In ww04-2014, Robert J. Morrison of the Intel Software & Services Group started posting these weekly news roundups about OpenStack:
ww19-2014
HP Announces Helion Hybrid Cloud--Runs its own OpenStack
- HP Makes $1 Billion Bet on Open Cloud
- HP drops $1bn, two-year OpenStack cash bomb. Floats own-branded open-source plus IP protection
- HP builds an OpenStack of its own and layers indemnification on top
Deploying OpenStack made easy with Puppet
When it comes to managing infrastructure deployments of a certain size, even a ninja sysadmin can't do it all without some help. In fact, one might argue that knowing when and how to use IT automation tools for managing infrastructure is a prerequisite to getting your admin blackbelt. Enter Puppet.
Puppet is an open source framework for templating repetitive tasks to save time and make them easy to document, modify, and replicate. And it's backed by a company that provides enterprise support while still conducting their development out in the open. [Interview with Chris Hoge, Senior Software Engineer for OpenStack at Puppet Labs. Puppet is only one deployment option, but is closely aligned with the OpenStack project]
Metacloud Raises $15M to Give Customers More Flexibility in Clouds
Metacloud Inc., which gives customers private clouds that can integrate with Amazon.com Inc.’s public cloud, raised another $15 million in funding, the company told Venture Capital Dispatch. Metacloud is built on OpenStack, the cloud computing software that was originally developed by Rackspace and NASA and then put into open source. It’s now supported by a community of more than 300 vendors and is able to interface with Amazon Web Services, which is Amazon’s public cloud.
Piston Announces Quanta QCT as Certified Piston OpenStack Hardware Vendor
Piston certifies hardware vendors to support Piston OpenStack, available as a per-server license with an annual support subscription from the company. This custom cloud system configuration from Quanta QCT includes all cabling, power management, networking, and servers required to deploy and operate a Piston OpenStack-powered private cloud.
Tesora Announces OpenStack Collaborations With Open Source Leaders, Red Hat and MongoDB
Tesora, developers of OpenStack enterprise-class, scalable database as a service (DBaaS) platform, today announced collaborations with Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, and MongoDB, the leading provider of NoSQL technology, to collaborate on bringing the power and flexibility of the Trove database as a service platform to their customers implementing OpenStack such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.
See also: OpenStack now does NoSQL
Four things to watch for at next week’s OpenStack Summit
Is the state of OpenStack too many distributions for too few customers? We need to hear more on this at next week’s OpenStack Summit.
[Next week’s newsletter will feature a round-up of key news from the Summit]
ww18-2014
Oracle Previews OpenStack-Solaris Hybrid
Software giant Oracle is not hesitant to leverage open source software … The company has created a fairly substantial Linux distribution, controls the MySQL database, and participates in a number of file system projects. While Oracle has backed off on the plans of the former Sun Microsystems to open up Solaris to compete against Linux on a level community playing field, Oracle knows that Solaris needs to do the things that Linux can do. One of those things is OpenStack, and it will be coming to Solaris.
See also: Oracle adds OpenStack to updated Solaris
Press release: Oracle Introduces Oracle Solaris 11.2 -- Engineered for Cloud
Red Hat Acquires Ceph ISV, InkTank
Tesora, Database as a Service, and OpenStack Trove
Tesora's CEO, Ken Rugg, stopped by to discuss the ninth release of OpenStack, Icehouse, the concept of Database as a Service (DBaaS), and the newest release of Tesora's own Database Virtualization Engine (DVE). Tesora's goal is to help organizations create and deploy database-based OpenStack applications without their having to have a great deal of expertise with database administration; in short, to make database just another service rather than a central focus.
Dell - Red Hat Cloud Solutions available for customers at various stages of OpenStack evaluation and deployment. Dell and Red Hat to enable enterprise application developers and hybrid cloud environments through OpenShift solutions
Dell and Red Hat now are collaborating on next-generation Linux Container enhancements from Docker [The Dell – Red Hat deal has received a lot of coverage, this release gets more granular on the solutions they will offer]
ww17-2014
OpenStack Icehouse Cloud Debuted With Heavyweight Support
The OpenStack Foundation officially debuted its Icehouse release on April 17 providing enterprises, service providers and end-users with new and enhanced cloud computing features. The Icehouse release is the ninth release of OpenStack since the project officially debuted and enjoys the support of many of the world's leading tech vendors, including IBM, HP, Dell, Cisco, AT&T, Intel, VMware and many others. With the Icehouse release, in addition to more features, there was more development activity across multiple metrics. In this slide show, eWEEK examines release data from the OpenStack activity dashboard and the Bitergia data report on the Icehouse release. [By the numbers data: commits, contributors, tickets closed, and so on]
Dell Red Hat Cloud Combo For Dev/Test
Dell and Red Hat have coengineered a set of enterprise-grade private cloud solutions based on OpenStack. Known rather cleverly as the "Dell Red Hat Cloud Solution", this is a RHEL OpenStack platform for elastic and dynamic IT services to support and host non-business critical applications — including mobile, social, and analytics — and dev/test environments. These solutions include "rapid on-ramps" to OpenStack private clouds for Proof of Concept Configuration — designed for customers looking to explore OpenStack capabilities; and Pilot Configuration — designed for testing cloud applications, and for customers beginning a production environment. [Dr.Dobbs reporting on the announcement from last week]
eRacks Announces Launch of Their Largest Cloud Server Ever, the New 432TB eRacks/NAS72
"With the confluence of the highest storage density available, 'Green' miserly power usage, and sheer storage size, the eRacks/NAS72 brings an unprecedented level of utility to the cloud marketplace," said Joe Wolff, CTO and Founder of eRacks. "When combined with our available OpenStack pre-installation/pre-configuration services, it's a truly unbeatable Enterprise-class turnkey Petascale private cloud."
