Red Hat is one of the top contributors to OpenStack development, so it was no surprise to see OpenStack was a popular topic of discussion at this year’s Red Hat Summit in San Francisco. theCUBE hosts John Furrier and Stu Miniman sat down with Red Hat’s GM of Virtualization and Open Stack, Radhesh Balakrishnan, to discuss the future of Red Hat and Open Stack in the cloud.

Balakrishnan described Red Hat Summit as a great opportunity to test new ideas, get feedback and interact with customers. Over the past ten years, open source technology has grown from being known and used but still considered risky to something that powers 9 out of 10 clouds. As a Red Hat employee committed to open source, Balakrishnan said, “I consider myself personally lucky at this juncture”

Red Hat, he explained, is now trying to help customers make a seamless transition to the cloud. They may start with some virtualization and eventually graduate to Open Stack, reinventing their compute, storage and networking. Red Hat intends to offer a method of bridging what customers have with what they can get.

When asked why customers should choose their KVM-based virtualization over its competitors, Balakrishnan explained that KVM is the “best performing hypervisor on the planet” and RHEV (Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization) is now 5 years old and steadily increasing in the number of subscribers. RHEV is built from KVM, open source, enterprise ready, cross platform and designed specifically for performance.

Red Hat customers trust the company to deliver open innovation in a wide hardware ecosystem. They are able to deliver solutions that are as enterprise ready as possible and manage it over the entire life cycle.

For more insights from Red Hat, you can watch the entire interview with Balakrishnan and also get complete coverage of Red Hat Summit 2014 right here at SiliconANGLE.com.

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