Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform Opens for Business

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Finally.

After years of talk, preview and beta releases, Red Hat at long last now has a generally available, commercially supported OpenStack cloud platform release.

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The Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform is based on the recent OpenStack Grizzly release that first debuted in Aprilof this year.

As opposed to being a standalone product, Red Hat changed its OpenStack direction last month. The General Availability release of Red Hat’s OpenStack solution is directly integrated and bundled with an optimized version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

In a video interviewat the Red Hat Summit in June, CTO Brian Stevens explained why the integrated Linux OpenStack platform makes sense. Fundamentally it’s about including the latest open source Linux kernel and associated packages that can fully enable an OpenStack cloud.

As part of its go to market product bundling, Red Hat is now offering two separate bundles for the commercial release of its OpenStack solution. The first is the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform which is optimized as an OpenStack Nova Compute platform. The second offering is called the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform for Controller Nodes, and is targeted for nodes that don’t require virtual guests.

To date, Red Hat has not made a penny from it’s OpenStack efforts, though with the general availability releases today, that is likely to change. Red Hat CEO, Jim Whitehurst noted during his company’s recent earnings call, that real revenues for OpenStack are not likely to start flowing for another year to 18 months.

Red Hat will be following its typical annual subscription model for its OpenStack solutions and has now also released its list pricing.

List pricing for US (in USD$) for an annual subscription follows:
– Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform Premium: $4,499/socket-pair/year
– Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform Standard: $3,449/socket-pair/year
– Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform for Controller Nodes Premium: $2,799/socketpair/year
-Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform for Controller Nodes Standard: $2,149/socketpair/year

The Road to GA

Red Hat’s road to a commercial OpenStack release began in 2011. Red Hat was not among the first to join the OpenStack effort when it launched in 2010 and only got involved as off the Essex release on the development side. Red Hat’s official involvementin the project didn’t come until April of 2012.

Red Hat didn’t detail its OpenStack commercial plans until July of 2012, with the first public previewof the Red Hat OpenStack Enterprise platform showing up a month later.

For the OpenStack Grizzly release, Red Hat emerged as the top code contributor.

Red Hat’s first commercial release of a fully supported and production-grade OpenStack platform is still however a late comer to the market.Ubuntu has already been in the market with a commercial solution for at least the last two years and already has a number of major wins.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Datamation and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.