OpenStack Icehouse Supports Rolling Upgrades and Tighter Overall Integration
Icehouse focuses on maturity and stability as illustrated by its attention to continuous integration (CI) systems, which featured the testing of 53 third party hardware and software systems on OpenStack Icehouse …. Icehouse also features a "discoverability" enhancement to OpenStack Swift that allows admins to obtain data about which features are supported in a specific cluster by means of an API call. On the networking front, OpenStack now contains new drivers and support for the IBM SDN-VE, Nuage, OneConvergence and OpenDaylight software defined networking protocols. Meanwhile, OpenStack Keystone identity management allows users to leverage federated authentication for "multiple identity providers" such that customers can now use the same authentication credentials for public and private OpenStack clouds. In total, Icehouse constitutes an impressive release that focuses on improving existing functionality as opposed to deploying a slew of Beta-level functionalities.
He brought Microsoft the open source it had viewed with such dread and now former Redmond man Bill Hilf is challenging the thinking at Hewlett-Packard … Engaging with the community is important in terms of making its cloud successful rather than just a vehicle to flog more servers. That means committing paid HP programmers to work on the open-source OpenStack code, code that might also help other companies – including potential rivals. Hilf claims he’s hiring a “ton” of people in dev and testing to deliver and OpenStack product HP can credibly claim it's able to support. The firm is now the third largest single contributor to OpenStack – behind Rackspace and Red Hat – with “others” the largest block. Hilf promised HP would “invest a lot” in things like stability, QA and hardening of the OpenStack code to build an infrastructure that’s “enterprise ready.”
ww16-2014
OpenStack Icehouse Release
Official press release:
Voice of the User Reflected in New Features of OpenStack Icehouse Release
Rolling upgrades, federated identity and tighter platform integration reflect software maturity; continuous integration process drives software reliability.
Top companies contributing code to the Icehouse release were Red Hat, IBM, HP, Rackspace, Mirantis, SUSE, OpenStack Foundation, eNovance, VMware and Intel. Top users contributing code also included Samsung, Yahoo! and Comcast.
Release webinar:
A webinar highlighting the new features in Icehouse, plus key end users Das from Intel and Troy Toman from Rackspace, is available for playback at https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/499/107965\.
News Roundup:
OpenStack Icehouse cloud platform adds database service, better support for Containers
The OpenStack project has officially released Icehouse, the latest version of its cloud computing framework, with a focus mainly on stability and consolidation. However, it does add new features such as a database service, improved support for Containers, and early support for Hadoop deployments on OpenStack clouds.
OpenStack’s latest Icehouse release hits the streets
OpenStack releases a new version of its open source cloud computing code twice a year. And today is the day for Icehouse, the first release of 2014. OpenStack leaders say they are excited about how many of the changes in the Icehouse release have been influenced by end users of the platform. "We've worked hard to build a community of developers and users, and they're the ones driving the priorities of how the software evolves," says COO of the OpenStack Foundation Mark Collier. Large scale enterprise end users want improvements related to reliability, ease of use and upgradability.
OpenStack Icehouse Features a Trove of Open-Source Cloud Updates
Database-as-a-service technology, live upgrades, storage improvements and federated identity are part of the new open-source cloud platform release. The new Icehouse comes six months after the OpenStack Havana release came out in October 2013. As part of Icehouse, the OpenStack platform is now gaining a new project with the inclusion of the Trove database-as-a-service (DaaS) technology.
Icehouse: New OpenStack cloud arrives
OpenStack, an extremely popular open source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud program, has just released its latest version: Icehouse. According to the OpenStack Foundation, the ninth release of OpenStack comes "with new features reflecting a community-wide effort to bring the voice of the user into the rapidly maturing open source cloud software platform." This is a major release that includes many minor improvements and new features. Perhaps the most welcome for OpenStack administrators is that you can finally do "rolling upgrades in OpenStack Compute (Nova). Rolling upgrades simplify the process of upgrading to new versions of the OpenStack software by not requiring virtual machine (VM) instances to be shut down in order for upgrades to install.
OpenStack's latest release keeps the DIY private cloud features coming
'Icehouse,' the newest edition of the open source IaaS, adds more features, but uptake with enterprises and competition with public cloud vendors remain thorny
OpenStack Targets Enterprise Workloads with Icehouse
The OpenStack Foundation on Thursday released its planned Icehouse build of the open source cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) operating system. In all, the Icehouse release includes 350 new features and 2,902 bug fixes. The OpenStack Foundation credited the tighter platform integration in Icehouse to a focus on third-party continuous-integration (CI) development processes, which led to 53 compatibility tests across different hardware and software configurations.
OpenStack Icehouse: IT'S ALIVE! – live migration, that is
OpenStack's Icehouse release has arrived, bearing stress-busting gifts for hollow-eyed cloud administrators. The distribution was released on Thursday, and – finally – gives admins some upgrading features for shifting OpenStack's "Nova" compute component to the new version without having to pull the plug on their entire install.
Other News
Red Hat Continues OpenStack Momentum with Global Enterprise Deployments
SAN FRANCISCO – RED HAT SUMMIT 2014 – April 15, 2014 – Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced significant momentum for its OpenStack-powered product offerings focused on delivering an open hybrid cloud. Since their introduction in June 2013, Red Hat’s enterprise OpenStack offerings have emerged as industry-leading solutions for building scalable private clouds with streamlined management. Several dozen organizations have embarked on proof-of-concept deployments for Red Hat’s OpenStack offerings, with customers around the world now moving to enterprise deployments. [Press release from Red Hat Summit highlighting OpenStack deployments. 4 of the 5 examples given are universities.]
More evidence that the Linux wars have moved to OpenStack
As Red Hat Summit gears up, Canonical drops news of a new Ubuntu Linux release — but with most of the focus on OpenStack. It’s sort of funny that the press release announcing the new Ubuntu Linux 14.04 LTS release seems as focused on Ubuntu OpenStack as on Linux per se. It’s studded with partner testimonials from Cisco, Mellanox, NTT Software, Brocade lauding Ubuntu OpenStack. But then again, that makes sense given that the vendor battlefield has shifted from core operating system to core cloud infrastructure, where Canonical OpenStack has gained traction with Hewlett Packard and other big cloud providers.
