Red Hat and Cisco: Collaborating to enable pervasive adoption of OpenStack

According to the OpenStack Foundation April 2016 user survey, flexibility, interoperability, and faster innovation are among the top benefits customers are planning to get from adopting OpenStack. At the same time, complexity, ease of deployments, inconsistency, and lack of stability were cited as top reasons respondents would not recommend OpenStack to others. This can often be said for many new technologies as they involve learning new skills and expanding outside our comfort zone.

As OpenStack adoption grows, it is important to ask some key questions: How are people benefiting from OpenStack? How can barriers to adoption be removed?

Red Hat has been working with industry leaders to enable success with OpenStack and the hybrid cloud. We’re a leader in the upstream OpenStack community and in our efforts to bring a production-ready OpenStack platform to customers and partners around the world. Cisco has also made significant contributions to the OpenStack community, be it via plug-ins for automated network configuration with network switches, Cisco UCS, or the validated and tested Red Hat OpenStack Platform architecture documented in the Cisco UCS CVD (link.)

The latest example of our efforts to remove barriers to OpenStack adoption is the newest release of Cisco Metapod, which is now standardized on Red Hat OpenStack Platform. Cisco Metapod is a highly available, production-ready, OpenStack-based, on-premises solution engineered, deployed and remotely operated by Cisco for users. Cisco also offers a fully managed and operated Red Hat Ceph Storage option for Metapod, providing a converged compute/storage subscription. Read Cisco’s blog post here.

With Metapod, a skills gap should not be an inhibitor to embracing Red Hat OpenStack Platform. Cisco will deliver and manage it on your behalf, enabling you to deploy your workload on a more secure, on-premise cloud environment. No maintenance overhead is anticipated as Cisco handles updates, upgrades, scale, and more. You can get the performance and scalability of public cloud with the privacy and added security of private cloud. Additionally, Metapod offers industry-standard OpenStack API and the ability to use compatible Amazon Web Services APIs, so if you have existing deployment or monitoring tools, they should tie right in.

This is another way Red Hat strives to provide choice. By collaborating with Cisco, we offer many paths to OpenStack-based clouds, at multiple levels of customer engagement. From the fully managed Metapod to the documented architecture of UCS.

• More on Red Hat + Cisco: www.redhat.com/cisco
• More on Red Hat OpenStack Platform: https://www.redhat.com/en/insights/openstack
• Cisco blog on Metapod 4.0: http://blogs.cisco.com/cloud/introducing-metapod-4-0-now-powered-by-red-hat