Red Hat collaborates with NetApp

Red Hat, Inc. has announced collaboration with NetApp to deliver an open hybrid cloud reference architecture based on OpenStack IceHouse, the newest version of the rapidly maturing open source cloud software platform. Based on open technologies, the architecture will help organizations build agile, interoperable private and hybrid clouds that are easily managed, massively scalable, and highly reliable. This reference architecture will be designed to enable customers to more closely integrate Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform with NetApp® storage and data management technology.

For more than a decade, Red Hat and NetApp have collaborated to support industry standards that give enterprises greater choice when deploying new IT environments. The combination of Red Hat open source software with NetApp storage and data management provides an open, interoperable, standards-based foundation for new hybrid IT delivery models requiring a mix of resources across physical, virtual, public, and private cloud infrastructures. The Red Hat and NetApp solution for open hybrid cloud with OpenStack features enterprise-level security, performance, availability, and data management to reduce implementation risk, and lower overall total cost of ownership.

The collaboration between the two companies extends to a support relationship as Red Hat and NetApp work to provide highly collaborative support to customers. Using combined best practices, the joint support teams have adopted a process to quickly and efficiently engage the right engineers to troubleshoot customer issues to resolution. Combining best practices, adopting a collaborative process, and participating in training exchanges and service reviews are the first steps in our on-going commitment to providing an ideal support experience for our customers.

NetApp and Red Hat continue to contribute to the success of OpenStack by more tightly integrating their products and services with OpenStack. Both companies announced their intent to drive file services standards through Manila, a new OpenStack project under consideration. Having diverse applications critical to enterprise business, from server virtualization to relational or distributed databases depends on the tight integration of those services with file-based systems, such as NetApp products and services. Manila aims to drive enterprise adoption of OpenStack by creating tighter integration with the file-based storage market.

Additionally, Red Hat and NetApp have integrated key technologies with the OpenStack Icehouse release. Red Hat was one of the leading corporate contributors to OpenStack Icehouse, and is involved in many core and emerging OpenStack projects. These contributions, along with the pre-compiled installer to ease deployment, and integration with Red Hat Enterprise Linux provide the security, reliability, and performance needed to support mission critical workloads. Icehouse focuses on maturity and stability as illustrated by its attention to rolling upgrades amidst ongoing production deployment. NetApp’s direct contributions to OpenStack provide closely integrated access to storage efficiency, data protection, continuous availability, scalability, and quality of services features designed to accelerate and simplify delivery of differentiated cloud services.

As part of Icehouse development, NetApp was actively engaged with OpenStack to help bring enhanced block storage to enable tighter integration with NetApp’s storage and data management solutions, expanding support and integration from the clustered Data ONTAP operating system and FAS to SANtricity® software and the E-Series. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform provides the foundation to build a private or public infrastructure-as-a-service cloud that is more tightly integrated with NetApp’s products and services. It offers a massively scalable, fault-tolerant platform for the development of cloud-enabled workloads.