See also: Ubuntu Beefs Up OpenStack Support
See also:Ubuntu chases after Red Hat with OpenStack and Docker bundles
Giving rise to the cloud with OpenStack Heat
Setting up an application server in the cloud isn't that hard if you're familiar with the tools and your application's requirements. But what if you needed to do it dozens or hundreds of times, maybe even in one day? Enter Heat, the OpenStack Orchestration project. Heat provides a templating system for rolling out infrastructure within OpenStack to automate the process and attach the right resources to each new instance of your application. [Interview with Steve Baker, PTL for the Heat project during the Icehouse release cycle and senior software engineer at Red Hat].
Focus Or Breadth? Broadening OpenStack With Trove And Tresora
Despite a ton of well-funded startups, the anointment buy some mega-vendors and huge market attention, OpenStack is yet to deliver any massively compelling customer stories. So a tension exists within the OpenStack ecosystem – should members focus on building a strong compute and storage platform that actually delivers on the needs for a robust AWS alternative, or should they innovate to match AWS’ breadth of functionality? It’s a topic ripe for discussion today since Trove, an OpenStack project that delivers Database as a Service on top of OpenStack, is now an official OpenStack project.
Dell and Red Hat extend partnership in OpenStack cloud solutions
Dell and Red Hat have extended their partnership in OpenStack-based cloud solutions for the enterprise, with co-engineered infrastructure to help customers get started. The pair are also collaborating on Red Hat's OpenShift application platform and on Container technology based around Docker.
OpenStack's French Connection: eNovance
One of the few services available for implementing OpenStack clouds is eNovance, a major contributor to the OpenStack project. Like other major contributors Red Hat, Rackspace, and Mirantis, it's also a member of the OpenStack Foundation board of directors. Unlike those firms, however, eNovance is based in Europe, with offices at 10 rue de la Victoire in Paris. It's the only European member of the board, and typically the seventh largest contributor of modules of code to OpenStack.
Red Hat: We don't need no stinking dictator to make money out of OpenStack (in late 2015)
Open source company Red Hat thinks it might start making significant money out of OpenStack in the Autumn of 2015 and it won't need a Linus Torvalds-like dictator to keep the project focused.
The company told El Reg on Wednesday at the OpenStack summit that it will turn the data center management cloud technology into serious money toward the end of next year. Red Hat recently re-organized its business units to help it push OpenStack into the enterprise, with the hope of creating the same lucrative market for the data center management and provisioning tech as it did for Linux half a decade ago.
ww15-2014
Sneak peek at Icehouse Release [No link]
OpenStack Icehouse releases April 17th. The OpenStack Foundation Marketing Group gave a sneak preview of the release this week (plus an overview of how projects move from incubated to integrated). Deck is attached. Key highlights include improved upgrade support, the ability to target machines by affinity (e.g. these machines require fastest possible interconnectivity), object storage discoverability, improved object store replication performance, tighter integration between compute and networking.
Mirantis, Parallels Partner on OpenStack Distribution
Mirantis and Parallels are hoping to make it easier for service providers to offer OpenStack infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings to customers via the Parallels Automation platform. The companies have partnered to integrate the Mirantis OpenStack distribution with Parallels Automation.
See also: Mirantis and Parallels Partner to Help Service Providers Monetize OpenStack
Affordable-cloud pioneer Nebula nabs $3.5M for OpenStack hardware
Cloud infrastructure startup Nebula claims its cloud hardware can undercut Amazon Web Services by 90 percent. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company deploys complete private clouds for enterprises based on OpenStack (open source cloud computing software) and commodity hardware. The resulting implementations cost as little as $100,000, which is cheap for an enterprise-capable data center. Now the company has taken on an additional $3.5 million in debt funding, according to a Form D filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday. We aren’t sure who ponied up the funds, but we’d put our money on Silicon Valley Bank, which provides Nebula with debt and credit facilities.
Cisco Plans to Build a Giant Cloud Network, But Why on OpenStack?
Giant networking equipment manufacturer Cisco has finally decided to jump on the cloud bandwagon. The company has announced that it is planning to invest $1 billion over the next two years to build a federated ''intercloud'' network infrastructure on the OpenStack framework, together with partners such as Australian telecom carrier Telstra, European cloud company Canopy, Canadian communications services provider Allstream, Indian IT company Wipro, and wholesale communications technology distributor Ingram Micro. Cisco's other partners will, presumably, build out the giant cloud atop Cisco's hardware. But, the question that begs for an answer is, why did Cisco opt for OpenStack instead of VMware, with which it has already entered a joint venture? The second question is, why did Cisco decide to get into an already crowded market? Is OpenStack really ready for the mainstream?
Ringing In The Cloudy Changes At Red Hat - Predicting The Perilli Future
When Gartner analyst Alessandro Perilli wrote a post last year detailing exactly why he believed OpenStack was broken and unable to sell into enterprise, shockwaves reverberated around the cloud industry. Analysts from traditional firms tend not to make such sweeping and pointed criticisms – instead their language tends to be more moderate and considered. It’s fair to say that Perilli lit a fire under the broader OpenStack community. That fire got all the more interesting when, only a few months later, Perilli announced that he was leaving Gartner to work for Red Hat and would be in charge of the strategy and overall product direction for the company’s open cloud initiatives In light of this I reached out to Perilli to get his take on the Red Hat opportunity and, frankly, to work out just why Red Hat picked up the guy that has been most vocal about OpenStack’s lack of viability in the enterprise market.
ww14-2014
Ericsson-Mirantis Deal a Milestone for OpenStack Software
OpenStack, a kind of operating system for computer rooms, is emerging as an increasingly important piece of software. A move by Ericsson stands to provide another big push. The Swedish giant has signed a deal with a startup called Mirantis to use OpenStack as the software foundation for its telecommunications network, internal data centers and cloud computing services that Ericsson will offer its customers.
