New Red Hat Management Innovations Designed to Accelerate Customers’ Hybrid Cloud Automation Strategies

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced new innovations in its management portfolio, including the latest releases of Red Hat Satellite and Red Hat CloudForms, designed to accelerate deployments of Red Hat-powered cloud environments, and automate and greater simplify ongoing infrastructure management.

"Being able to scale and deploy more quickly are key capabilities of digital transformation, where enterprises embrace emerging digital technologies to fuel differentiated products and services. This agility, however, can often require a new management approach, one that builds upon a core of task automation in the face of increased complexity. With today’s announcement, Red Hat continues to build out our management offerings based upon the powerful automation capabilities of Ansible, helping our customers to adopt new technologies while maintaining greater control over their hybrid cloud infrastructures." — Joe Fitzgeraldvice president and general manager, Management, Red Hat

IT infrastructure is increasingly complex with disparate systems across physical hardware, virtualized environments, private cloud deployments, and public cloud instances. The heterogeneous nature of modern enterprise computing can often require a new type of management solution, one that can improve scale, speed, and stability while still providing a clear picture across disparate infrastructures.

The latest releases of Red Hat Satellite and Red Hat CloudForms help address these needs with enhanced integrations with Red Hat Insights and Red Hat Ansible Tower, for an automation-centric approach to IT management. The integrations are aimed at enabling users to not only identify critical risks, but also create enterprise change plans and automatically generate Ansible playbooks to remediate those risks. These integrations, along with additional product enhancements, are designed to help improve agility and decrease complexity for hybrid cloud customers.

Automation is an important component of digital transformation, helping to drive efficiency, deliver value faster, and solve IT and business workflow challenges. By deepening the integration of Ansible technology across its management portfolio, Red Hat aims to better enable organizations to take a more agile and consistent approach to managing Red Hat environments and hybrid infrastructure. With automation as a foundational capability, Red Hat Satellite 6.3 and Red Hat CloudForms 4.6 can further help organizations to speed IT deployments and updates via improved provisioning while maintaining enhanced stability and performance.

Red Hat Satellite 6.3
With deeper Ansible integration, Red Hat Satellite can provide a dynamic inventory source for targeting automation via Red Hat Ansible Tower and the systems provisioned via Red Hat Satellite can now request additional automation or reflect their current state back to Red Hat Ansible Tower. These capabilities are designed to provide more flexibility for IT teams looking to tackle complex environments by using a combination of automation and traditional systems management.

Red Hat Satellite 6.3 also provides further integration with Red Hat Insights, Red Hat’s predictive analytics platform. The enhanced integration provides new widgets for Insights actions and Insights risk summary, enabling organizations to more proactively identify threats to performance and stability. Additionally, the integration builds out an Insights planner playbook for use with Red Hat Ansible Engine or Red Hat Ansible Tower, enabling organizations to automatically remediate Insights findings.

Red Hat Satellite 6.3 now also provides greater flexibility for hybrid cloud computing with the addition of support for Satellite and Satellite Capsule Server running on Amazon EC2. As enterprises extend workloads across public clouds, being able to bring more consistent and enterprise-scale system management capabilities with these deployments is important. Red Hat Satellite customers are now able to manage their Red Hat infrastructure on Amazon EC2 with the backing of Red Hat’s award-winning global customer support.

Red Hat CloudForms 4.6
Red Hat CloudForms 4.6 builds on the automation-centric foundation to multi-cloud management introduced in CloudForms 4.5, including increased support for automated infrastructure provisioning and scaling of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat Openstack Platform deployments. CloudForms 4.6 is designed to make more Ansible capabilities available natively within CloudForms, including the ability for CloudForms to execute Ansible playbooks and visibility and linking into Ansible-deployed compute resources.

Red Hat CloudForms 4.6 also introduces Lenovo XClarity as the first physical infrastructure provider, enabling CloudForms to go beyond hybrid cloud management and manage hybrid infrastructure. The new Lenovo XClarity provider enables CloudForms to discover and manage physical compute infrastructure alongside virtual and multi-cloud through a single pane of glass. This view helps deliver valuable insight to system administrators to determine on-premise capacity and analyze the impacts of infrastructure modifications on workload and control infrastructure maintenance.

Red Hat Consulting
To help customers maximize their investments and to get the most from their systems management and automation deployments, Red Hat Consulting can provide services and expertise to more quickly and effectively integrate new technologies with existing operations. From providing training to helping map out technology landscapes, Red Hat Consulting aids enterprises in developing a modern approach to hybrid cloud management.

Availability
Red Hat Satellite 6.3 is now generally available to all Red Hat Satellite customers with a valid subscription. Red Hat CloudForms 4.6 will be made generally available soon – check the Red Hat Customer Portal for further announcements.