Che: Storage, Openness Drive Hybrid Cloud

Bryan Che, general manager of Red Hat Inc.’s cloud business unit, spoke with Channelnomics and offered a more nuanced look at Red Hat’s cloud strategy. While Che echoed many of what other Red Hat executives had professed, Che outlined Red Hat’s vision from a technical aspect, focusing on the kinds of capabilities that will enable the cloud services of the future.

With so much buzz about partner enablement, Che said partners grasping a technical understanding of the portfolio was a critical part of Red Hat’s continuing strategy. But there was a bigger picture for that message — it’s not enough to just outfit partners with solutions, Che was hopeful that Red Hat could help influence road maps for customers and put production-ready technology in place that is an investment in scalable cloud technology, not just the next best thing.

Part of achieving those goals is a a focus on storage. Che spoke to Red Hat’s increased efforts in the storage space, currently built on acquired technology from company Gluster Inc., which provided scalable public and private cloud storage capabilities. Che explained that Gluster “…plays an important role on our focus on the open hybrid cloud, because it delivers consistency. Whether it’s VMware or Amazon,” storage needs to be accessed in the same way.

“Gluster solves a fundamental problem Red Hat has had with storage, which is acquiring a singular name-space for all storage situations. If I have an application in a dynamic cloud environment, different data centers can now access different data sets. It exposes new ways to manage the data center and new flexibility for cloud deployments going forward.” Che added that these unique storage  capabilities help bridge the old world and the new world of technology, which is helpful in promoting and proving the power of a open hybrid cloud environment.

So how soon until this cloud utopia sees the light of day? Like Jerry Lumpkin, Che conceded ”it’s a number of years before it all plays out,” and partners and customers alike are still figuring things out, learning and understanding where to place cloud assets. But Red Hat is striving to be a beacon of light in that cloudy atmosphere.

Speaking of the future, Channelnomics was curious where Che saw the cloud in the next 5-10 years. “We don’t know!” said a laughing Che. “Our focus on open hybrid cloud is a 10-year journey, but beyond that, there’s a lot of competing visions in the cloud landscape.” Che said there are many companies that are focusing on delivering a public-facing cloud where all data lives in their cloud — conversely, Che said “some providers say it’s all about the software defined data center and their software. We think it’ll be a mix of all those things.”

Red Hat doesn’t want to get caught up in “competing visions,” because “…enterprises are going to want what they’ve always wanted — a mix of different approaches,” said Che. “It’s not going to be exclusively public or private, but they’ll all be part of the mix. We’ll still have physical systems, even mainframes — they haven’t gone away yet! The future of cloud is about widely accepting technologies, which is why you’ll need a cloud architecture that can span across all topologies seamlessly.”

Considering Red hat’s efforts to create that comprehensive and unifying cloud technology, it’s fair to say Red Hat is prepared for whichever vision of cloud dominates the landscape — even new ones. “We believe the world is going to be hybrid and heterogenous,” said Che, and Red Hat will be poised to give partners the “new class of technologies” that can help everyone move into the future.