Red Hat unveils production-ready hyperconverged infrastructure

Red Hat hasintroduced Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure, the industry’s first production-ready fully open source hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution.
Organisations with distributed operations, such as those in the banking, energy or retail industries, need to be able to offer the same infrastructure services in remote and branch offices as they run in their datacenter. However, remote and branch offices can have unique challenges: less space and power/cooling, and fewer (or no) technical staff onsite. Organizations in this situation need powerful services, integrated on a single server that can scale out.
Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is designed to address these challenges by integrating compute and storage together on a single server, making it a well-suited solution for low-footprint remote or branch office installations and edge computing. It is designed to enable organisations to deploy and manage distributed infrastructures centrally, enabling remote locations to benefit from high-performing systems without requiring extensive or highly specialised on-site support staff.
Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is the only production-ready offering with an entirely open source infrastructure stack and that is developed, sold and supported by a single vendor.
An open source, community-based approach helps to avoid the vendor lock in of a proprietary approach and enables customers to take advantage of the faster innovation emerging from open source communities.
By delivering a hyperconverged infrastructure solution with the software-defined components coming from the same vendor, Red Hat is aiming to help customers minimize troubleshooting and support headaches.
Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure uses Red Hat’s widely-deployed virtualisation platform, as well as software-defined storage, to more efficiently manage an integrated compute and storage infrastructure across a range of server hardware or networks. To accomplish this, Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure was built with a suite of components, integrated to provide a unified experience from installation to management. These include:
* Red Hat Virtualization – The company’s award-winning Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)-powered enterprise virtualization platform.
* Red Hat Gluster Storage – Highly scalable software-defined storage that can be converged on the same hardware as Red Hat Virtualization hosts, removing the need for additional compute infrastructures and simplifying deployment.
* Red Hat Enterprise Linux – The world’s leading enterprise Linux platform offers a stable and reliable foundation.
* Ansible by Red Hat – Deployment and management built on the leading simple, powerful, and agentless open source IT automation framework, providing automated installation and configuration from a central point.
Ranga Rangachari, vice-president and GM: storage at Red Hat, comments: “Our customers have been looking for a solution to meet infrastructure needs across their entire organization – not just in the main office – but proprietary solutions previously appeared to be the only viable option for remote and edge installations.
“With Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure, customers can now provision compute and storage resources for remote sites to run local instances of applications with the same proficiency as in-office operations. Integrating our widely-deployed virtualization technology and our software-defined storage platform gives organizations the confidence of easier procurement, deployment and interoperability, ultimately enabling them to save time and money.”