Open source vendor Red Hat is betting on a year-old open source effort that it hopes will further open up the Cloud. Red Hat’s deltaCloud project http://deltacloud.org/ started last year as a way of enabling and managing a heterogeneous Cloud virtualized infrastructure. Now, deltaCloud is on a path to commercialization as part of a set of new virtualization products from Red Hat.
The potential payoff for Red Hat is that deltaCloud will be positioned as an open source approach to managing nearly any type of virtualized Cloud technology.
“We’re creating a Cloud management engine based on the open source deltaCloud project,” Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager of Red Hat’s Cloud business, told InternetNews.com. “We haven’t yet issued a delivery date for that product, but it will be sometime next year. We have people using deltaCloud now, but in terms of a fully supported product, it will be incorporated into a family of products for Cloud management that Red Hat will provide.”
DeltaCloud allows for any certified virtualized environment — including Red Hat, VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V — to be managed from one common management layer. So instead of having multiple management consoles for each type of virtualization, Cloud administrators will be able to use one interface to manage any type of virtualization capacity.
“DeltaCloud also enables different virtual machines to be transferred or migrated in real time from one virtualization capacity to another, so from VMware to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization or Microsoft,” Crenshaw said. “That’s hugely important as very few customers have a homogenous infrastructure. It provides a reduction in complexity and delivers on the promise of Cloud, which is about making IT simpler to manage and use.”
Additionally, Red Hat is working on some tooling that sits above the management stack. The tooling is for application building and management in the Cloud as well as building service portals for users and administrators.
While deltaCloud is intended to enable administrators to run whatever virtualization technology they want, the system is also open, so that it can be included in other IT management system. Crenshaw said that if an enterprise is already using BMC, IBM Tivoli or HP OpenView, deltaCloud is open source, and as a result, the technology can be integrated.
“We’re still in the very early days of Cloud, and we don’t know what the best innovation will be in the next few years,” Crenshaw said. “So companies need to deploy an infrastructure that gives them the strategic flexibility to make changes and adopt new technologies in the future.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.