Red Hat brings OpenShift closer to the enterprise

Red Hat continues to enhance its software portfolio for helping organizations run and manage cloud services in their own data centers, adding more features to its OpenShift Enterprise software package to accommodate enterprise requirements such as policy orchestration and multiregion availability.

OpenShift Enterprise 2.1, available now, also includes new releases of the latest open source software used in the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) hosting package, such as PHP and MySQL.

Although it gets less attention than the IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service)-style cloud services, PaaS services can be valuable.

IaaS provides a complete OS within a cloud-based virtual machine, into which a user can install software programs. PaaS services, on the other hand, free organizations from maintaining the underlying operating systems, middleware or other underlying components that run an application. PaaS providers maintain the OS, and offer specific supporting programs, such as a database or programming language runtime, that developers can use to build their cloud-based applications.

Google, IBM, Microsoft and Safesforce.com all offer PaaS services.

Red Hat launched OpenShift Enterprise in 2012 as a version of its online OpenShift PaaS that could be run by an organization within its own data center. OpenShift Enterprise could be used as a foundation for hosting providers to offer PaaS to their customers, as well as for large organizations that may want to run PaaS services in-house.

Running OpenShift Enterprise is also designed to provide an organization an easy way to transfer their workloads over to Red Hats own OpenShift cloud offering, for purposes of disaster recovery or workload balancing.

The new version of OpenShift Enterprise, currently available, offers a number of new features to better help incorporate PaaS into the workplace.

A new plug-in will help organizations incorporate OpenShift services within their own policy orchestration engines, allowing them to incorporate services built on PaaS into their own complex workflows spanning multiple business units.

The software introduces the concept of zones and regions, allowing organizations to make their systems more reliable, but spreading out resources across multiple geographic areas. If a service stops running in one geographic area, due to a natural disaster, a duplicate of that service in another zone can pick up the work.

Read more:
Red Hat brings OpenShift closer to the enterprise