Red Hat launches hybrid cloud software

Red Hat has revealed a suite of new products that will allow organisations to deploy and manage open-source based hybrid clouds.

The new offering, unveiled at its annual conference in Boston, combines its range of products, spanning from Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation, Red Hat Storage, JBoss Enterprise Middleware, Red Hat CloudForms and Red Hat OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to offer enterprises an "easy on-ramp to open hybrid cloud computing with reduced complexity."

Paul Cormier, president of products and technologies at Red Hat said that cloud computing has introduced "a new era of IT and has brought enterprises to their most critical IT strategy decision this decade."

"We strongly believe that enterprises need to embrace an open hybrid cloud approach, combining all their existing resources into their cloud infrastructures, crossing physical, virtual and public cloud resources."

Cormier said that the company has taken "a huge step forward in enabling our enterprise customers with the technologies and solutions they need to build and manage open hybrid clouds."

While the Storage Server product is already available, the OpenShift Enterprise PaaS Solution, Red Hat Hybrid Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Solution and Red Hat Cloud with Virtualisation Bundle offerings are expected to be available within the next few weeks.

Analysts said that organisations are still finding integrating public and private clouds a problem.

"While customers seeking to build clouds from open source components have a wealth of projects to choose from, integration remains a challenge," said Stephen O'Grady, principal analyst at RedMonk. "With its hybrid cloud offerings, Red Hat is seeking to give customers more of a turnkey experience."

The company also said that its Certified Cloud Provider Programme has more than doubled since its launch in 2011 and has expanded to include partners across North America, Europe, Asia and Latin America.