In a move intended to beef up the capabilities of Red Hat Virtualization 3.1, its own virtualization management console, Red Hat will acquire virtualization environment manager ManageIQ for $104 million.The acquisition comes soon after RedHat recently updated its software to better deliver open hybrid solutions to enterprises.
ManageIQ is an existing member of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Certified Partner program, and has worked aiding Red Hat in providing customers unified monitoring, management and automation solutions. Its tools offer control over server and storage provisioning, workload optimization, policy-based compliance, chargeback, virtual machine lifecycle management, discovery and control, and analytics across heterogeneous private clouds and virtualized data centers. ManageIQ’s enterprise solutions and technology for cloud monitoring, automation and management are expected to be folded into Red Hat’s virtualization portfolio.
In a statement on the proposed deal, Red Hat noted that it anticipated ManageIQ’s Hybrid Cloud Operations Management technology to provide additional lifecycle activities such as storage provisioning, compliance, discovery and workload optimization, specifically to Red Hat’s virtualization management lines CloudForms and Enterprise Virtualization.
A little crystal-ball gazing indicates that this move will establish RedHat as stronger player in the creation of multi-hypervisor, on-premises clouds capable of working with various public cloud services, because ManageIQ’s tools work across not only Red Hat cloud architecture, but also AWS, Microsoft and VMware.
Paul Cormier, president, products and technologies, Red Hat said in a statement “Industry and customer response to Red Hat’s vision for the open hybrid cloud has been overwhelmingly positive because it offers the best of both worlds: the ability to tap into the public cloud when and where it makes sense, while leveraging existing investments for cloud infrastructure. For enterprise cloud initiatives, effective cloud management is critical. ManageIQ offers robust features, including orchestration, policy, workflow, monitoring and chargeback, that deepen Red Hat’s cloud management capabilities and bring the promise of open hybrid cloud a step closer for the industry.”
“ManageIQ provides a strong set of operational capabilities, monitoring and introspection into virtual machines,” said Bryan Che, Red Hat general manager of its cloud business unit, in an interview on the acquisition. He also added that Red Hat has plans to support Rackspace Cloud, a user of the Xen hypervisor, in the near future.
The acquisition makes total sense as now Red Hat can now offer cloud management tools to its customers, and offer new functionality without having to go through a lengthy internal development process.
