Among the vendors that have reserved a booth at next week’s OpenStack Summit is Red Hat Inc., which is set to showcase several major enhancements to its distribution of the platform that were pre-announced today. The perhaps most notable of the bunch is the inclusion of Ceph, an open-source storage engine that holds a special place in the company’s growth plans.

The system was originally created by engineers from cloud provider DreamHost who struck out on their own in 2012 to monetize their work and joined Red Hat two years later as part of a $175 million buyout. Since then, Ceph has emerged as the storage engine of choice in the OpenStack ecosystem despite the fact that it’s not officially part of the upstream project. Much of the credit goes to the technology’s ability to expose information in the form of both blocks and objects, which makes it possible to support different types of workloads without having to use a separate data access layer for each.

Red Hat’s decision to incorporate Ceph into its OpenStack distribution should help cement its lead even further and create new monetization opportunities in the process. But at the same time, the growing number of components in the platform is also creating some logistical challenges for customers, an issue that the company is tackling as well. The new version of its distro packs an automated updating component that can implement patches and even entire system refreshes without requiring any manual input. More complicated maintenance tasks, meanwhile, are handled by Red Hat CloudForms, which is likewise being upgraded as part of today’s release.

The scope of the tool’s management capabilities has been extended beyond infrastructure to encompass the workloads in a deployments as well. As a result, administrators can now control both through the same interface, which can be a major convenience in large clusters with have upwards of dozens of applications to maintain. Red Hat Openstack Platform 8 will be available both on a standalone basis and as part of a new package called Red Hat Cloud Suite that also incorporates a number of additional operations tools.

The list includes the company’s homegrown infrastructure monitoring software, the Satellite system for orchestrating large-scale hybrid cloud deployments and its OpenShift platform-as-a-service bundle. The latter provides tools for building containerized applications that Red Hat says can be freely moved between the on- and off-premise components of a customer’s environment.

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