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.