Red Hat Inc. wants to make the deployment of cloud computing easier in hopes of making it attractive to more large enterprises, not just early adopters.

With that in mind, the Raleigh, N.C.-based company on Thursday unveiled OpenStack Platform 10, based on the “upstream” Newton release that attempts to address the challenge of deployment complexity. The latest version of the company’s OpenStack cloud platform comes with enhanced scale and automation tools, as well as a new container cluster orchestration manager, a container-networking project and a bare-metal server provisioning service. In addition, Red Hat said the new platform enables organizations to run and scale OpenStack services independently.

With the improved scaling and automation capabilities, the new OpenStack Platform is designed to simplify infrastructure management. In particular, the release attempts to address installation complexity with a refreshed user interface that leverages new components found in Newton that automate much of the process.

OpenStack Platform 10 also incorporates Red Hat’s CloudForms, which is designed to manage hybrid cloud deployments and other workloads running on OpenStack clouds. Finally, the release comes with 64 terabytes of Ceph-based storage capacity that acts as a virtual disk drive.

In its release, Red Hat also emphasized significant performance gains for network-intensive workloads thanks to a new data plane developer kit that helps to deliver a network performance that’s similar to bare metal.

“In just a few short years, OpenStack has moved from simply being an ‘innovation’ for proofs-of-concept and R&D testbeds to a foundation for mission-critical private cloud deployments, used by hundreds of enterprises and major telecommunication providers alike to power production operations,” said Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager for OpenStack at Red Hat. “Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 drives the enterprise-readiness of OpenStack by delivering a stable, reliable and open foundation for cloud deployments, delivering new innovations like composable services and roles while retaining our commitment to enterprise stability, highlighted by our new Long Life support model.”

Another new development is the introduction of Distributed Continuous Integration for key partners, which include Dell EMC, NEC Corp. and Rackspace Inc. With DCI, Red Hat’s partners will test their hardware on new versions of OpenStack as it evolves, with the end goal being to boost stability as the platform is scaled to production. That should ensure that systems compatible with the platform are ready sooner, Red Hat said.

“We are pleased to have worked closely with Red Hat to both refine and build the new distributed continuous integration partner testing process which accelerates both code testing, validation and the ability to deliver robust software to customers,” said Jim Ganthier, senior vice president of validated solutions and HPC at Dell EMC’s Converged Platforms and Solution Division.

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