![Red Hat Offers Infrastructure, Storage for Hybrid Clouds](/binaries/content/gallery/dice/insights/2012/06/shutterstock_82795300.jpg)
As businesses turn to the cloud for their operational needs, a healthy portion of them are deciding on hybrid solutions. It’s precisely this demographic that Red Hat has targeted with its latest slate of releases, which combine the company’s product lines in ways that allow businesses to set up and manage open hybrid clouds. Those releases include Red Hat Storage Server 2.0, which it bills as open-source storage software for the management of unstructured data (those IT administrators who utilize Red Hat had the chance to play with the beta earlier this year). Hardware-wise, it relies on x86 servers, still the industry standard despite signs that ARM-based servers could take a significant portion of the market in years to come. Red Hat is also offering a cloud-with-virtualization bundle, which combines—you guessed it—virtualization and cloud-management tools on the same platform (Red Hat achieved this by bundling its enterprise virtualization product with Red Hat CloudForms). Also among the releases is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform, combining Red Hat Cloud Forms, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. The result allows IT administrators to manage virtualization, cloud, and systems. Red Hat also claims that, at a future point, it will include public-cloud hours from “leading providers.” Finally, Red Hat is offering an OpenShift Enterprise PaaS Solution, combining Red Hat CloudForms, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and JBoss Enterprise Middleware into a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) platform for open and hybrid clouds. Red Hat plans to further expand this platform into a developer PaaS environment compatible with
OpenShift.com Public PaaS. “We strongly believe that enterprises need to embrace an open hybrid cloud approach, combining all their existing resources into their cloud infrastructures,” Paul Cormier, president of Products and Technologies at Red Hat, wrote in a statement, “crossing physical, virtual and public cloud resources.” While Red Hat Storage is currently available, the PaaS, IaaS and virtualization bundle will hit the market later in the summer. According to the second annual
Future of Cloud Computing Survey, which collected the opinions of some 785 respondents across the tech industry, 36 percent of respondents reported utilizing a hybrid approach to the cloud, versus 40 percent relying on a public cloud strategy. Moreover, some 52 percent of respondents predicted they’d rely on hybrid clouds within the next five years. “The move away from internally-hosted to public and hybrid clouds reflects the need and desire to integrate with other technologies, vendors and ecosystems,” Jay Lyman, a senior analyst with 451 Group, wrote in a short research note about the survey results. “This year’s survey proves organizations want flexibility along with scalability.” If those numbers prove accurate, it could play right into Red Hat’s strategy.
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