Aiming to fuel enterprise adoption of OpenStack, open-source solution provider Red Hat today announced a collaboration with storage and data management solution provider NetApp to deliver what the companies describe as a new “open hybrid cloud reference architecture.” Announced at OpenStack Summit 2014 taking place this week in Atlanta, the new architecture promises to help companies more easily build interoperable private and hybrid clouds.

Since many organizations don’t have the resources to build their own OpenStack solution from scratch nor deploy it into production, Red Hat and NetApp said they have joined resources to simplify the integration and implementation process. “Together, we’re contributing to the success of OpenStack with a reference architecture designed to speed the deployment of scalable, reliable and easily managed hybrid cloud solutions,” said Phil Brotherton, Vice President of the Cloud Solutions Group at NetApp, in a statement.

OpenStack Icehouse

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Red Hat and NetApp said they have based their new architecture on the ninth and latest version of OpenStack Icehouse, an open-source cloud software platform for building public, private and hybrid clouds. It is a platform to which both Red Hat and NetApp have contributed key technologies. OpenStack says there’s now more than 350 new features in Icehouse, as well as 2,902 bug fixes. In addition, there are now more than 1,200 individual contributors to the project—a 32 percent increase from “Havana” (its last release).

The growth of OpenStack Icehouse highlights the growing maturity of the OpenStack platform itself. “OpenStack has crossed the threshold and will become another de facto IaaS standard before the end of the year,” wrote Lauren E. Nelson, analyst at Forrester Research, in a “State Of Cloud Platform Standards: Q1 2014” report published in March 2014.

Red Hat and NetApp’s new combined architecture will let customers more closely integrate Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform with NetApp’s storage and data management technology. “The combination of Red Hat’s OpenStack and NetApp’s storage and data management offerings enable customers to implement an enterprise-class OpenStack,” said Radhesh Balakrishnan, General Manager of Virtualization and OpenStack at Red Hat, in a statement.

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