SUSE today announced the general availability of SUSE OpenStack Cloud 6, the latest 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.

"The market has started to realize that do-it-yourself approaches to deploying private clouds are too time consuming, too expensive and too prone to failure," said Nils Brauckmann, CEO of SUSE. "As the first to offer an enterprise OpenStack cloud distribution, SUSE continues to focus on providing the OpenStack solution of choice for businesses. 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."

SUSE OpenStack Cloud 6 addresses market needs
A recent study commissioned by SUSE found that more than 90 percent of large companies say they have already implemented at least one private cloud within their business, would use a cloud solution for business-critical workloads, and believe there are business advantages to implementing an open source private cloud. At the same time, most respondents were concerned about installation challenges, possible vendor lock-in and a lack of OpenStack skills in the market. SUSE is addressing these concerns by adding non-disruptive upgrade capabilities along with a more business-friendly release cycle and longer support duration. These combine to reduce the load on limited skilled resources by requiring fewer upgrades and minimizing disruption to production environments.

In addition, new OpenStack training and certification from SUSE will help grow the OpenStack skills base and support the growth of OpenStack solutions in the market. SUSE is introducing the SUSE Certified Administrator-OpenStack (SCA-OpenStack) certification along with a new training course on deploying and administering SUSE OpenStack Cloud to complement SUSE's existing SUSE OpenStack Cloud training. Developed in collaboration with the OpenStack Foundation exam development team, the new course will specifically prepare students to take both the OpenStack Foundation Certified OpenStack Administrator (COA) exam as well as the SCA-OpenStack exam. In this way, OpenStack professionals not only garner important community-supported credentials but also demonstrate real-life OpenStack deployment expertise. First sessions of the new course will be held at the upcoming OpenStack Summit in Austin, Texas, beginning April 25.

Gary Chen, research manager for Software Defined Compute at IDC, said, "OpenStack has rapidly matured to become a viable option for enterprise-grade private clouds. For most businesses, balancing and enhancing in-house skills with support, training and maintenance from an experienced, seasoned partner like SUSE is a key factor in the success of private cloud projects. Initiatives such as new training and certification programs will help accelerate OpenStack adoption, making it easier for more enterprise businesses to gain the full productivity and agility benefits from their private cloud investments."

SUSE OpenStack Cloud 6 enhancements to address customer needs include:

• 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.
• Support for IBM z/VM alongside existing support for Xen, KVM, Hyper-V and VMware, making SUSE first to include all these hypervisor options. This gives SUSE OpenStack Cloud the widest range of hypervisor support available and allows customers to incorporate their mainframe platforms into their OpenStack private cloud.
• Docker support to let customers 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.
• Support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 Support Pack 1 to allow customers to build their OpenStack clouds on the latest version of the top platform for enterprise workloads.

"SUSE OpenStack Cloud is a sophisticated cloud solution that simplifies the automation and management of cloud services," said Lars Göbel, head of IT Operations for DARZ, a full IT service provider with its own high-security colocation data center situated in the former vault building of the bank of Hesse. "It delivers highly available, superb performance and outstanding value. SUSE OpenStack Cloud technology is extremely reliable. This enables DARZ to deliver high-quality IaaS services to our customers, with all the flexibility, performance and security they need."

Jeff O'Neal, senior director of the Cloud Solutions Group at NetApp, said, "We are excited about the release of SUSE OpenStack Cloud 6 with Manila support. As the founder of the Manila project and a charter member of the OpenStack Foundation, we have contributed deep expertise and technology that will enable shared volumes between public and private clouds for our Data ONTAP customers, a feature many enterprises have been looking for to accelerate their cloud adoption."

For additional information on SUSE OpenStack Cloud, visit www.suse.com/cloud. For details on SUSE OpenStack Cloud 6 pricing, see www.suse.com/products/suse-cloud/how-to-buy.