Red Hat pushing hard on OpenStack IaaS

According to the latest cloud computing market overview from 451 Research’s Market Monitor, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is expected to grow at a 37 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through to the end of 2016. The survey also shows that, as cloud and IaaS adoption grows, open source cloud infrastructure solutions are becoming increasingly popular.

With this in mind, one of the major players in the provision of open source cloud infrastructure solutions, Red Hat, has launched a number of new initiatives aimed at supporting customer interest as it grows. These include the introduction of the Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), a Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation Promotional Bundle, and the achievement of a new performance record in the SPECvirt _sc2010 benchmark.

The new Certificate of Expertise in Infrastructure as a Service is aimed at meeting a growing need from within enterprise users for experienced IT professionals who can deploy and manage OpenStack.

The class will cover essential OpenStack skills, including installing and configuring a Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform deployment, though as OpenStack is also available from several other sources this skill should be readily transferable.

It also covers configuring and managing images and managing storage using Object Storage (Swift) and Block Storage (Cinder). The certification process for this training will be performance-based, with candidates performing tasks on a live system to utilise real-world experience.

The new Enterprise Virtualisation Promotional Bundle brings together Red Hat’s well-known  enterprise Linux platform with the company’s virtualisation management system for servers and desktops that is aimed at users with both Linux and Microsoft workloads.

Red Hat’s Enterprise Virtualisation platform is aimed at large-scale virtualisation initiatives and internal/private cloud deployments, featuring an enterprise management system that enables customers to centrally and effectively manage their entire virtual environments.The well-known Enterprise Linux Server provides a secure and certified foundation for running the OpenStack workload servers, such as compute nodes, storage nodes, and controller nodes, as well as a scalable, high performance Linux operating system for guest virtual machines.

Red Hat also announced new performance records on the SPECvirt_sc2010 benchmark. The company suggests this highlights the KVM hypervisor’s lead as the industry’s top-performer. A Bull SAS novascale bullion server running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 with a KVM hypervisor ran 768 Virtual Machines, a performance confirmed as the fastest and most efficient virtualisation test on an x86 server.

This 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.