Red Hat announces general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5

Red Hat, Inc. has announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5, the third enterprise release of Red Hat's OpenStack offering, designed to serve as the foundation for building OpenStack-powered clouds for advanced cloud users, telecommunications companies, Internet service providers (ISPs), and public cloud hosting providers.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform delivers an enterprise-class cloud platform built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, co-engineered and integrated with Red Hat's OpenStack technologies, offering IT organisations the agility to scale and quickly meet customer demands without compromising on availability, security, or performance.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5 is based on the OpenStack Icehouse release and includes several new features aimed at easing enterprise adoption of OpenStack technology in the existing datacenter and enhancing capabilities to make it a more reliable and dependable cloud platform, including:
· Three-year support lifecycle, providing stability and support for enterprise cloud environments. Backed by Red Hat’s award-winning Global Support Services team and the world’s largest certified OpenStack partner ecosystem with more than 250 partners, including joint support relationships with hundreds of certified software, hardware, and services partners, customers can have confidence that they will receive support for their production environments.
· Support for integration with VMware infrastructure, encompassing virtualisation, management, networking and storage. Customers may use existing VMware vSphere resources as virtualisation drivers for OpenStack Compute (Nova) nodes, managed in a seamless manner from the OpenStack Dashboard (Horizon). Additionally, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5 supports the VMware NSX plugin for OpenStack Networking (Neutron) and the VMware Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK) plugin for OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder).
· Better placement of workloads across cloud resources. Server groups enable workloads to be spread broadly across the OpenStack cloud for enhanced resiliency of distributed applications, or located proximately for lower communications latency and better performance of complex applications.
· Improved support for virtual machines, supporting new cryptographic security requirements from the United States and United Kingdom. Using the para-virtualised random number generator device added in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, cryptographic routines in guest applications will have access to better quality encryption and experience improved performance.
· Improved interoperability of networking stacks. The new modular plugin architecture for Neutron eases the addition of new networking technologies to OpenStack deployments. The new architecture provides a path for customers with heterogeneous networking environments who want to use a mix of networking solutions in their OpenStack environment.

Additionally, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5 will offer OpenStack data processing service (Sahara) as a Technology Preview, enabling faster provisioning and easier management of Hadoop clusters on OpenStack. Hadoop is used to store and analyse large amounts of data and when combined with Sahara it provides a powerful platform for rapidly creating data driven applications and deploying them on the open hybrid cloud.