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Oh, Red Hat. Contain yourself and your 'new innovations' talk

Open-source biz extends Linux sandbox offerings with storage and more

Red Hat Summit Red Hat is going full tilt after bringing containers and traditional Linux apps together under its management with a raft of announcements.

The company has launched:

  • A Linux container operating system via Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host.
  • Red Hat OpenShift container development and deployment platform.
  • Red Hat Gluster Storage for container native storage, enabling persistent storage to be deployed in standard containers, orchestrated by Kubernetes, managed like other apps on OpenShift, and integrated with Red Hat's container stack.
  • Red Hat CloudForms for unified container management; users can manage relationships from the container through the platform layer to the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) layer or the physical host.
  • A container-scanning interface so that security partners like Black Duck can plug into the OpenShift Container Platform.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host includes a technology preview of the Open Security Content Automation Protocol (OpenSCAP) scanner.

There is an updated version of Atomic Host with fresh container runtimes, offering users a choice of Docker or Open Container Initiative (OCI) run times. It also has improved systems integration to help migrate existing apps to run inside containers.

Atomic Host has better update functionality for hot fixes between full releases, and graphical management for admin tasks, including updates from within Cockpit.

Embracing app hybridity, Red Hat claims OpenShift enables traditional apps to coexist with cloud-native and container-based apps. It talks about several OpenShift capabilities:

  • OpenShift Container Local adopts containers for local development.
  • OpenShift Container Lab enables customers to evaluate containers in non-production server environments for dev and test.
  • OpenShift Container Platform (formerly OpenShift Enterprise) is said to support enterprises bringing containers to mission-critical workloads.
  • Red Hat Cloud Suite, which combines the components of Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat CloudForms, transforms a traditional data center into a private cloud.
  • OpenShift Online and OpenShift Dedicated are fully managed, public cloud container platform offerings.

Red Hat says OpenShift allows for easier integration with Red Hat JBoss Middleware services within a container architecture, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP) 7, Fuse, and Data Grid. So developers can build and integrate new apps faster and modernize existing apps to run on container-based infrastructure across the hybrid cloud.

The company's spokespeople can't resist hype, talking about "Red Hat's new storage innovations" and taking a page from a WDC/SanDisk marketeer's style guide. Are there any other kinds of innovations?

A major appeal of Red Hat's container approach is to unify containers and traditional app development, operations, management, and eco-system integration inside the Red Hat environment and so avoid losing out as Docker expands its container capabilities in these areas.

From the storage point of view, Red Hat is now competing with Hedvig, Portworx, Storage OS and others in supplying persistent container storage, and hoping to win developers' support.

Red Hat Gluster 3.1.3 has performance and stability improvements, including faster self-healing and what Red Hat claims is a high-performance software-defined storage fabric for virtual machines.

The company has also announced OpenShift Primed as a partner designation in the OpenShift partner network. It is a technical readiness program for ISVs integrating their apps on OpenShift. Customers can preview and try these apps on the OpenShift Hub and test them in their own data centers.

Red Hat Gluster Storage will be available this summer. ®

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