Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today introduced Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure, the industry’s first production-ready fully open source hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution. By combining innovative virtualization and storage technologies with a stable, proven operating platform, Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is designed to help enterprises to bring datacenter capabilities into locations with limited space, such as branch offices and other remote facilities.
Organisations with distributed operations, such as those in the banking, energy or retail industries, need to be able to offer the same infrastructure services in remote and branch offices as they run in their datacenter. However, remote and branch offices can have unique challenges: less space and power/cooling, and fewer (or no) technical staff onsite. Organisations in this situation need powerful services, integrated on a single server that can scale out.
Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is designed to address these challenges by integrating compute and storage together on a single server, making it a well-suited solution for low-footprint remote or branch office installations and edge computing. Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is designed to enable organisations to deploy and manage distributed infrastructures centrally, enabling remote locations to benefit from high-performing systems without requiring extensive or highly specialised on-site support staff.
Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is the only production-ready offering with an entirely open source infrastructure stack and that is developed, sold and supported by a single vendor. An open source, community-based approach helps to avoid the vendor lock in of a proprietary approach and enables customers to take advantage of the faster innovation emerging from open source communities. By delivering a hyperconverged infrastructure solution with the software-defined components coming from the same vendor, Red Hat is aiming to help customers minimise troubleshooting and support headaches.
Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure uses Red Hat’s widely-deployed virtualization platform, as well as software-defined storage, to more efficiently manage an integrated compute and storage infrastructure across a range of server hardware or networks. To accomplish this, Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure was built with a suite of components, integrated to provide a unified experience from installation to management. These include: