DUBAI, UAE, 5th January, 2017 – Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the availability of Red Hat CloudForms 4.2, the latest version of its award-winning open hybrid cloud management solution. IT operations teams can face slow, manual processes to deliver services internally, which may cost time, money and competitiveness. To address these challenges, IT teams can use Red Hat CloudForms to increase service delivery while enabling IT teams to focus on critical, business-impacting issues.

Red Hat CloudForms, based on the open source ManageIQ project, provides an advanced open source management platform for physical, virtual and cloud IT environments, including Linux containers. CloudForms helps IT organizations offer composable services through a self-service portal, managing the service lifecycle from provisioning to retirement. It can also define and enforce advanced compliance policies for new and existing IT environments, better enabling operators to optimize the costs of a given environment and system.

Red Hat CloudForms 4.2

Red Hat CloudForms 4.2 delivers improvements to public cloud, private cloud and container-based platforms, by enhancing metrics and events for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform and by adding an Amazon EC2 image, enabling customers to run CloudForms in Amazon Web Services (AWS). This new release also upgrades its capabilities for OpenStack, improving tenant management and introducing storage management for the OpenStack object and block storage services: Swift and Cinder. Finally, CloudForms 4.2 enhances its chargeback capabilities for containers running on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

Global Enterprises Turning to Hybrid Cloud Management

As many enterprise IT environments become more and more complex, adding a mix of physical, virtual and cloud-based environments along with Linux containers and microservices, traditional IT management solutions can trail behind. The inflexibility of many proprietary management solutions may not meet trail the demands of large organizations for cloud-based and cloud-like services, which can lead these organizations to look for more flexible, service agnostic solutions like Red Hat CloudForms.

To date, Red Hat customers from global telecommunications providers and manufacturing organizations to leading research institutions and universities, have deployed Red Hat CloudForms to manage their hybrid IT environments. CloudForms has enabled these organizations to better optimize costs and time by making their IT organizations more efficient and their IT processes more responsive. Built from the ground up on a flexible open source framework, Red Hat CloudForms can cover a broad range of infrastructure platforms and can be tailored to the specific needs of a given industry or customer organization.
Availability

CloudForms 4.2 is available for immediate download from the Red Hat Customer Portal.

Supporting Quotes

Joe Fitzgerald, vice president, Management, Red Hat

“There is no longer a ‘one-size-fits-all’ IT environment, as many organizations are seeking to leverage the best benefits of physical, virtual and cloud-based technologies. Coupled with Linux containers, only managing one or two aspects of these hybrid computing environments can lead to downtime or outages. Red Hat CloudForms provides a flexible, open management platform to oversee these disparate resources and we’re pleased to help enterprises at a global scale use them to manage the growing complexities of their environments.”

Lionel Louie, chief commercial officer, CargoSmart Limited

“Red Hat CloudForms is one of the key components in our software-defined data center (SDDC) that helps to streamline the infrastructure setup processes and enables us to deliver fast-track development projects with scale, speed, and efficiency. We are using CloudForms to manage the production environment that integrates and coordinates our infrastructure resources. Together with other process changes and technology adoptions, our provisioning time for a single virtual machine has been reduced from 8 hours to 20 minutes, which has greatly improved our time to market.”

Hannes Leblhuber, head of sales services, eww ItandTel
“Red Hat CloudForms lets us take full advantage of our virtualized infrastructure to set up customer cloud solutions more quickly and manage them more efficiently. We provide our customers with all of the resources they require, such as processing power, storage space, databases, networks, middleware, and load balancing. The resources are scaled automatically to meet the requirements of each application.”

Travis Rollings, director, Office Systems, Herzog Technologies

“Red Hat realizes that we’re all working toward the same goal. Without Red Hat CloudForms and Red Hat Satellite, launching our cloud-based positive train control (PTC) solution would have been a far more complex undertaking, and we would not have been able to onboard new customers as quickly.

Varun Katyal, chief architect, Network Data Solutions

'Working with proprietary software can be difficult if it becomes unstable. This happened in a number of the proofs of concept we conducted with other solutions, and debugging usually proved very difficult. Thanks to Red Hat CloudForms, our customers can now use cloud services more flexibly. Its automation capabilities made the difference for us. The solution’s greater stability and ease of debugging also contributed to its success in achieving the objectives NDS had set.

Thomas Wenninger, deputy head, IT Services, University of Salzburg

“The high-performance automation of Red Hat CloudForms has helped The University of Salzburg centralize existing provisioning and operational workflows. Using this technology, we can automatically scale applications to manage an increase in demand, while also improving hardware use. We need certain resources at the beginning and at the end of each semester where peaks occur. In between these peaks, we can allocate resources to other use case, for example high performance computing (HPC), to utilize all the resources we have efficiently.”

Tim Cutts, Ph.D., head of Scientific Computing, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute

“Red Hat OpenStack Platform allows users to create and share virtual machine images of their own creation and to find and spin up images from elsewhere. This means that we can conduct complicated analysis on worldwide data, with confidence that we can meet the needs of data integrity and governance. In addition Red Hat CloudForms is used to manage this complex hybrid cloud environment, and deliver a more consistent user experience.”