The preview release is the first milestone on the path to what will become Red Hat’s Enterprise OpenStack commercially supported release at some point in 2013. OpenStack is one of the leading open source cloud platforms and has the support of major IT vendors including Dell, HP, IBM, Cisco, AT&T and Rackspace.
Red Hat CTO, Brian Stevens told Datamation that the first preview release is based on Essex OpenStack release. OpenStack Essex debuted in April of this year and benefited heavily from Red Hat’s contributions. While the preview released today is based on Essex, Steven noted that Red Hat will update to the upcoming Folsom release later this year.
“Our commercial offering early next year will be based on Folsom,” Stevens said. “We believe that Folsom provides the baseline feature set for a commercial product so our commercial release will wait until then.”
With Essex-based Red Hat OpenStack preview, Stevens added that there is only basic support for the Quantum networking project. Quantum is the new networking component of OpenStack, leveraging the open vSwitch technology originally developed by Nicira. Quantum is set to become a full project in the Folsom release and Red Hat intends to include full support as part of its commercially supported distribution as well.
Read the full story at Datamation:
Red Hat Releases Open Source OpenStack Cloud Preview
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.