Red Hat OpenStack HCI Targets Telco Hybrid Cloud, 5G Deployments

Red Hat today rolled out a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform based on OpenStack compute and Cephstorage. The new product targets service providers looking to deploy virtual network functions (VNFs) and 5Gtechnologies on top of open source software. Launched at this week’s OpenStack Summit, the Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Cloud combines Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 and Red Hat Ceph Storage 3 into one product. Red Hat says it is the largest contributor to both open source projects. The company’s new open platform improves application portability between on-premises data centers, public clouds, and the edge, said Irshad Raihan, senior manager of product marketing at Red Hat. In addition, nodes in an OpenStack deployment are interoperable, which means customers can use hyperconverged and non-hyperconverged nodes across their networks and at the edge. “It’s targeted primarily at a telco audience — there’s a lot of affinity between telcos and OpenStack,” Raihan said. “But also general enterprises can benefit, too.” Those benefits include all of the usual reasons companies choose hyperconverged systems. Namely, they are easier to deploy and manage. And they usually provide lower operating and capital costs by using commodity hardware and enabling flexible, scalable compute and storage.