ORed Hat today rolled out its latest “hyperconverged” product suite, launching an integrated cloud offering for customers looking to co-locate compute and storage functions in OpenStack environments.

The “Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Cloud” release is the second component of Red Cloud’s hyperconverged portfolio. It will be generally available this coming June, the company said in a release.

It combines Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 and Red Hat Ceph Storage 3 (open source storage for workloads like cloud infrastructure, data analytics, media repositories, and backup and restore systems) in a single user experience.

“[This] offers an open platform to improve application portability between the datacenter and the edge, especially critical to enterprises that have historically didn’t have any choice outside of inflexible, proprietary systems. In addition, nodes in an OpenStack deployment are interoperable, giving customers the choice to use non-hyperconverged nodes across their networks, with hyperconverged nodes at the edge, further improving resource utilisation”, Red Hat said in a release.

Dr S. P T. Krishnan, principal architect at REAN Cloud, told Computer Business Review: “We’re seeing more enterprises transform their data centers to behave like public clouds, for instance, introducing elasticity, scalability, resilience and self-service. This is a good product evolution for Red Hat. Converging the compute and storage layers using a single interface in a private cloud setting aligns with the public cloud’s selling point of self-service, and is definitely a step in the right direction.”

The (Real) Edge

It follows the introduction of Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Virtualisation in June 2017.

This was aimed at those struggling to deploy storage separately from virtualisation in resource-constrained environments; for example remote banking, telecommunications, energy branches, where business-critical applications are often deployed on local server and storage infrastructure.

The company said of its latest release: “In addition to lifecycle and operational benefits, it also includes all the networking capabilities of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 such as Real-time KVM and OpenDaylight. Communication service providers and network equipment providers looking for innovation at the datacenter and the mobile edge can greatly benefit from this solution as they roll out highly performant, agile, and scalable platforms for 5G.”

Henry Baltazar, research VP at 451 Research added: “Seventy-one percent of respondents [to our recent survey] were using hyperconverged infrastructure to simplify infrastructure management and maintenance… Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Cloud provides the infrastructure consolidation and simplified lifecycle management which many OpenStack customers are looking for to accelerate their private cloud deployments at the edge and in datacenters.”