Red Hat, Inc., arguably the largest corporate contributor to the Linux open-source project and founded in 1993, is responsible for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Dell, the struggling PC integrator, was once a powerful force in PC sales both for businesses and consumers.
Unlikely bedfellows?
Well not really. Dell has been a supporter of open-source and OpenStack for some time now and the relationship between the two companies is over 14 years old. The new deal however makes Dell the first company in history to OEM Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform (ELOP). The jointly engineered product is to be constructed completely with Dell infrastructure elements and utilize Red Hat’s OpenStack platform within Dell’s Cloud Services.
For Dell it is an opportunity to start selling an offering that is tailored for large enterprises wishing to establish private clouds. This follows Hewlett-Packard’s (HP) announcement that its newest version of CloudSystem will utilize the HP Cloud OS which itself is based on OpenStack.
Radhesh Balakrishnan, Red Hat general manager for virtualization and OpenStack, was bullish on the the deal at this year’s Dell World conference saying ”There are definitely parts of OpenStack platform that still have a ways to go in terms of maturing,” he said. “The core parts of the software, however, are operationally solid and Red Hat has worked to bring these components to the level of an enterprise grade implementation. We fundamentally believe that OpenStack will be the new data-center fabric of the future,”.
The joint effort will provide for a real contender going after IaaS share currently held by Amazon, IBM and HP but only time will tell if it truly drives adoption of OpenStack in the enterprise private cloud market. It doesn’t however necessarily aid smaller organizations to meet similar goals. Aimed at the big enterprise market it is not going to be an inexpensive effort.
Developing systems and resources that IT teams can deploy at much lower cost is still the job of both in-house and outsourced development teams. Often companies find that they don’t require everything that can be done but rather more specific database tools or collaborative systems that meet unique business needs. A “one size fits all” option usually cost more and drives up end-user learning curves.
Thankfully, if your’s is a company that has more specific needs but lacks the in-house prowess to develop it, there are companies available as outsourced assets and many offer reasonably prices services for augmenting your staff or doing the development outright. Most have deployed systems and applications in enterprise environments just like yours for many years, giving them expertise you will need to keep costs down and potential for success up.
The move to join forces is a clear indication of where these two companies see the future going. For many end-user organizations this may just signal that it is time for them to examine how they are going to respond to an increasingly tech driven future.
