Red Hat and Dell are co-developing OpenStack-based private cloud solutions

Red Hat and Dell have announced a series of co-engineered, high-density servers the companies claim are optimised for large-scale OpenStack deployments.

The co-engineered servers ship with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and are based on Dell PowerEdge R630 and R730xd high-density rack servers, the latter ideal for compute and the latter optimised for storage utilisation.

“Enterprise customers are requiring robust and rapidly scalable cloud infrastructures that deliver business results,” said Jim Ganthier, vice president and general manager, Dell Engineered Solutions and Cloud.

“Dell and Red Hat continue to jointly deliver cost effective, open source-based cloud computing solutions that provide greater agility to our customers, and this newest version of the Dell Red Hat Cloud Solution leverages best of breed technology from both companies to do so,” Ganthier said.

Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager, OpenStack at Red Hat said: “Red Hat’s ongoing collaboration with Dell to co-engineer enterprise-grade cloud solutions is further enhancing OpenStack to be production-ready.End customers continue to benefit from Red Hat’s strategic partnership with Dell as we deliver joint solutions that streamline deployment and accelerate time to innovation.”

A number of interrelated forces seem to be at play here. In revealing its fourth quarter 2015 financial results last month Red Hat said deals involving OpenStack-based offerings tripled when compared to the fourth quarter 2014, and with HP pushing its Helion OpenStack-based private cloud offerings hard it seems reasonable to expect Dell, one of its largest private cloud rivals, would want to counter with OpenStack-integrated offerings of its own.