Cloudscaling … today announced its new Cloud Concierge Services .. Cloud Concierge provides enterprises with the services and resources required to predictably and reliably deploy a modern, OpenStack-powered private or hybrid cloud solution. Cloud Concierge Services can be employed with any version of OpenStack, including do-it-yourself deployments created in-house. The service is available to any organization looking to evaluate an existing private or hybrid OpenStack cloud deployment or implement a new cloud starting at ground zero. Cloud Concierge, along with the company's Open Cloud System (OCS), makes Cloudscaling the first in the OpenStack cloud market to have a comprehensive product and services offering. [Another entry into the “make OpenStack installation easier” business]
VMware: Price Tag versus OpenStack Immaterial, Says ISI
ISI Group networking and telecom analyst Brian Marshall …. writes that in talking to someone [at Interop in Las Vegas] working at a so-called hyperscale data center “we did collect an interesting nugget of information pertaining to the costs of deploying VMWare (VMW) cloud management framework vs. an alternative open-source OpenStack solution.” [one person’
ww13-2014
Cisco and partners to build US$1bn global OpenStack cloud
Promises to support any workload, any hypervisor, any cloud
Cisco on Monday announced that it will build a global public cloud business together with its partners, which will provide a wide variety of on-demand services that will compete with cloud providers across the board, from Infrastructure- and Platform-as-a-Service offerings by the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft to specific business application services, such as VMware's Desktop-as-a-Service offerings or security, network management and collaboration software offered as services by a multitude of providers out there.
See also: Cisco’s Intercloud: For when one cloud isn’t enough
A sneak peek of OpenStack Icehouse
Today I’ll be giving a sneak peek to just some of the changes made in one of the two projects that made up the original OpenStack release and today is still one of the largest—showing no signs of the innovation slowing down—OpenStack Compute (Nova). OpenStack Compute is a cloud computing fabric controller, a central component of an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) system. It is responsible for managing the hypervisors on which virtual machine instances will ultimately run and managing the lifecycle of those virtual machine instances. This list is by no means exhaustive but highlights some key features and the rapid advances made by the contributors that make up the OpenStack community in a six month release cycle.
Dell launches high density switch and OpenStack controller for SDN
Dell is putting more grunt into software defined networking (SDN), releasing a high-density next-generation spine switch with 132 40GbE ports and targeting the carrier and cloud space with an OpenStack fabric controller it said simplifies network functions virtualization (NFV) deployments. Speaking in London ahead of the launch, Dell Networking VP of product management and marketing Arpit Joshipura said Dell’s new Z9500 switch, with more than 10Tbps throughput and 600 nanoseconds latency, is the highest density switch on the market today.
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization promises more OpenStack integration
Red Hat just released a beta version of the latest rev of its server and desktop virtualization solution, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV). Based on KVM, which Red Hat acquired from Qumranet in 2010, Red Hat has revved RHEV roughly every six months, and the latest update ties right into another big-name Red Hat offering that's become almost as big as RHEL itself: OpenStack.
See also: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.4 Beta: On-ramp to cloud computing
Just call red-hot Red Hat the 'OpenStack' company
Even Jim Whitehurst is surprised at how the world is embracing OpenStack from Red Hat. "We'll we're seeing, actually - I kind of I'll say surprisingly strong interest across the board," the Red Hat CEO told an analyst Thursday evening.
See also: Red Hat Banking on OpenStack for Future Growth
OpenStack in Asia – Where Business Agility Trumps Cost Savings
Enterprise customers are frustrated with growing costs and limitations of traditional IT software. This problem is exacerbated when start-ups appear out of nowhere to compete with agile businesses powered by the cloud. To meet customers' needs, I have seen a number of legacy IT vendors extend the OpenStack cloud platform to give their customers a viable cloud computing operating system that does not lock customers in with a single provider and limited options.
ww12-2014
How Openstack stores data in the cloud with Cinder
Without solid storage, the data of the cloud lives only in the moment. Within OpenStack, storage comes in two flavors: object storage, which stores chunks of information, and block storage, which is more analogous to the traditional idea of a disk drive image. Block storage in OpenStack is handled by Cinder, which provides the infrastructure for managing volumes and sharing them with the other components in OpenStack. Meet John Griffith. He is currently serving as the Program Technical Lead (PTL) for the Cinder project. John is a software engineer at SolidFire, and he has been an active user and contributor to open source software for almost ten years. We chatted with John to better understand how the Cinder project functions within OpenStack, why it is important, and what is on the roadmap for the Icehouse release.
Look out, Amazon -- OpenStack jobs are on the rise
Amazon EC2 specialists can take their pick of the most job openings, but OpenStack engineers are closing the gap
Cloud skills are unquestionably one of the hot new areas for IT job seekers, with a bevy of career possibilities available. But which skills for what specific cloud architectures are most in demand? As you can imagine, it's Amazon followed -- now very closely -- by OpenStack.
Hadoop Coming to OpenStack Juno in October 2014
Savanna was recently renamed to Sahara ….. Sahara has now been formally voted on to become an integrated part of the Juno release.
Maybe OpenStack has legs after all: Red Hat taps once-skeptical Gartner analyst to lead group
Alessandro Perilli will help Red Hat push its enterprise hybrid cloud plan. The company hopes to become to OpenStack cloud what its been for Linux.
Mirantis OpenStack 4.1 is Now Available for Download
New release of Mirantis OpenStack uses Fuel for deployment on CentOS or Ubuntu [but not Red Hat].
Mar 4 OpenStack Foundation Board Meeting
[Blog post with notes from the latest board meeting. Not the official minutes, but a good read]
ww11-2014
Is Red Hat now the boss of OpenStack? Should it be?
Was the Cloud Foundry Foundation set up to promote the open-source PaaS or to thwart Red Hat OpenShift? Or a little bit of both?
See, Mirantis Does More Than Just Stir. Certification Program A Hit With OpenStack Users
Mirantis’ certification is a vendor non-specific course that helps IT pros learn how to deploy and operate OpenStack and (shock, horror) it’s a certification that isn’t tied to any particular OpenStack distribution – certificate recipients have to prove proficiency at configuring OpenStack within RHEL, Ubuntu and CentOS environments, across multiple hypervisors (KVM and vSphere), multiple storage paradigms (Ceph, NetApp, EMC) and differing network topologies.
