Red Hat Announces Preview Version of Enterprise-Ready OpenStack Distribution

Raleigh || August 13, 2012

RALEIGH, NC – August 13, 2012 – Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the immediate availability of the preview release of Red Hat’s OpenStack distribution based on the popular open source OpenStack framework for building and managing private, public and hybrid Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds. With this, Red Hat delivers the next step in its plans for the industry’s only enterprise-ready OpenStack distribution with Red Hat’s award-winning commercial support, certified ecosystem of hardware and application vendors and leadership in delivering trusted open source clouds for organizations worldwide requiring enterprise-grade solutions and support.OpenStack is an open source framework for building private and public IaaS clouds that complements Red Hat's portfolio of open source cloud solutions. The core software projects provide compute, storage and networking management services, with a shared identity service and dashboard. Red Hat has long been contributing to OpenStack and has steadily increased its participation and contributions over time. At the OpenStack Summit 2012 in April, it was recognized that Red Hat is the third overall contributor to OpenStack. In April 2012, in cooperation with other industry leaders, Red Hat also announced its intention to support the OpenStack Foundation, the governing body for maintaining the OpenStack project, as a Platinum Member.

The OpenStack project has quickly developed into an open source solution capable of providing organizations with performance, features and functionality for their private and public clouds. The announcement of the forthcoming OpenStack Foundation accelerated this development, as well as highlighted the need for commercial supportability to accelerate enterprise adoption. With this preview release of Red Hat’s OpenStack distribution, Red Hat delivers on the next step in its commitment to deliver a trusted enterprise distribution of OpenStack, leveraging its long track record of providing supported commercial-grade open source products. Red Hat’s OpenStack distribution will further extend and complement the company’s open hybrid cloud portfolio, which today includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Red Hat CloudFormsTM, Red Hat Storage and Red Hat OpenShiftTM Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

Red Hat has been working with an early group of customers who have been strong advocates for a commercial release of OpenStack from Red Hat, and who have been instrumental in providing the feedback and testing required to bring this preview release to completion. The company now seeks to work with a wider group of customers to further develop Red Hat’s OpenStack distribution and its usage with other Red Hat products. In addition, Red Hat is working closely with key partners such as Rackspace to provide fully managed Red Hat OpenStack-powered clouds in the future.

Customers who sign up for Red Hat’s OpenStack distribution will be able to provide feedback to Red Hat’s OpenStack team and collaborate with each other through community tools provided through the preview program.

Availability

The unsupported public preview version of Red Hat’s OpenStack distribution based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is available for download immediately at www.redhat.com/tryopenstack. A fully supported release for Red Hat customers is expected to be delivered in 2013.

Supporting Quotes

Brian Stevens, CTO and vice president, Worldwide Engineering, Red Hat

“Through our expanding involvement with OpenStack, we’ve seen a thriving community develop and are excited in reaching this milestone along the way to delivering an enterprise-class product based on this open cloud technology. Our current productization efforts are focused around hardening an integrated solution of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenStack to deliver an enterprise-ready solution that enables enterprises worldwide to realize infrastructure clouds. We invite OpenStack enthusiasts and enterprises interested in the technology to download our preview and provide feedback to help us accelerate the delivery of a stable OpenStack enterprise platform for the industry.”

Lew Tucker, chief technology officer for cloud computing, Cisco

“Cisco believes strongly that deploying cloud platforms needs to be made easier, open and accessible. Just as Cisco collaborates with many partners within the OpenStack community, we see Red Hat's preview release of its enterprise-ready OpenStack distribution as an important step in this direction.”

John Igoe, executive director of open source cloud and big data solutions, Dell

“Dell has made a commitment to the OpenStack project as both a sponsor and an adopter of OpenStack cloud solutions, and our collaboration with Red Hat and the solutions that IT enables is an important piece of that commitment. As the datacenter moves to the cloud, open source software and standards-based hardware are essential to migrate IT operations to the cloud. By combining OpenStack’s enterprise-leading cloud software solution with Dell PowerEdge C servers and Dell software including Crowbar, enterprise-leading cloud servers customers can accelerate and embrace movement to the cloud.”

Billy Cox, director, Intel Cloud Strategy

“As an early adopter of OpenStack and a key proponent of open source, Intel welcomes the leadership of Red Hat to help evolve this open source project into a robust cloud operating system. Our long-standing collaboration with leading companies like Red Hat help make enterprise Linux and open source virtualization successful. Intel looks forward to working with the OpenStack community and Red Hat to help enterprises deploy open, trusted clouds.”

Jim Curry, general manager of Rackspace Private Cloud Business

“As founders of OpenStack, Rackspace is excited to see Red Hat implementing the OpenStack technology in its product offerings and delivering those solutions to its customers. Red Hat is a pioneer in the open source software space and we look forward to working with them on our private cloud offerings and managed services in the very near future.”

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About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat is the world's leading provider of open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to reliable and high-performing cloud, Linux, middleware, storage and virtualization technologies. Red Hat also offers award-winning support, training, and consulting services. As the connective hub in a global network of enterprises, partners, and open source communities, Red Hat helps create relevant, innovative technologies that liberate resources for growth and prepare customers for the future of IT. Learn more at http://www.redhat.com.

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