Red Hat includes NFV special sauce in latest OpenStack offering

Red Hat has announced its OpenStack Platform 11, its latest cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering, which will be available for customers in the next couple of weeks.

The new offering is based on the OpenStack ‘Ocata’ release, which the team claims delivers enhanced support for upgrades with composable roles, new networking capabilities, and improved integration with Red Hat CloudForms for cloud management. Ocata is in fact the 15th version of the open source infrastructure software, with a greater level of focus on support for container-based application frameworks at the networking layer.

“As OpenStack deployments grow in scale and scope, enterprises need a clear path forward to embrace new innovations without sacrificing their existing deployment structure,” said Radhesh Balakrishnan, GM of OpenStack at Red Hat.

“Red Hat OpenStack Platform 11 helps to provide this path forward, with Red Hat OpenStack Platform Director helping to maintain stability through the upgrade process, while also adding new networking features, management capabilities, and storage support, bringing the powerful innovations of the OpenStack community to mission-critical enterprise deployments.”

New features of the launch include full support for VLAN-aware virtual machines, which the team claims can now send and receive VLAN encapsulated traffic while being deployed over Open vSwitch (OVS) or OVS Data Plane Development Kit (OVS-DPDK). “Our collaboration with Red Hat and the use of Red Hat OpenStack Platform within our Metacloud and NFVi solutions enables Cisco to bring world-class product and services to our customers,” said Kip Compton, VP of the Cloud Platform and Services Group at Cisco.