Canonical And Cisco Welcome OpenStack’s Bexar Releases

OpenStack has announced the release of updates, codenamed Bexar, to its Compute and Object Storage cloud implementations. The OpenStack open-source cloud project has also recruited four new members, including Cisco and Canonical.

The addition of influential members like Cisco and Canonical alongside Extreme Networks and Grid Dynamics has added breadth to the OpenStack community, founded by Rackspace Hosting and NASA. The membership now numbers 50, including AMD, Citrix, Dell and Intel.

Ubuntu OS And Cisco Code

Lew Tucker, vice president and CTO for Cisco’s Cloud Computing division, is a great believer in the open source cloud initiative which he says will deliver the open standards that a mature, federated cloud infrastructure will require.

“The effort here is being led by the CTO organisation but also draws on other engineers throughout Cisco’s product groups to help with the design, specification and development of this open source cloud stack. And yes, that does mean code,” he said.

Canonical has already incorporated the Bexar releases of OpenStack into its Ubuntu Linux (Natty Narwhal) distribution. The Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud release has been integrated with Dell’s PowerEdge C2100 and C6100 servers, initially in the US. This will allow customers access to an easily-deployed Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) implementation based on Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Canonical claims.

The company said, “Our aim with OpenStack over time is to make Ubuntu the best OS for clouds built on this stack, both at the infrastructure and guest levels. There is real energy and momentum building around this technology and we congratulate the guys and girls in that project for their success so far. It looks a terrific base for building out open-source based public clouds and its embracing on not just its own APIs but also the EC2 APIs.”

Jim Curry, vice president for OpenStack at Rackspace, added, “We’ve heard CIOs hesitate to invest in proprietary cloud technology because they don’t want to be locked in for the long haul. They want the freedom to switch cloud hosting or technology providers and gain more flexibility with their deployments. OpenStack is rapidly moving to solve these problems, and it’s evident to us that we need an open cloud standard to best enable hybrid scenarios, federation and easy migration.”

The Bexar release of OpenStack Compute brings enterprise-level deployment features to enable them to pre-install and create their own application environments and instantly spin up the same copy as they scale out.

Compute features support for IPv6, Microsoft Hyper-V, iSCSI with Citrix XenAPI, XenServer snapshots and raw disk images. It also contains an image discovery and delivery sub-project, codenamed Glance, that will enable portability of workloads between OpenStack clouds, Rackspace announced.

Object Storage now supports unlimited-size file storage. The new release is supported by a documentation site with PDF and HTML manuals to guide users through installation and deployment.

April will see the release of an optimised version of OpenStack for service providers and this is being worked on under the codename Cactus.