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Red Hat Opens Early Adopter Program for Enterprise OpenStack Distribution

• By Leila Meyer
• 04/15/13

Red Hat has elevated its Red Hat OpenStack distribution from a preview version to an Early Adopter Program.

Red Hat OpenStack is an open-source framework for building and managing private, public, and hybrid Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds for cloud-enabled workloads. According to the company, it lets organizations use OpenStack technologies while "maintaining the security, stability, and enterprise readiness of a platform built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux." The company plans to offer Red Hat commercial support and a certified ecosystem of hardware and application vendors for its enterprise-ready distribution of Red Hat OpenStack.

The Red Hat OpenStack Early Adopter Program is based on the community Folsum release of OpenStack, of which Red Hat was the second top corporate code contributor. Red Hat's preview version of its OpenStack distribution, which was announced last August, was based on the community Essex release.

RDO (Red Hat Distribution of OpenStack) is a freely available, community-supported distribution of OpenStack that runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, and their derivatives. According to the company, it provides "a pure upstream OpenStack experience with the latest stable release from OpenStack.org, packaged, integrated, and easy to deploy on Red Hat platforms." It includes the core OpenStack components, as well as two incubating projects: Heat, for cloud application orchestration, and Ceilometer, for resource monitoring and metering. Red Hat has created an open source RDO community at openstack.redhat.com to help users share knowledge. RDO is now available for download.

The company also announced the Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network, which it describes as "a multi-tiered program designed for third-party commercial companies that offer hardware, software, and services for customers to implement cloud infrastructure solutions powered by Red Hat OpenStack." Red Hat is currently accepting nominations for early adopter partner participation.

Following Red Hat's acquisition of ManageIQ in December, the company has announced plans to integrate technology Red Hat developed for CloudForms with that developed by ManageIQ to provide customers with cloud operations management tools.

Further information about the Red Hat OpenStack Early Adoption Program, RDO, and Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network can be found on the Red Hat site.