New name, sharp focus on Trove for startup Tesora
Tesora is the Italian word for treasure. And by adopting that new name last month, the Cambridge-based startup formerly named ParElastic intends to reflect its strategic shift to support Trove, the database as a service component of OpenStack, the massive open source cloud-computing infrastructure project.
Mark Shuttleworth blog: Ubuntu is the #1 platform for production OpenStack deployments
OpenStack has emerged as the consensus forum for open source private cloud software. That of course makes it a big and complex community, with complex governance and arguably even more complex politics, but it has survived several rounds of competition and is now settling down as THE place to get diverse vendors to work together on a IAAS that anybody can deploy for themselves. It is a big enough forum with sufficient independent leadership that no one vendor will ever control it (despite some fantastically impressive efforts to do so!). In short, OpenStack is what you want if you are trying to figure out how to build yourself a cloud. And by quite a large majority, most of the people who have actually chosen to deploy OpenStack in production, have done so on Ubuntu. [Blog from the Canonical CEO, some competitive comments and a look ahead to Ubuntu 14.04LTS/OpenStack]
Also of interest:
Consistency—a necessity when it comes to any large-scale, open source project. Sharing source code and libraries between the different components of OpenStack is critical to its rapid evolution and fast-paced development. The Oslo program is what holds it all together and brings consistency to OpenStack. We wanted to learn more about Oslo and what is does for OpenStack. So we asked the program lead to share his thoughts.
ww10-2014
OpenStack networking and orchestration: What's possible?
OpenStack, the most popular open source cloud infrastructure platform, has evolved rapidly in a few short years to become a major factor in the growth and adoption of cloud computing. But while much of the attention has been on OpenStack's compute functions, it has also opened up a new world in networking, enabling engineers to automate and orchestrate network resources the way they would virtual machines. At the heart of these capabilities is OpenStack's Neutron application programming interface (API), which can be used to integrate the provisioning and management of these network resources into the orchestration of the overall IT infrastructure.
GoDaddy Becomes OpenStack Sponsor
GoDaddy, the world's largest technology provider dedicated to small businesses, today announced it has sponsored the OpenStack Foundation, a global community of developers collaborating on cloud architecture and an open source cloud operating system. This is a key step in GoDaddy's strategy to invest in the most scalable, simple-to-implement and feature-rich cloud technology.
CPLANE NETWORKS, the leader in high-performance software-defined networking (SDN), today announced the availability of a new network virtualization platform for enterprises and cloud service providers. Dynamic Virtual Networks (DVN) transforms static physical networks into virtualized resource pools that can be allocated on demand, significantly reducing the time and cost to deploy cloud applications. DVN is Built for OpenStackTM, the leading open source computing platform for private and public cloud service orchestration
Dell Plans for Big NFV, SDN OpenStack Push
It looks like Dell has big plans for the network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) space. Some of those plans revolve around the open source world; and that shows with Dell's latest OpenStack-related announcement. A partnership formed in December 2013 with Red Hat (RHT) is being expanded. Together, the two companies will be working on co-engineering NFV and SDN for OpenStack, specifically for the telecommunications market segment. But Dell is also collaborating on such endeavors with Calsoft Labs to deliver NFV and SDN within Dell OEM products.
Ooyala turns to Metacloud for brawny OpenStack hybrid cloud
Ooyala deals with lots and lots of digital video. It serves up about a billion (with a “b”) videos per month to about 200 million viewers across 130 countries. …. Ooyala is always looking for the most efficient way to deploy those workloads on private and public clouds. Much of the variable workload stuff, including transcoding, runs in the public cloud — Ooyala tends to rely on Amazon Web Services. But, its big data stack of Hadoop, Cassandra and Spark, on the other hand, runs on bare metal at its west coast data center. And that workload is moving onto a private cloud running Metacloud’s OpenStack CarbonIOS implementation.
See also: Metacloud to provide Ooyala with OpenStack-based private cloud
eNovance: why enterprises are building OpenStack clouds
It’s logical for larger enterprises to build their own cloud, according to Nick Barcet, VP of products at eNovance, a French consultancy that is a leading authority on OpenStack architectures. This is not a question simply of number of employees or revenues, he told me when we met last week at Cloud Expo Europe in London. What matters is that you have a business need for IT that operates at scale.
ww09-2014
Mirantis and IBM team up on OpenStack benchmarking tool
Mirantis, in partnership with IBM's SoftLayer, just announced the availability of a benchmark test designed to help IT decision makers better understand key performance, scalability and manageability criteria of the OpenStack environment and that environment executing in an IBM SoftLayer cloud computing data center.
See also Mirantis and IBM Set New OpenStack Benchmark, Standing Up 75,000 Live VMs in Multi-Datacenter Cloud
Examining the latest OpenStack spat
So what’s the real deal with OpenStack driver compatibility efforts? Last week, Mirantis stepped forward, pushing what it called a multi-vendor open-source driver certification effort for drivers that work with OpenStack. The goal is a no-brainer — making sure software and hardware from many companies can easily work in the OpenStack cloud ecosystem. Mirantis co-founder Boris Renski told me that VMware, Netapp, Dreamhost and other companies were aboard. Interestingly, driver certification — indeed certification of all kinds — is a point of pride for Red Hat, another OpenStack player, and the one that, arguably, has become the most influential in the OpenStack cosmos. Red Hat’s name was conspicuously absent from the Mirantis list and about an hour before Mirantis announced this effort, Red Hat posted a blog of its own, touting the value of its certification efforts.
Red Hat Shows How Not To Win Friends And Influence People
There’s a perception that the open source world is fueled by altruism, collectivism and good will. Some news from the OpenStack community this week questions that perception. The Register carried the exclusive story of the somewhat sordid goings on between OpenStack contributors Red Hat and Piston Cloud.
