SUSE Cloud 4, the newest version of SUSE's OpenStack distribution for building Infrastructure-as-a-Service private clouds,
is now available. SUSE Cloud 4 is based on the latest OpenStack release
(Icehouse) and features full support for the Ceph distributed storage
system. Along with Ceph support, the latest SUSE Cloud platform includes
advanced VMware capabilities and enhanced scalability, automation and
availability features to ease enterprise adoption of OpenStack and help
organizations maximize current IT investments.
"With SUSE Cloud, SUSE has taken the lead in making a standardized
OpenStack distribution deployable in today's enterprise data centers,"
said Michael Miller, SUSE® vice president of global alliances and
marketing. "SUSE Cloud makes it easy and cost effective to implement a
highly available, mixed-hypervisor private cloud infrastructure.
And the addition of Ceph distributed storage capabilities increases the
value and flexibility of SUSE Cloud in almost any enterprise."
SUSE Clod provides enterprises with the capabilities and support to
seamlessly deploy an open-standards private cloud. The SUSE Cloud
installation framework makes it easy to install and manage OpenStack
clouds, and SUSE Cloud is the first enterprise distribution with automated high availability configuration
and deployment of the OpenStack cloud services. This ensures the
continuous operation of private cloud deployments and the delivery of
enterprise-grade Service Level Agreements. In addition, SUSE Cloud
supports a multi-hypervisor cloud environment that gives enterprises
increased choice and interoperability in their cloud designs. Supported
hypervisors include KVM, Xen, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere.
Laura DuBois, program vice president for storage at IDC, said,
"Software-defined storage is an increasingly important component of
Infrastructure-as-a-Service clouds. Ceph and OpenStack are highly
complementary solutions that are increasingly valued by enterprises
seeking to deliver a more flexible and responsive infrastructure to
deliver business goals. By integrating the installation of Ceph with
SUSE Cloud, SUSE has simplified the deployment process, making it faster
for enterprises to scale their storage as part of an OpenStack cloud."
SUSE Cloud 4 offers the following benefits to enterprise customers:
- Reduced costs by deploying a software-defined storage solution based
on the Ceph distributed storage system. SUSE Cloud's installation
framework enables enterprises to automatically configure and deploy Ceph
clusters. With a single solution using commodity hardware, Ceph enables
provisioning of persistent block storage at the virtual machine level
for quick retrieval and fast processing along with the construction of a
resilient image and object storage cloud that is massively scalable.
- Maximized VMware investments through enhanced integration between
existing VMware vSphere environments and OpenStack. SUSE Cloud now
includes advanced VMware capabilities for image management and support
for VMware Virtual SAN™, in addition to previous support for VMware
vSphere® compute nodes, VMware NSX™ network virtualization and the
vSphere driver for block storage.
- Simplified workload deployment, while providing increased levels of
scalability and automation. SUSE Cloud delivers database, load balancing
and firewall-as-a-service. The standardization of these services makes
it faster to deploy workloads by eliminating the need for users to
manage and configure these services themselves. In addition, SUSE Cloud
improves application scalability through tighter integration between the
orchestration service that automates control and coordination of
multiple virtual machines based on a set of predefined templates and the
rest of the cloud services, such as compute, storage and networking.
Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, said,
"The OpenStack project is seeing increasingly wide adoption by
enterprises. We've heard from enterprise users that high availability,
integration with their preferred tools and platforms, and access to the
latest upstream innovation is important, and that's exactly the market
SUSE is reaching for with Ceph integration and HA tools."
Comments from SUSE Cloud Partners "Enterprises are seeking a unified
and flexible approach to OpenStack and cloud computing," said Lew
Tucker, vice president and CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco. "By
delivering UCS Manager integration with the SUSE Cloud installation
framework and providing full support for the Nexus ML2 Driver for
OpenStack Networking, Cisco and SUSE are working to help customers
easily adopt open private clouds."
"Hedera Cloud Manager automates the deployment and management of
resources for private, hybrid and public clouds," said Jérémie
Bourdoncle, CEO of Hedera Technology. "The automation and high
availability features built into SUSE Cloud combined with the
optimization and unified service management capabilities of Hedera Cloud
Manager enable customers to build a sustainable cloud infrastructure to
rapidly respond and adapt to changes in their business environment."
"The OpenStack community is gaining momentum around its efforts to
drive enterprise adoption of private clouds," said Mauri Whalen, vice
president at Intel and director of Core System Software in the Open
Source Technology Center. "Intel and SUSE have worked together for 18
years to bring the benefits of open source technology to enterprises.
The two companies continue to work closely with our joint customers to
identify and deliver critical requirements such as high availability to
help accelerate deployments based on Intel architecture."
"UForge for SUSE Cloud gives customers a ready-to-run hybrid solution
that integrates the SUSE Cloud OpenStack platform with simple,
self-service software templating and migration tools," said Alban
Richard, CEO of UShareSoft. "Together, SUSE Cloud and UForge enable
enterprise customers to implement hybrid clouds out of the box, offering
efficient scaling of resources and fast, simple, consistent workload
deployment across existing virtual data centers or new public or private
clouds."
"VMware and SUSE have long partnered to increase choice and
flexibility for our customers," said Dan Wendlandt, director of product
management for OpenStack at VMware. "We continue to see strong customer
demand for VMware's enterprise-grade compute, network, storage and
management technologies within OpenStack and have contributed
integrations for these VMware technologies to the OpenStack community.
SUSE Cloud 4 delivers these community contributions as a product, making
it even easier for customers to choose best-of-breed VMware
technologies as the building blocks for their OpenStack clouds."
For additional information on SUSE Cloud, visit www.suse.com/cloud. For details on SUSE Cloud 4 pricing, see www.suse.com/products/suse-cloud/how-to-buy.