DUBAI, UAE, 5th July, 2016– Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat CloudForms 4.1, the latest version of its award-winning open hybrid cloud management solution. With support for Google Cloud Platform, Red Hat CloudForms 4.1 now supports greater choice and flexibility for customers who want to run hybrid cloud workloads on Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services. In addition, Red Hat CloudForms 4.1 expands the scope of its management capabilities with software-defined networking (SDN), providing a more unified management experience for software-defined datacenters. Finally, CloudForms 4.1 makes it easier to automate complex IT processes through integration with Ansible Tower, and provides customers with a simpler, cloud-friendly subscription model.

CloudForms is an advanced open source management platform for physical, virtual, and cloud IT environments, supporting both virtual machines and containers. CloudForms enables IT organizations to offer composable services through a self-service portal, managing the entire lifecycle from provisioning to retirement. It also facilitates risk management by defining advanced compliance policies that can be enforced in both greenfield and existing environments, and allows operators to optimize unit cost through capacity planning, reporting and financial management features.

Red Hat CloudForms 4.1 introduces several new few features, including:

Support for Google Cloud Platform

Developed in close collaboration with Google in the ManageIQ open source community, customers can now use Red Hat CloudForms to manage Google Cloud Platform environments. The support includes full lifecycle management of provisioned virtual machines, policy enforcement, chargeback and lifecycle management.

Support for software-defined networking

As organizations adopt Red Hat CloudForms to manage their cloud workloads, the management platform must extend beyond compute and handle networking and storage as well. To this end, CloudForms 4.1 adds network management for OpenStack Networking (Neutron), Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. Developed in close collaboration with Nuage Networks, CloudForms’ new SDN capabilities enable users to discover and manage network elements while visualizing their relationship to other parts of the infrastructure.

Integration with Ansible Tower by Red Hat

Built-in integration with Ansible Tower makes it simpler than ever for CloudForms customers to provision complex applications and services through custom automation code. CloudForms 4.1 can now access Ansible Tower to run Ansible automation jobs, enabling CloudForms customers to make use of the popular Ansible automation language. Furthermore, the Ansible Tower integration also allows for easy composition of complex services by combining native CloudForms service catalog support with Ansible playbooks.

New cloud-friendly subscriptions

New flexible subscriptions are available immediately to all Red Hat CloudForms customers, enabling users to apply one subscription to either physical servers or cloud workloads. The subscription can be transported in either direction, as often as needed during the subscription period. Customers can also use an average of cloud instances under management to determine the number of CloudForms subscriptions they require for their public cloud workloads, helping them to avoid purchasing for peak demand, while new built-in reports can help them understand their actual and average utilization over time.

Other improvements in Red Hat CloudForms 4.1 include:

Expanded support for Microsoft Azure, including a wider range of functionality spanning support for Microsoft Azure cloud images, events, metrics, provisioning from private images, and full lifecycle management. CloudForms 4.1 also brings SmartState Analysis (agentless VM and container introspection) to Microsoft Azure, allowing enterprises to enable DevOps and self-service, and mitigate Shadow IT, through advanced policy and compliance enforcement that was previously only available on premises;
Updated charge-back model, including customizable currencies and rate tiers;
New capabilities for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, SmartState Analysis, heatmaps showing operational utilization, support for persistent data volumes; and
Improved self-service user interface, adding a new shopping cart interface and remote console.

Availability

Red Hat CloudForms 4.1 is immediately available for customers with a subscription to download.

Supporting Quotes

Joe Fitzgerald, vice president, Management, Red Hat

“We hear constant customer demands focusing on rapidly advancing their hybrid cloud strategies and the need for one, consistent management view across their physical, virtual, and cloud environments. CloudForms offers that, and we believe CloudForms 4.1 is the industry’s most comprehensive, hybrid cloud management solution on the market. CloudForms now not only supports the world's largest public clouds, but also integrates with Ansible to dramatically simplify automation.”

Sunil Khandekar, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Nuage Networks from Nokia

“CloudForms is gaining significant market traction and, now that SDN is fully supported as a first-class citizen in the platform, is a first-class citizen the momentum we expect will only continue. By integrating Nuage Networks SDN technology with Red Hat’s CloudForms management system, customers will be able to automate and manage workloads across hybrid cloud environments while maintaining unified network policy across the breadth of their applications and assets.”

David Condell, Head of Open Systems Services, s IT Solutions At Spardat GmbH

“We choose CloudForms because of its powerful automation capabilities to centralize our existing provisioning and operations workflows, and it has turned into a central tool in our IT landscape. We needed an open source tool with flexible and open interfaces in order to easily integrate with many other infrastructure tools and projects which are also partly open source. CloudForms’ expanded list of supported providers in the new version will give us even more operability in the future. The ease of consumption which we achieved with CloudForms’ automation has enabled us to instantly provide many IaaS services for our internal customers.”

The Forrester Wave™: Hybrid Cloud Management Solutions, Q1 2016, Dave Bartoletti

'The hybrid cloud management solutions market is mature and growing because more developers and I&O professionals see it as a way to address the needs of a growing multi-cloud portfolio. These solutions help developers build cloud apps faster and more easily while giving I&O pros the governance and control they need to enforce usage and cost policies.'