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Choosing how to build a cloud is the most strategic decision IT leaders will make this decade. It's a choice that will determine your organization's competitiveness, flexibility, and IT economics for the next ten years. Done right, a cloud delivers strategic advantages to the business by redirecting resources from lights-on to innovation. But only an open cloud delivers on the full strategic business value and promise of cloud computing. Not all "open" is created equal though. Openness doesn't stop and end with the submission of some format to a standards body or with the announcement of partners endorsing some specific technology platform. And it's more than just open source, important as open source is.

In this newsletter, we'll share with you our perspective about how you can build an open cloud to maximize the positive benefits for your business. And you'll learn how Red Hat, as the open source leader, is uniquely positioned to help you realize those benefits.

Paul Cormier
Red Hat Executive Vice President & President, Products and Technologies




  • Design Your Private Cloud With Hybrid in Mind
  • Thomas J. Bittman
  • 24 February 2012
  • Polls and inquiries show a growing interest in hybrid cloud computing for infrastructure as a service (IaaS). While technologies and providers for the hybrid cloud model are very nascent, private cloud architectures today should be designed with hybrid in mind. Managing this evolution is part of the overall transformation toward "hybrid IT."

    • Key Findings
    • Most private and community cloud services will evolve over time to a hybrid model.
    • A cloud service that spans both private and public cloud implementations, or both on-premises private and off-premises private or public cloud implementations, is a hybrid cloud service.
    • Hybrid cloud connections can be static (done at provisioning time) or dynamic (rebalancing constantly); static connections will be the most common.
    • Technologies, vendors and business models are still nascent, but emerging to enable hybrid cloud services.
    Recommendations
    • Design private cloud deployments with interoperability and future hybrid cloud computing in mind.
    • Choose vendors and technologies for private cloud carefully; there is a significant variety of vendor strategies on how to connect to cloud providers and which providers they enable.
    • Especially in larger enterprises, consider the evolution to hybrid cloud computing as part of a broader strategy to position IT as the broker for a broad mix of IT services delivered in many different ways – hybrid IT.

Red Hat content

  • Whitepaper: Why the Future of Cloud is Open
  • There are three basic approaches to building a cloud. You can restart your IT from scratch as a new service provider would. That's not a practical approach for most enterprises. You can build a cloud silo atop one piece of your infrastructure. That increases complexity, rather than simplifies. Or you can build a cloud out of all your IT resources, both private and public. That's the way to maximize the value of your IT. This open, hybrid approach is the path to your greatest business value. It takes advantage of the strategic flexibility provided by cloud technologies and approaches that are open across a broad range of characteristics including, but not limited to, open source. Before you take your next step toward cloud, make certain you understand the importance of each of the characteristics of an open cloud.
  • Webinar: CIO to CIO on Open Cloud
  • Red Hat's CIO Lee Congdon provides a c-level perspective of the key considerations and benefits of building an Open Cloud Architecture in his interview with Cloud Evangelist, Gordon Haff including:

    • the key decision criteria used by Lee Congdon and the Red Hat IT team when building and expanding Red Hat's internal cloud infrastructure
    • how to manage diverse infrastructures under the same cloud architecture
    • how to avoid creating new cloud silos that can limit the potential of the cloud for your enterprise. Downloadable (.MP4)
  • Video: Choice. Control. Open Cloud.
  • Choice of cloud architecture determines an organization's competitiveness, ability to respond to customers and access to innovation. Gain an understanding of why you don't want to have a cloud that restricts you, and how an open approach to cloud puts you in control of decisions and choices.