Dell is partnering with Red Hat to jointly engineer the open-source OpenStack Cloud Platform for enterprise deployments and will offer it to customers on its hardware, a move that differentiates Dell from such rivals as Hewlett-Packard and IBM in the increasingly competitive cloud computing space.
At the same time, CEO Michael Dell, in his keynote here Dec. 12 at the Dell World 2013 show, also announced partnerships with public cloud providers Google, Microsoft’s Azure and CenturyLink. Dell also signed a four-year agreement with Accenture to jointly develop and sell enterprise technology solutions, including offerings around cloud computing.
Dell and Red Hat have collaborated on Linux for more than a dozen years. In their latest partnership, Dell and Red Hat will co-develop cloud offerings that will run Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform (RHELOP), which is part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.5, which was released last month. In addition, Dell will offer a range of services for the solutions, from configuration to support for organizations using RHELOP—and not only Dell customers, but those of IBM, HP and others.