E-Shelter Offers Up Managed Ubuntu OpenStack Through Canonical

Canonical and NTT Communications-owned data centre business e-shelter have launched a joint managed OpenStack private cloud service for e-shelter customers.

The platform uses Ubuntu’s ‘Hosted BootStack’, and is built on Ubuntu’s own OpenStack distribution.

Dedicated hardware

Describing the product as end to end, e-shelter and Canonical will take care of the design, implementation and complete management of the OpenStack private cloud, which will run over dedicated hardware in e-shelter’s European data centres.

Hosted BootStack also takes advantage of Canonical’s application modelling service Juju, alongside the company’s Bare Metal as a Service (MaaS) – touting simpler provisioning, orchestration and management of cloud resources. Hosted BootStack clouds can be built on-premise or in dedicated colocation environments in e-shelter data centres.

Canonical’s reasoning for BootStack is the increase in demand in customers wanting a managed private cloud platform.

In February, Rackspace launched its own managed OpenStack distribution built on Linux, delivering OpenStack private clouds-as-a-service using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.

The increase in managed OpenStack distributions can be pinned on the complexity of OpenStack as a platform, with difficulty in implementation still a major barrier to adoption.

Read: IBM SoftLayer now certified Ubuntu cloud partner

“Hosted BootStack will allow customers to bypass time consuming, costly decisions of data centre location, hardware and management solutions,  instead choosing a fast, reliable and fully managed by experts, cloud infrastructure for their business,” said Arturo Suarez, Canonical Cloud product manager.

In Canonical, e-shelter has selected a reasonably strong partner for dishing out managed OpenStack.

Toan Nguyen, cloud platform director at e-shelter, said: “Enterprises rely on Canonical to transform their businesses and we are thrilled Canonical has chosen e-shelter as their data centre partner, helping them continue to scale, add new services and maintain their incredible momentum.”

Japan’s NTT Communications sealed the deal on its purchase of German data centre services provider e-shelter last summer, acquiring an 86.7 percent stake in the company. The purchase boosted >NTT Com’s data centre floor space in Europe to 92,000 square metres across nine cities, up from just shy of 20,000 square metres in four cities.

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