Piston Announces OpenStack 3.0 - The Last OpenStack You'll Ever Try (Maybe)
Piston Cloud is an interesting company. And not just because its founder and CTO Josh McKenty has perhaps the smartest dress sense in the cloud industry. Take a company that contains much of the brains behind the original project that morphed to become OpenStack, add a business model that sees them ignore the public cloud monster and rather aim for the arguably more lucrative enterprise space and throw in board memberships of both the OpenStack foundation and the Cloud Foundry Community Advisory Board and there is much opportunity for interesting conversations. It’s a claim that has got the attention of others in the OpenStack ecosystem, last week it was reported that Red Hat made the questionable move of cancelling Piston’s sponsorship of their upcoming summit. They eventually rescinded the decision but, frankly, all the move does is shows that Piston’s offering is indeed credible and that Red Hat, far from being the nice community-minded open source guys we all thought, are a big bad evil empire [matches the point above!]. Who would have figured? Anyway, I spent some time last week talking with McKenty in the lead up to the company’s launch of its 3.0 product. 3.0 is a release that is being called, not too modestly, “the last OpenStack you’ll ever try”.
See also: Piston coats OpenStack in secret Red Hat–killing sauce [This distribution sports automation, upgrade in place, and support for SDN plug-ins]
OpenStack converges around Cloud Foundry, future of Solum in question
Following lots of confusion regarding platform as a service in the OpenStack world last year, it's clear that the community is converging around Cloud Foundry. Yesterday, Pivotal announced that it would build an open governance model for Cloud Foundry. It might surprise people who have been following the OpenStack PaaS market to learn that Rackspace, HP and ActiveState are three companies sponsoring the effort. Those vendors have been behind a separate OpenStack PaaS project known as Project Solum. The effort has been a source of confusion for many people, starting with exactly what its goals are.
Open source cloud will outshine AWS, says OpenStack founder
OpenStack launched three years ago at the right time: Open source was going mainstream, and cloud was beginning to take off. Within the next three to five years, OpenStack community member Rackspace believes, the majority of clouds will be built on OpenStack. But the Amazon Web Services constituency would likely say otherwise as the battle between AWS and OpenStack heats up. Here, Jim Curry, senior VP and general manager of Rackspace's private cloud business, explains OpenStack's lofty plans to take over the cloud market, RackSpace's strategy, the new stack that has emerged and the revelation that not everything works better in a cloud infrastructure.
Servosity Introduces the World's First UnCrashable Disaster Recovery powered by OpenStack
Servosity UnCrashable TM Disaster Recovery allows Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to backup and launch an entire enterprise network or data center and server infrastructure instantly. Servosity … today officially launched its UnCrashableTM Disaster Recovery Cloud. UnCrashableTM Disaster Recovery (UnCrashableTM DR) is the first Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) where servers are now UnCrashableTM. Servosity also announces it is now a sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation and will contribute its knowledge of disaster recovery cloud with the OpenStack community.
ww08-2014
OpenStack Cloud Goes Open for Vendor Certification
An effort led by Mirantis could reshape the way vendor certifications are done in the cloud. The way that IT certifications have long worked is that they have largely been vendor-specific. That's something that is about to change with the open-source OpenStack cloud platform.
Rather than relying on vendor-specific certifications, a new effort being led by OpenStack vendor Mirantis is aiming to open-source certification for the cloud. For example, if an IT person has EMC storage in-house and wants it managed via OpenStack, there will be a place for that person to now go and see what specific EMC storage products work with what version of OpenStack.
See also: Opening OpenStack: A New Certification Initiative Challenges Red Hat
See also:Mirantis pushes for “open-source” certification of OpenStack drivers
OpenNebula vs. OpenStack: User Needs vs. Vendor Driven
[Ignacio M. Llorente is from the OpenNebula Community, and freely admits the article is biased towards OpenNebula. However, some of the points raised about OpenStack are not without merit, and can be a useful guide to some of the objections OpenStack faces]
We’ve crafted this post to answer a recurring question we’ve been hearing lately, specially from organizations planning to build their own private cloud: How do you compare OpenNebula with OpenStack?… This is indeed a complex question. There is no single answer because open-source projects and technologies present several dimensions. But we are far from afraid to answer it: the short, tl;dr version would be that they represent two different open-source models. While OpenNebula is an open-source effort focused on user needs, OpenStack is a vendor-driven effort.
SUSE does OpenStack with SUSE Cloud 3
Suse's OpenStack attempts to quell long-standing deployment headaches, adds more hypervisor options than Red Hat
Like Linux before it, OpenStack is manifesting via different vendors, each a product of a different development philosophy and target market. Now, the creator of a major business-grade Linux -- not Red Hat, but Suse -- is revving its own edition of OpenStack. Dubbed Suse Cloud 3, this distribution of the Havana edition of OpenStack supports two of the big new features rolled out for OpenStack this time around: its orchestration (Heat) and telemetry (Ceilometer) components.
Rackspace adds much-needed budget management tools to OpenStack
Cloud Cruiser's financial management solution for OpenStack on Rackspace provides insights into usage, billing, chargebacks, and demand forecasting
The hardest part about creating a private cloud isn't creating it, but managing it, and sometimes the hardest management tasks aren't the technical ones, but the budgetary ones. How much of this cloud is actually getting used, and to what end? Cloud Cruiser has been answering that question since around 2011, when it first invited companies to try out its cloud computing chargeback and usage management solution. Now it's making that solution available to OpenStack users on the Rackspace Private Cloud.
Storage policies: Coming to an OpenStack Swift cluster near you
OpenStack Object Storage (code named Swift) has a fairly frequent release schedule for improvements and new capabilities but naturally, there is always significant gravity around integrated releases for any OpenStack project. Even though the Havana release was very big for OpenStack Swift, with new support for global clusters, the upcoming Icehouse will be the biggest release yet for the OpenStack Swift project. Since the project was open-sourced over three years ago, the community of contributors has grown significantly. Every new release is bigger than any prior release given the vibrancy of developer participation. Recent contributions have come from companies including HP, IBM, Intel, Red Hat, Rackspace, and SwiftStack. Icehouse is targeted for a major set of new features, and many improvements to replication and metadata. The standout new capability though is storage policies, a new way of configuring OpenStack Object Storage clusters so that deployers can very specifically match their available storage with their use case.
