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Red Hat Forges Ahead with PaaS Strategy with OpenShift Enterprise

Making good on its promise made nearly six months ago, open source provider Red Hat (News - Alert) has made the next move in its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) strategy with the general availability of OpenShift Enterprise, a PaaS product that is designed to be installed on-premise within customer datacenters or private, public or hybrid clouds.

OpenShift Enterprise is designed to help customers to streamline and standardize developer workflows and facilitate increased IT service delivery speed that can better support business demands, according to Ashesh Badani, general manager of Red Hat’s Cloud Business Unit and OpenShift.

“This product offers our customers further freedom and choice in the cloud with the backing of Red Hat’s full stack and open source leadership,” Badani said in a statement. “Developers are now able to choose among leading application development languages and tools for the job, and IT operations leaders can choose to deliver these application stacks to their enterprise on their choice of clouds in compliance with their security, governance and compliance requirements. This offering stands to revolutionize how enterprises use PaaS platforms.”

OpenShift Enterprise gives enterprise users the ability to build cloud-based applications and have them run in a cloud architecture and is designed to automate much of the provisioning and systems management of the application platform stack in a way that enables the IT operations team to more easily meet growing business demands for new application services, company officials said. With its Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) approach, OpenShift Enterprise also offers security and multi-tenancy with the ability to subdivide the Node instances.??

OpenShift Enterprise is built on a stack of open source-based Red Hat technologies, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and OpenShift Origin, the basis for Red Hat’s existing online OpenShift PaaS service that has been available in a free beta since May 2011.

OpenShift Enterprise is being initially offered in North America, the U.K. and continental Europe. The OpenShift PaaS online service remains available in developer preview.

The worldwide public PaaS market grew over 40 percent in 2011 as organizations continued to leverage the benefits of platform services to develop, deploy and manage applications of all types, according to Stephen D. Hendrick, group vice president of application development and deployment research, IDC (News - Alert).

“Advanced PaaS products support multiple development patterns, high availability, high performance, automated provisioning, dynamic scalability and shared services delivered as public, private or hybrid clouds,” Hendrick said. “OpenShift Enterprise brings Red Hat’s advanced PaaS capabilities into the private datacenter where they are most needed and enables hybrid cloud computing with enhanced security, flexibility and consistency.”?

In May 2012, Red Hat first announced plans for an on-premise PaaS offering. At that time, Red Hat said it planned to extend the OpenShift enterprise PaaS platform to provide a choice of management and operational models, including: A DevOps model that empowers developers to deploy and manage their applications via either a Public PaaS solution at openshift.redhat.com or a private PaaS solution with OpenShift on-premise.