Red Hat Advances Enterprise and Network Automation with New Ansible Offerings
Introduction of Ansible Engine, advanced network automation and
latest version of Red Hat Ansible Tower accelerate path to
enterprise-wide automation
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--
ANSIBLEFEST 2017 – Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT), the world's leading
provider of open source solutions, today introduced new innovations
designed to advance IT automation as its strategic importance grows in
the enterprise.
Ansible is a game-changing open source automation technology for the
management of IT environments at scale. Designed to be simple to adopt,
use, and understand, Ansible has become one of the world’s most popular
open source IT automation technologies, with nearly 3,000 unique
contributors, more than 32,000 commits to the upstream Ansible open
source project, and a user base that spans industries and the globe. Red
Hat acquired the company behind Ansible in 2015, with the aim of helping
users drive down the cost and complexity of deploying and managing both
cloud-native and traditional applications across hybrid cloud
environments. With Ansible, organizations can make the automated
enterprise a reality.
Organization-wide adoption of automation technology can hold significant
potential in the enterprise. In a July 2017 study, around three out of
four respondents "highlighted the value of automation in relation to all
key aspects of IT operations work," with the majority of respondents see
automation as "highly valuable" or "worthwhile" throughout the
operations cycle, from initial provisioning through routine operation
and support to ongoing change management.
Today at AnsibleFest San Francisco, Red Hat introduced several new
Ansible innovations aimed at helping enterprise customers harness the
power of automation organization-wide: from IT operations to development
to network administration, and in-between:
- Red Hat Ansible Engine, a new offering designed to bring the
enterprise-grade global support that Red Hat is known for to the
popular Ansible automation community project.
- Red Hat Ansible Engine Networking Add-on, including full
support for select networking platform modules.
- Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.2, the latest version of its enterprise
Ansible automation management platform.
As organizations face pressure to innovate more quickly and more often,
IT infrastructures need to be able to adapt to the latest technology
while still supporting critical legacy systems. This can result in
complex, disparate systems that are difficult to manage without
automation. With Red Hat Ansible Engine and Red Hat Ansible Tower,
organizations now have the ability to unify existing and disparate
technologies into simple, repeatable and automated processes. This can
help to extend access to and fully manage the enterprise-wide deployment
and adoption of business-critical automation. This organization-wide
adoption can be important to IT organizations seeking to implement
DevOps, as well as IT disruptors that use automation to help drive
digital leadership.
Red Hat Ansible Engine
Using Ansible automation, developers and IT operations teams can more
easily and quickly deploy IT services, applications and environments,
enabling them to remove barriers between IT teams by automating routine
activities. With Ansible Engine, Red Hat is introducing a new offering
that provides support for the open source Ansible automation technology
for the first time. While the upstream Ansible community is known for
fast-moving innovations, many enterprises require a more secure, stable
and reliable approach. With Ansible Engine, organizations can access the
tools and innovations available from the underlying Ansible technology
in a hardened, enterprise-grade manner. Ansible Engine features:
-
A reliable and enterprise-ready set of Ansible automation, modules and
capabilities.
-
Business hours or 24x7 support from Red Hat’s award-winning, global
support organization.
-
All the benefits of a Red Hat subscription, including Open
Source Assurance, Service Level Agreement (SLA) response, regular
security and maintenance updates, and more.
Red Hat Ansible Engine is also available with new Networking Add-on,
helping to address a critical component of today’s modern
infrastructure. With networking automation, IT organizations can now use
fully supported Ansible modules, developed and maintained in-house for
many popular networking devices. This offering includes full engineering
support for the following networking-specific Ansible modules:
-
Arista (EOS)
-
Cisco (IOS, IOS-XR, NX-OS)
-
Juniper (Junos OS)
-
Open vSwitch
-
VyOS
Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.2
As organizations adopt Ansible automation technology, the requirement to
govern, manage, and effectively scale IT automation increases. Ansible
Tower helps IT teams more effectively manage automated systems and
optimize multi-tier deployments while adding control, greater security
and delegation capabilities.
Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.2 includes several new and enhanced features to
help provide greater value to IT teams, including the ability to:
- Manage more globally:
- Updated inventory support enables users to create custom
views for managing machines based on their attributes across
public, private and hybrid cloud
- Tower Instance groups dedicate capacity for specific
organizations and inventory
- Tower isolated nodes allow for local job execution capacity
in remote locations
- Automate more flexibly:
- SCM inventory support enables teams to fully manage their
automation and infrastructure as code
- Pluggable credentials enable users to define their own
custom credential types, enabling integration with third-party
credential storage
Current Ansible Tower customers can add an Ansible Engine subscription
to their Ansible Tower subscription at any time to gain support for the
underlying Ansible automation that powers Ansible Tower.
Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.2 is also the first version based on the open
source AWX project, a new open source community project sponsored by Red
Hat that enables users to directly interact with and add features and
capabilities to help drive innovations in Ansible Tower.
Availability
Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.2 will be available later this month through
ansible.com and the Red
Hat Customer Portal. Ansible Engine and Ansible Engine for Network
Automation is expected to be available by the beginning of October as a
stand-alone product or as part of a Red Hat Ansible Tower subscription.
Press Conference
Red Hat will host a press conference about this news today, September 7,
at 1:00 pm PT. Register for the live webcast of the event here.
Supporting Quotes
Joe Fitzgerald, vice president, Management, Red Hat
“Around the world, we have seen strong interest in Ansible. Enterprise
customers are interested in more stable and reliable automation
technologies in order to be able to adopt these powerful capabilities
enterprise-wide. Additionally, as more automation implementations
directly impact mission-critical business applications and environments,
the requirements for greater security, support and stability become even
more important. By expanding our portfolio with Red Hat Ansible Engine
and Ansible Engine for Network Automation, we are aiming to fill a need
to help organizations adopting these technologies with greater
confidence.”
Additional Resources
Connect with Red Hat
About Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat is the world's leading provider of open source software
solutions, using a community-powered approach to provide reliable and
high-performing cloud, Linux, middleware, storage and virtualization
technologies. Red Hat also offers award-winning support, training, and
consulting services. As a connective hub in a global network of
enterprises, partners, and open source communities, Red Hat helps create
relevant, innovative technologies that liberate resources for growth and
prepare customers for the future of IT. Learn more at http://www.redhat.com.
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Red Hat, Inc.
Kathryn Lucas, +1-703-663-1634
kkaplan@redhat.com
Source: Red Hat, Inc.