Suse announced Thursday general availability of Suse OpenStack Cloud 6, its enterprise-ready technology for building Infrastructure-as-a-Service private clouds with less stress on IT staff and resources.
Based on the OpenStack release Liberty, Suse OpenStack Cloud 6 delivers high availability enhancements and non-disruptive upgrades for future releases, along with Docker and IBM z Systems mainframe support to make it easier to move business-critical applications and data to the cloud. In addition, Suse is offering new OpenStack training and certification for deployment and operation of OpenStack private clouds.
New enhancements of Suse OpenStack Cloud 6 offer non-disruptive upgrade capabilities to ease migration to future OpenStack releases; enhanced high availability features to enable customers to move legacy or business-critical applications to their cloud with the same level of availability of more traditional infrastructures.
It also comes with support for IBM z/VM alongside existing support for Xen, KVM, Hyper-V and VMware, making Suse first to include all these hypervisor options, offering Suse OpenStack Cloud wide range of hypervisor support available and allows customers to incorporate their mainframe platforms into their OpenStack private cloud.
Docker support allows clients to build and run new and innovative containerized applications; full support for OpenStack Manila to provide direct access to the performance, scalability and management of the open source Manila shared file system service; às well as support for Suse Linux Enterprise Server 12 Support Pack 1 that allow customers to build their OpenStack clouds on the latest version of the top platform for enterprise workloads.
Based on OpenStack Liberty release, Suse OpenStack Cloud 6 eases the management of private cloud infrastructure by providing IaaS capabilities to deliver new business solutions and improved operational efficiency to data centers. Suse OpenStack Cloud 6 is integrated with Suse Enterprise Storage and Suse Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP1, offers reliability, flexibility and scalability platform for running enterprise workloads and for delivering business innovation.
With Suse OpenStack Cloud 6, Suse has made it even easier for cloud administrators to manage, support and control OpenStack private cloud environments. For instance, the Suse OpenStack Cloud installation framework provides fast and easy deployment and configuration for OpenStack cloud and includes a web-based installation tool for improved user experience.
As many workloads require additional services, the standardization in an Infrastructure-as-a-Service model simplifies and speeds up the deployment process by eliminating the need for users to manage and configure these services. By simplifying services deployment, Suse OpenStack Cloud 6 makes it easy to deploy private clouds tailored for development or workload requirements.
For example, the OpenStack Database Service provides standard provisioning and management of scalable and reliable relational and non-relational database engines. The Load Balancing-as-a-Service extension can be used natively with OpenStack Networking to handle virtual machine traffic and integrates with both proprietary and open source load balancing technologies.
The Firewall-as-a-Service extension can be deployed to protect users’ networks, while OpenStack data processing provisions, scales and manages Hadoop clusters through predefined templates for on-demand data analysis.
Suse OpenStack Cloud 6 includes support for Suse Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP1 as compute nodes within the cloud, giving users current versions of KVM and Xen. Suse OpenStack Cloud 6 also integrates closely with Suse Enterprise Storage powered by Ceph, giving an enhanced platform for object, block and image storage within the Suse OpenStack Cloud, while retaining the same ease of installation of Ceph components that was available in earlier releases of Suse OpenStack Cloud.
Suse OpenStack Cloud 6 provides additional networking functionality and additional support for third-party OpenStack Networking plug-ins. In particular, Suse OpenStack Cloud 6 provides for the implementation of distributed virtual routing. Distributed virtual routing enables individual compute nodes to handle routing tasks individually or as clusters. Configuring distributed virtual routing as part of Suse OpenStack Cloud installation increases the scalability, performance and availability by enabling your network to automatically expand as you add compute nodes, reduce traffic through central routers and decrease your exposure to a single point of network failure.
Suse OpenStack Cloud 6 offers improved choice in how to implement software defined networking as part of the private cloud by supporting OpenStack plug-ins for solutions from networking companies.
“As the first to offer an enterprise OpenStack cloud distribution, SUSE continues to focus on providing the OpenStack solution of choice for businesses,” said Nils Brauckmann, Suse’s CEO. “We combine rapid and simple deployment, configuration, management and maintenance with enhanced high availability features and the widest hypervisor support in the industry to give our customers access to the benefits of OpenStack without the complexities that hold some companies back.”
