Veritas announced at OpenStack Summit, Veritas HyperScale for OpenStack, a new software-defined storage solution designed to maximize workload performance, lower operating costs and protect data in OpenStack-based cloud environments.

As OpenStack gains traction as an open source platform for cloud infrastructures, some of its components are at vastly different stages of maturity. While enterprises and app developers enjoy the flexibility and agility the environment provides, storage management capabilities are not as advanced. As a result, organizations often face challenges with workload performance, reliability and efficiency as well as with storage optimization and data protection. Veritas HyperScale for OpenStack addresses these issues directly.

HyperScale for OpenStack helps organizations realize the speed and economic benefits of deploying applications on OpenStack through predictable performance and storage quality of service (QoS). The software-defined storage solution leverages commodity hardware and includes integration for enterprise data protection.

"Organizations look to open source platforms to drive innovation, while reducing complexity and cost," said Mike Palmer, executive vice president and chief product officer, Veritas. "Today's announcement helps customers achieve improved data management and protection independent of the hardware, on-premises or in the cloud. This is critical for enterprise adoption of OpenStack."

A key feature of HyperScale for OpenStack is a patent-pending dual-plane architecture that distributes storage functionality between separate compute and data planes. This separation increases performance while maintaining efficiency, allowing for data management tasks, performed at the data plane, to be decoupled from workload processing at the compute plane. Efficient use of direct attached storage (DAS) helps minimize total cost of ownership without compromising performance and resiliency requirements.

"Veritas has a strong heritage in software-defined storage and Veritas HyperScale for OpenStack solves the challenges for OpenStack adopters concerned with performance and reliability of their most demanding workloads," said Anand Krishnan, executive vice president for Cloud at Canonical. "Canonical believes that by collaborating with Veritas, we will help our mutual customers adopt OpenStack with confidence to extract more value from their data."

Veritas HyperScale for OpenStack enables customers adopting cloud-based architectures to realize additional benefits including:

• Increased data protection to meet workload needs, with the ability for backups to be executed without impacting application performance.
• Simplified storage management and reporting for managing primary and secondary storage from within OpenStack Horizon.
• Enhanced IT efficiency through faster instance provisioning with chosen storage and compute resources and the ability to address storage needs of both legacy and newer cloud applications.
• Reduced deployment complexity through integration with distribution-specific deployment tools.

"Enterprises are looking to more easily adopt OpenStack cloud software and other open source platforms, while preserving their existing investments and creating new business advances. However, despite growing momentum, customers face challenges around managing data in the cloud," said Amita Potnis, Research Manager, Storage Systems at IDC. "Today's announcement from Veritas offers a key motivator for businesses moving to the cloud to help with workload performance and protection of data."