Dell and Red Hat upgrade private-cloud offering

Dell and Red Hat have announced an enhanced edition of the Dell Red Hat Cloud Solution, a co-engineered, enterprise-grade private-cloud solution based on OpenStack. The upgraded solution addresses enterprise customer demand for more flexible, elastic and agile IT services.

Designed to help customers build OpenStack-powered, highly-scalable clouds, the updated solution is co-engineered with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and Dell PowerEdge R630 and R730xd high-density rack servers, part of Dell’s 13th generation PowerEdge portfolio. With its hyper-dense memory, storage flexibility and compact footprint, the PowerEdge R630 maximizes datacenter efficiency for OpenStack cloud deployments. The PowerEdge R730xd delivers an optimised balance of storage utilisation and performance making it ideal for hosting massively scalable Red Hat Ceph storage.

This enterprise solution includes prescribed configurations for compute, infrastructure, networking, and multiple options for storage. It is designed to be easily scaled for an organisation’s needs now and the future. The upgraded solution provides customers the following key benefits:

• Increased density – optimised configurations minimise the data centre footprint for OpenStack admin and infrastructure nodes, and feature a 20% VM density increase and over a 30 percent storage capacity increase within the same size footprint
• Accelerated performance – fine-tuned configurations of Dell PowerEdge R730xd servers with solid state drives accelerate the performance of Ceph data processing, and with  a choice of hard drives and memory configurations, customers can optimise Ceph storage to their application needs
• Added security and stability – Hardened from the OpenStack “Juno” release, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6 adds the security and stability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. Highly resilient 10GbE network designs with multiple layers of redundancy provide continuous fault tolerant operation. Additionally, extended lifecycle support includes options for up to three years of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform “production phase” support and updates

This latest release of the Dell Red Hat Cloud Solution stems from a longstanding collaboration between the two companies, and joint engineering within the OpenStack community. Dell and Red Hat have partnered for more than 15 years, and Dell was the first company to OEM Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform in 2013. Since then, the two companies have continued to combine their cloud expertise, enterprise innovation and dedicated support of co-engineering open and scalable cloud solutions to accelerate the customer’s journey to cloud computing.

“Enterprise customers are requiring robust and rapidly scalable cloud infrastructures that deliver business results,” said Jim Ganthier, vice president and general manager, Dell Engineered Solutions and Cloud. “Dell and Red Hat continue to jointly deliver cost effective, open source-based cloud computing solutions that provide greater agility to our customers, and this newest version of the Dell Red Hat Cloud Solution leverages best of breed technology from both companies to do so.”

“Red Hat’s ongoing collaboration with Dell to co-engineer enterprise-grade cloud solutions is further enhancing OpenStack to be production-ready,” said Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager, OpenStack at Red Hat. “End customers continue to benefit from Red Hat’s strategic partnership with Dell as we deliver joint solutions that streamline deployment and accelerate time to innovation.”