Red Hat continues to press into the cloud computing marketplace with each new service offering. OpenShift Online, for example, is Red Hat’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution. For more than a year and a half, OpenShift has served literally thousands of applications running on a variety of frameworks and languages, and reaches across through private, public as well as hybrid cloud environments.

Yet, as is the case with any other PaaS solution, the effectiveness of OpenShift depends greatly on your organizations capabilities with Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). The ability to scale your PaaS reliably depends, to a large degree, on your ability to give the necessary VM resources to your PaaS. The same holds true for fault tolerance and developer availability.

OpenStack: the emerging standard
In the same way that Red Hat Enterprise Linux has dominated the Linux distribution space, Red Hat’s IaaS solution, OpenStack, is likely to become a sort of de facto standard in the IaaS space.

If you start with Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the base layer with OpenStack on top of it, you wind up with a roubust IaaS foundation that lets you build just about anything you need.

OpenShift: applying the capabilities of OpenStack
By running OpenShift over this foundation, you can create a fully scalable infrastructure for your cloud services. As time goes on, OpenShift and OpenStack will likely become more and more integrated with greater levels of efficiency and interaction. These two together provide the enterprise with the ultimate level of customization and flexibility, from the PaaS tier right down to your physical infrastructure on which it all relies.

What the enterprise needs
Today’s enterprise needs private cloud solutions that do what they claim. These solutions must provide:

• Scalability
• Flexibility
• Reliability
• Security

Red Hat’s combined suite of cloud products gives the enterprise what it needs to create a private cloud solution that really meets the organization’s needs.