Kontron joins OpenStack, takes open source cloud to telcos
Embedded computing developer Kontron has joined the OpenStack foundation as a sponsor and is working to integrate its cloud-based application infrastructure with the open source cloud provisioning and orchestration platform. Kontron said the move is a “significant milestone” in its long-term strategy in the software defined infrastructure space, an area telcos, cloud service providers and vendors are paying more attention to as of late.
Alcatel-Lucent to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform
Alcatel-Lucent has decided to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), as the common platform for its Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) solution, CloudBand.
Also of interest:
How to contribute to OpenStack
Like any open source community, OpenStack has its local quirks when it comes to getting involved in the project. This is further complicated, in the case of OpenStack, by the fact that it's actually a collection of numerous smaller projects which are linked together via shared APIs, but which have independent objectives and developer communities. This article isn't comprehensive, by any means, but it's an attempt to show you some of the places where you can plug into the community.
ww07-2014
PrivateCore Locks Down OpenStack Servers
vCage Software Establishes Trust and Protects Servers from Persistent Malware and Insider Threats
PrivateCore, the private computing company, today announced the general availability of its vCage software which audits platform integrity and protects OpenStack clusters from persistent malware, malicious hardware devices and insider threats. vCage validates the integrity of OpenStack infrastructure and protects servers using memory encryption to secure data in use across private, public, and hybrid clouds. …. PrivateCore vCage supports Intel® Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) hardware-based root of trust technology to validate the entire platform environment. Enterprises and service providers can create trusted computing pools in the cloud knowing that they are running on servers for which the integrity of the server firmware, BIOS, hypervisor and operating system code has been verified.
As part of the OpenStack community, Wind River will help apply OpenStack to telecommunications infrastructures and collaborate with other members to further promote and support open source cloud infrastructure advancements across industries. Wind River is helping the industry apply OpenStack to network functions virtualization (NFV) environments for carrier infrastructure. By leveraging its deep experience in telecommunications, Wind River is able to develop extensions to OpenStack that can address carrier needs that are required to maintain the level of carrier grade service level agreements (SLAs).
Database startup Parelastic rebrands as Tesora, embraces OpenStack
In a pivot, Parelastic morphed into Tesora and will make its current database virtualization middleware a plug-in for OpenStack. The company, which launched in 2010 to attack the MySQL scalability problem, is renaming itself Tesora and casting its lot with the OpenStack community to build atop the OpenStack Trove database-as-a-service project.
Piston Partners With Tokyo Electron Device to Accelerate OpenStack Private Cloud Adoption in Japan
SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Feb 12, 2014) - Piston Cloud Computing, Inc., the enterprise OpenStack™ company, today announced that it has entered into a partnership with Tokyo Electron Device to distribute Piston OpenStack™ in Japan. Tokyo Electron Device (TED), a technical trading firm that provides semiconductor products and business solutions, also commissions the design and development of its own brand products. The partnership combines the power of Piston OpenStack™, the company's global-scale private cloud software, with TED's superior technical support and unmatched quality assurance to help customers meet their critical business objectives.
ww06-2014
OpenStack is crucial for HP’s strategy
William L. Franklin, Vice President of OpenStack & Technology Enablement, Cloud with HP… ““OpenStack is very crucial for HP’s strategy. HP believes in the hybrid cloud. Public cloud is really crucial for a lot of what people are doing with cloud. HP runs an OpenStack-based public cloud, but we also sell technology – software, hardware, storage, networking to service providers around the world. But we recognize that sometimes for compliance and security reasons – and sometimes for ego reasons – people want their own private cloud. In order to burst move workloads from a private cloud to a managed cloud to a public one and back-and-forth, we wanted a common architecture and a common set of tools we could use across all of this. HP has a very long history in open source, so we looked at different options and chose OpenStack. We were involved with folks at NASA and folks at Rackspace, helping create the foundation. We’re trying to move and more towards where we think hybrid is going,”
OpenStack pioneer Chris Kemp says enterprise cloud headed for revolution
theCUBE hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante wrapped up the recently concluded OpenStack Enterprise Forum with an in-depth discussion on the private cloud featuring Chris Kemp, an open source visionary who led the development of OpenStack as the CTO of NASA. He went on to found Nebula, a startup that develops appliances for managing scale-out environments. Hyperscale is growing beyond market boundaries as data volumes continue to grow at an unprecedented rate, impacting every segment from financial services to the entertainment industry, according to Kemp. The technologies pioneered by web-scale giants such as Facebook and Microsoft to keep up with this information explosion are now being democratized through the Open Compute Project and OpenStack, with vendors like Nebula packaging the individual components into production-ready solutions.
Inktank Ceph Enterprise 1.1 upgrade is certified for Red Hat OpenStack
Inktank Storage Inc. has announced an incremental upgrade to its Ceph Enterprise software-defined storage system, offering improvements to the graphical manager component and formal certification for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. Inktank Ceph Enterprise 1.1 is the first formal update to the subscription-based software since last October's debut release. The product combines open source Ceph software for object and block storage, and graphical management tools and support services; it is designed to run on commodity server hardware. With the update, Inktank Ceph Enterprise is officially certified as a storage back end for Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 4.0, the supported OpenStack distribution that Red Hat launched last year. Inktank Ceph Enterprise 1.1 also supports Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.3 as a hypervisor platform for Ceph's Rados Block Device.
7 Ways in which OpenStack Adoption Parallels Linux
By, Gordon Haff, Cloud Evangelist, Red Hat
In spite of its considerable momentum, there are still skeptics about whether OpenStack will ultimately succeed. My colleague Bryan Che tackled some of that skepticism in a blog post late last year and I’m not going to rehash his arguments here. Rather, I’m going to make some observations about how OpenStack is paralleling and will likely continue to parallel the adoption of another open source project that I think we can all agree has become popular and successful—namely Linux.
