Enhanced Dell Red Hat OpenStack cloud solution now available
On April 8, Dell and Red Hat announced our latest enhanced OpenStack private cloud solution. The updated solution integrates and builds upon the latest OpenStack software bits, Red Hat’s latest OpenStack Platform 6 (OSP), with Dell’s supreme 13G PowerEdge server platforms. In fact, this is our 3rd generation Dell and Red Hat joint cloud solution built with OpenStack.
Dell and Red Hat cloud solutions are jointly engineered and designed to build out a highly scalable enterprise-grade private cloud Infrastructure. In this latest end-to-end solution refresh we are evolving and growing the solution capabilities to addresses enterprise requirements for dynamic, elastic and agile IT services. This enterprise cloud solution delivers prescribed configurations for compute, infrastructure, networking, and multiple options for storage. It is designed to be easily right-sized and scaled for an organization’s needs now and the future.
The solution is specifically designed to help customers build OpenStack-powered, highly-scalable clouds. The updated solution is co-engineered with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6 and PowerEdge R630 and R730xd high-density rack servers. With its hyper-dense memory, storage flexibility and compact footprint, the PowerEdge R630 maximizes datacenter efficiency for OpenStack cloud deployments. We have optimized the configuration of the PowerEdge R730xd to deliver a balance of storage utilization and performance making it ideal for hosting massively scalable Red Hat Ceph storage.
Our solution philosophy is to take the best of breed components from Dell, Red Hat and the OpenStack ecosystem, stabilize all the moving parts, and provide an enterprise grade experience. We are not interested in delivering one-off “snowflakes” as is often the case with other OpenStack solutions. Our goal is to deliver stable, reliable infrastructure powered by validated architectures that work.
In this release we focused on improvements in three core areas:
- Increased density – optimized configurations for OpenStack admin and infrastructure nodes to deliver increased VM density and an increase (~30%) in storage capacity – all within the same size footprint as our previous generation solution
- Accelerated performance – fine-tuned configurations of Dell PowerEdge R730xd servers with solid state drives accelerate the performance of Ceph data processing. The solution also supports a choice of hard drives and memory configurations so customers can optimize Ceph storage to their application need
- Security and stability – we continue to leverage and integrate Red Hat’s hardened and secure OpenStack distribution – Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6 – that combines the latest OpenStack bits with the stability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. Stability is further enhanced by the extended lifecycle support provided by OSP and we offer options for up to three years of support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform
New on the networking side, the solution now integrates Neutron SDN and highly resilient 10GbE network designs with multiple layers of redundancy to ensure continuous fault tolerant operation. On the storage side we support multiple storage back ends including Ceph and Dell Storage, and it is now possible to run multiple storage back ends simultaneously, so there is new flexibility for aligning storage to workloads.
Dell has been a proud supporter and contributor to the OpenStack community since day one. We are delivering on our mission to accelerate our customers’ journey to cloud computing with OpenStack and to help our customers make their organizations future ready. We are working hard with Red Hat to combine our cloud expertise, enterprise innovation and dedicated co-engineering to continue to refine open and scalable cloud solutions.
If your plans include attending the upcoming OpenStack Summit and/or Red Hat Summit events – make sure to attend a Dell session and stop by the Dell expo to learn more about our joint solutions with Red Hat.
OpenStack Summit, May 18-22 Vancouver
Red Hat Summit, June 23-26 Boston
