Bangalore: Finally, after a year of rigorous testing Red Hat recently launched CloudForms a new hybrid cloud management software for enterprises to ease their tasks of managing cloud data.

 Most of the enterprises that are migrating to cloud or interested in adopting cloud computing already have considerable IT infrastructure in place, argued Brian Stevens, Red Hat chief technology officer, in a webcast. As a result, their "focus is not how to start anew, but how to unify their existing internal resources with the elastic resources of the public cloud" reports Joab Jackson of CIO.IN

This management software was designed in an effort to unify public and private cloud resources into a single comprehended system, even if the underlying clouds use different technologies. One interesting feature about this software is that applications can be transitioned within the cloud environment without the user or administrator worrying about configuration issues which is veritable boon to enterprises. It provides users with a self-service portal, and administrators with control and governance tools.

Bryan Che, Red Hat senior director of cloud marketing explained that CloudForms uses application predefined blueprints to deploy an application across disparate cloud environments. The blueprints used could either composed by Red Hat or the administrator which defines everything an application needs to run in a particular native environment.

"An application blueprint provides a templating language that describes how to instantiate an application in the cloud," Che said. CloudForms maintains a catalogue of blueprints that it consults whenever an application is requested. "From a same application blueprint, you can manage the application across a diverse set of providers."

Moreover, Che also demonstrated how an instance of WordPress could be deployed across three different services, each with its own unique underlying infrastructure: Amazon Web Services, a VMware cloud and a Red Hat cloud. Each of the three services used different hypervisors, but CloudForms used the WordPress blueprint to package the software in the appropriate image for the chosen environment.

Red Hat used its own initiated project open source Apache DeltaCloud project, to fashion CloudForms. This application runs on on a software stack that includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, JBoss Enterprise Middleware and various Red Hat storage technologies.