Red Hat Inc, a provider of open source solutions, on Wednesday announced developments in its Cloud Foundations portfolio that promotes consistency between enterprise applications and the cloud. Red Hat is the only vendor that has the infrastructure capable of delivering an open source, flexible cloud stack, incorporating operating system, middleware and virtualization. Furthermore, this stack is designed to run consistently across physical servers, virtual platforms, private clouds and public clouds. Red Hat's comprehensive solution set enables interoperability and portability, recognizing that customers have IT architectures composed of many different hardware and software components from various vendors. Cloud Foundations is offering capabilities that allow customers to use multiple clouds effectively.

“In our extensive research, we've found that open APIs and interoperability are essential to customers considering the cloud,” said Gary Chen, research manager, Enterprise Virtualization Software at IDC. “Our research shows that 80 percent of enterprises cite the lack of interoperability standards as a challenge in adopting cloud computing services. With Cloud Foundations, Red Hat is on the right track with cloud by accelerating interoperability and portability to prevent cloud lock in."

Comprehensive Approach to Cloud Computing
Red Hat introduced Cloud Foundations in June 2010 during the Red Hat Summit in Boston. Cloud Foundations includes Red Hat's comprehensive line of products for implementing a private cloud, coupled with a detailed reference architecture and implementation cookbook, consulting services and training offerings. Based on Red Hat's experience building public and enterprise clouds with its products, the solution was well-received by enterprises looking to build real clouds, today. Select customers are already previewing the technology in Red Hat's next release of Cloud Foundations.

Focus on Portability

Red Hat's cloud solution uniquely emphasizes portability, providing customers with flexibility and choice across private and public clouds. Red Hat's next release of Cloud Foundations seeks to provide comprehensive portability for customers with the delivery of new technologies and offerings across four key areas:

• Portable Computing

Red Hat's cloud management capabilities offer the tools a customer needs to implement and manage a cloud, providing scalability, robust resource management and portals through an included cloud engine, self-service portal, tools and Deltacloud APIs. The solution allows customers to move computing to their choice of virtualization technology or public cloud virtual machines.

• Portable Applications

Red Hat's application builder provides cloud application lifecycle management, letting customers build assemblies to manage the complexities of creating, versioning, configuring, tracking and updating applications for the cloud. With portability of applications and workloads, customers can write an application once and deploy it anywhere. Red Hat's application builder allows customers to manage applications more consistently across physical, virtual and cloud deployments.

• Portable Services

The cloud services from Red Hat provide customers with the technologies needed to implement commonly used application features, a key need for deploying private clouds. With Red Hat's cloud services, customers are also able to move these features together with their associated workloads between multiple clouds. For example, storage services provide data persistence, and messaging services enable data to be moved in and out of the cloud.

• Portable Programming Models

Via Red Hat's Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution, which is designed to protect a company's application investment, by allowing developers to build once and deploy everywhere: on traditional servers, on virtualized servers, on private clouds and in public clouds.

“We are focusing on all four of these areas for portability in the cloud because they form an essential whole,” said Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager, Cloud Business at Red Hat. “If you can migrate your computational power anywhere you want but your data is tied to a particular cloud, you are still stuck there. At Red Hat, we aim to offer customers the tools they need for the cloud combined with real portability and choice.”