With Oracle Solaris 11 Running on Pluribus Networks' Freedom Server-Switches, Customers Can Take Advantage of Oracle Solaris Capabilities and Stability Across OpenStack Compute, Network and Storage. The cooperation between Oracle and Pluribus Networks is designed to help create unique customer value by offering customers the ability to use OpenStack(TM) plug-ins to manage their cloud environments based on Oracle Solaris and Pluribus Networks' Netvisor. [Also references Oracle decision to integrate OpenStack features into Oracle Solaris. Further proof point that this is not just a Linux play]
IBM looks to end the OpenStack wars with Jumpgate — a bridge to public clouds
As open-source cloud software OpenStack picks up more and more momentum, public-cloud providers are thinking hard about how much they should support OpenStack when many of them already have their own proprietary systems. IBM is looking to make that an non-issue. The company’s SoftLayer cloud business has come up with middleware to connect the application programming interfaces (APIs) that OpenStack uses with the APIs that public clouds use. And the company has released that middleware, called Jumpgate, under the MIT open-source license.
ww05-2014
OpenStack: The Project, The Products, And The Services
A blog that succinctly draws the distinction between OpenStack as an open source project, as a product, and as a service in terms of deployment, management and support. A useful primer that can be used to clear up some of the confusion in the market.
IO launches an OpenStack cloud running on open source servers
IO, which is known for its modular data center designs and specialized data center management software, is getting into the cloud provider space with a new service called IO.Cloud. It’s very open at the foundational level, at least, running OpenStack software on Open Compute hardware.
The OpenStack Blog: OpenStack Commitment to Interoperability
OpenStack began with the mission to produce a ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform. A key component of that mission is building not only software, but a large OpenStack ecosystem that would support its growth and add value to the core technology platform. In carrying out that mission, the Foundation has been taking key steps to define the core technology platform and advance OpenStack interoperability. Now that we have tons of users, we need to make sure all (downstream) products labeled “OpenStack” have a certain set of core capabilities, and we need to verify those with automated tests just like we do upstream. End-users should be our focus, and ensuring they get what they want and expect out of the platform once it’s running as a service is paramount. The goal is to define the first set of tests in time for the May 2014 Summit in Atlanta. If this matters to you, get involved!
See also: OpenStack Retools to Engage More Cloud User Feedback, Interoperability
By Chuck Dubuque (Red Hat)
The definition of potential is “latent qualities or abilities that may be developed and lead to future success or usefulness.” That's a great way to describe virtualization and, particularly, OpenStack adoption in 2013. Indeed, both solutions saw their potential skyrocket this past year, as greater numbers of organizations began exploring ways IaaS tools like OpenStack can help them achieve large-scale cloud deployments. Now, it's time for that potential to be fully realized – and it will be in 2014. It will be the year we see OpenStack make a big move from being a platform with a great deal of interest and hype, to something that is a very tangible option for public and private organizations that wish to build their cloud infrastructure.
OpenStack still has an enterprise problem
After trotting out some impressive enterprise users at its conference in Portland, Oregon, early last year, OpenStack hasn't been able to showcase many additional big names. Supporters tried to address "the debate about the opportunity for OpenStack in the enterprise" at a half-day conference yesterday that was held at the Computer History Museum and webcast. The speakers ended up highlighting a few of the challenges holding back OpenStack deployments.
OpenStack’s journey to the enterprise : Remaining challenges, proprietary issues
The OpenStack and Enterprise Forum, focusing on deploying OpenStack in the Next Generation Data Center, took place on January 29, 2014 at Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Here’s a recap of one Panel, discussing the remaining challenges OpenStack faces in going mainstream.
See also: Where do we go from here? Ken Pepple, CTO of Solinea. Over the course of his interview, Pepple expounded on several of the points he addressed during his earlier keynote panel discussion.
ww04-2014
Red Hat Announcements, January 22
On Wednesday Red Hat announced the release of Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure 4.0, which included RHEV 3.3 and RHOS 4.0. Under the banner “Building an integrated cloud infrastructure”.
Formal Red Hat press releases:
- Red Hat Upgrades Cloud Infrastructure Offerings to Deliver on the Open Hybrid Cloud Vision
- Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.3 Enables OpenStack-ready Cloud Infrastructure
Some press coverage:
- Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.3 Gets Real
- Red Hat ups its virtualization and cloud game
- Red Hat revamps cloud portfolio : Brings OpenStack closer to enterprise
- Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure 4.0 brings greater OpenStack integration
VMware: Citi Ups to Buy on Enterprise Enthusiasm, Waning of OpenStack Threat
Shares of VMware (VMW) are up $1.36, or 1.4%, at $99.69, after Citigroup’s Walter Pritchard this morning raised his rating on the shares to Buy from Neutral, and raised his price target to $120 from $87, writing that his conversations with software resellers, and “deeper modeling work” suggest to him that growth trends seen in the latter half of 2013 “remain sustainable into 2014.”
Red Hat: We CAN be IaaSed about OpenStack cloud
10 years after Red Hat got serious on enterprise Linux, the company is re-organised for enterprise cloud. The Linux distro last week scraped up its Linux, virtualisation, OpenStack and cloud management businesses into a new infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) unit.
Also created in the shuffle was an applications platform group responsible for JBoss and OpenShift. The existing storage and big data units continue as before. The purpose of the reorganisation? To drive “consistent strategy and story to customers” of a cause Red Hat calls the “hybrid cloud” according to the new infrastructure unit’s chief, Tim Yeaton.
A job ad indicates GoDaddy plans to adopt OpenStack. It looks like GoDaddy is planning to use OpenStack internally. The company has been advertising to hire an engineering director who will “lead GoDaddy’s internal infrastructure-as-a-service project by adopting and contributing to OpenStack,” according to an ad posted to LinkedIn and the OpenStack Foundation website.
OpenStack development projects aim to crumble adoption barriers
As a new year dawns, OpenStack development focuses on fixing the problems that hold the open source cloud platform back from enterprise adoption. OpenStack developers have created projects to mitigate usability and scalability issues, and increase enterprise production instances of OpenStack, though these projects are still either in incubation or were very recently released. Most prominent is a multi-project program called TripleO, or OpenStack on OpenStack. (also includes link to Rally benchmark)
IBM Explains Its Participation on the OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors
VIDEO: Todd Moore, director, IBM Standards and Partnerships, discusses his participation as a member of the OpenStack board of directors. (Interesting take from IBM rep to the board on how the board and OpenStack Foundation operates)
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