Red Hat has launched its own version of OpenStack at a time when surveys show many companies are interested in building out a private cloud. The free Red Hat Distribution OpenStack (RDO) may appeal to firms looking for a standardized approach, as well as lock-in avoidance in their cloud architecture.
That contrasts with building a private cloud from a virtualization vendor’s proprietary software, or copying the de facto standard of Amazon Web Services APIs through an implementation of Eucalyptus Systems code.
A community forum has been set up for RDO users, along with documentation and sources of information on the latest Grizzly release of OpenStack. Support for RDO is also community based. For commercial support, Red Hat offers OpenStack Early Adopter Edition.
Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens, a member of the OpenStack board, announced the availability of RDO Monday at the OpenStack Summit, underway in Portland this week. RDO will run with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4, the community-based Fedora version 18 or clones, such as CentOS. CentOS is used as the basis for Oracle Linux.