Red Hat is pushing back against Amazon Web Services with an open source spin on the hybrid cloud. Unveiled on Monday, the latest release of the company’s Linux-based server virtualization platform gives users more flexibility in managing their environments and integrates with OpenStack to deliver software-defined networking capabilities.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.3 adds the option of implementing the built-in admin console as a virtual machine to conserve infrastructure resources, and makes it possible to store server images on OpenStack Glacier for further efficiency gains. The new version also lets customers leverage the Neutron component of the cloud OS to define network topographies across their on- and off-premise deployments.

RHEV 3.3 powers Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure 4.0, a private IaaS offering that is built on the firm’s Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and takes advantage of the Cloudforms management tool to bridge operations over disparate environments. It’s a central to what to Red Hat virtualization boss Radhesh Balakrishnan describes as an effort to enable “customers to take control of their datacenters and build individualized paths to a private cloud infrastructure.”

Meanwhile, CA Technologies is taking a different approach to addressing the proliferation of cloud silos in the enterprise with a newly announced governance solution designed to tame the growing phenomenon of shadow IT without diminishing its benefits. CA Service Management is a platform-independent SaaS hub that makes it easy for employees to access software and support resources across multiple platforms, including iOS and Android, while increasing the productivity of IT professionals via a set of collaboration features.

CA Service Management made its debut a day after Symantec upgraded its data protection product to provide better performance in VMware-virtualized data centers. NetBackup 7.6 boots VMs directly from backup files instead of using primary storage to accelerate recovery by 400 times, the security giant said.