Red Hat Unveils Its Open Source HCI

Today Red Hat Inc. announced that it was jumping into the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) market with what it is calling the industry’s first production-ready fully open source HCI solution, Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure. The new HCI solution is all about taking data center capabilities and squeezing them into smaller spaces such as branch offices and other remote facilities.

Today Red Hat Inc. announced that it was jumping into the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) market with what it is calling the industry’s first production-ready fully open source HCI solution, Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure. The new HCI solution is all about taking data center capabilities and squeezing them into smaller spaces such as branch offices and other remote facilities.

Several companies now have distributed operations. These same companies can have powerful capabilities in their data center, while they could be lacking some in their remote and branch offices. Typically at these edge locations, there is limited space and power options, not to mention little to no IT resources. These locations could use all of the same benefits of the data center. Red Hat’s Hyperconverged Infrastructure can address the above issues by doing what HCI solutions do best, converging compute and storage into a single server while being managed centrally.

There are several HCI solutions out there, in fact there are quite a few. To set itself apart from the rest of the field, Red Hat is offering what it states as the only production-ready offering with an entirely open source infrastructure stack and that is developed, sold, and supported by a single vendor. Its open source nature allows customers to both avoid vendor lock in while also allowing them to take advantage of innovations from the community as they emerge. Red Hat goes on to say that it can help minimize troubleshooting and support issues by being a HIC solution with the software-defined components coming from the same vendor.

Key features include:

• Red Hat Virtualization – The company’s award-winning Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)-powered enterprise virtualization platform.
• Red Hat Gluster Storage – Highly scalable software-defined storage that can be converged on the same hardware as Red Hat Virtualization hosts, removing the need for additional compute infrastructures and simplifying deployment.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux – The world’s leading enterprise Linux platform offers a stable and reliable foundation.
• Ansible by Red Hat – Deployment and management built on the leading simple, powerful, and agentless open source IT automation framework, providing automated installation and configuration from a central point.

Availability

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is available now.

Red Hat

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