Intel Corporation.
 
“Nokia Networks is defining requires for the operators’ datacenter architecture to be able to meet the needs of virtualized network functions. In collaboration with Red Hat, we have been working to prioritize the NFV infrastructure features that will now become available in Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6. Nokia Networks is utilizing this and other cloud stack solutions to deliver carrier-grade NFV end-to-end solutions,” said Michael Clever, senior vice president, Core, Nokia Networks.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform delivers the foundation for a production-ready cloud, integrating Red Hat’s hardened and agile OpenStack technology with the security and stability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform sets a new standard for OpenStack deployments, with customers in production in every region, spanning industry verticals and enterprises of various sizes in education, financial services, government, healthcare, retail, and telecommunications.

Building on its innovative co-engineered design, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6 strengthens Red Hat’s production-ready cloud platform through advancements in both the Linux and OpenStack components. Interoperability and ease of use continue to be at the forefront, starting with updates to Red Hat’s intuitive graphical installer and management tools that create greater efficiency and reduce the complexities of a cloud deployment.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6 is based on the OpenStack Juno release and includes several new features aimed at easing enterprise deployments of OpenStack technology within existing datacenters and capabilities specific to telecommunications providers to enable Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) deployments among carriers, including:

• IPv6 support, for both provider and tenant networks, enabling customers to assign IPv6 addresses across physical networks and OpenStack Networking (Neutron) virtual routers in stateless and stateful modes.

• Neutron High Availability offers an upgraded OpenStack experience with Neutron agents in “active-active” mode for high availability configuration. This availability improves redundancy for networking, providing service uptime and improving stability for larger-scale production clouds.

• Single root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) networking, supported by a new driver, enables users to execute network switching directly on their hardware, bypassing the hypervisor and virtual switch levels.

• Support for Multi-LDAP backends and domains, all within a single Identity service node, easing the installation and configuration processes for the platform, as well as long-term daily operations.

• Full support for data processing, moves the Sahara service from tech preview to a fully supported feature that enables big data workloads.

• Deeper Ceph integration with new capabilities for OpenStack Compute (Nova) and OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder), including full support for ephemeral volumes backed by the Ceph block device. This enables ‘diskless’ compute nodes and near-instantaneous booting of new virtual machines.

• New tech preview features, highlighting Red Hat’s continued innovation in the OpenStack space with feature debuts of unsupported technology previews, including bare metal provisioning and TripleO deployment and management.
 
Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6, engineered with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, is available globally.