Flurry of News From OpenStack Summit

openstack-cloud

There's lots of news from this week's  OpenStack Summit in San Diego.

The OpenStack Summit, which is underway in San Diego, is the OpenStack community's largest conference to date with 1,400 attendees, said Jonathan Bryce, executive director, OpenStack Foundation, during the opening session yesterday. To illustrate his point, he showed a video of the registrants waiting in a check-in line that went out the door of the conference site.

The event includes 230 sessions covering variety of topics of interest to end uses as well as developers in the OpenStack community. Videos from the conference sessions will stream on the OpenStack web site and the conversation can be followed on Twitter hashtag #openstack.

As the ecosystem grows, so does the participation of many vendors, so we've put together a look at the announcements - on compute, networking and storage - from the event.

Cisco Launches Edition for OpenStack. Vice Chairman of the OpenStack Foundation and Cisco CTO Lew Tucker blogged about OpenStack history and the release of Cisco Edition for OpenStack. It is built around the core OpenStack services along with automated installation scripts designed specifically to support running OpenStack in production on Cisco infrastructure. The Essex version (version 5) of Cisco Edition brings in other open source components for monitoring and deployment in a highly available environment, and the Folsom version (version 6) includes the Folsom core services, Cisco’s latest Quantum implementation, and will include the HA components in the near future.

Metacloud launches OpenStack cloud. Cloud solution provider Metacloud announced its emergence from stealth with an investment from Storm Ventures. Metacloud offers a fully managed OpenStack-based private cloud solution with enterprise capabilities for availability, management and scale. Co-founders Steve Curry and Sean Lynch draw upon their previous experience managing large-scale infrastructure for Yahoo and Ticketmaster to develop Metacloud. Curry, CEO of Metacloud, said, "Despite popular misconceptions, IT organizations can have the best of both worlds: a cloud customized to their requirements, deployed quickly and cost effectively. IT organizations shouldn't have to keep buying proprietary hardware or software that locks them into an increasingly expensive cycle. Nor should they have to put up with costly public cloud services that can't scale with their data center operations or business needs."

Midokura Advances Network Virtualization with OpenStack - Japanese startup Midokura launched in the U.S., unveiling with its MidoNet network virtualization technology, called MidoNet, which is integrated with the OpenStack Quantum networking project and has support for OpenStack Nova network drivers as well. This technology treats networking like one big distributed system.

NetApp contributes to OpenStack.  NetApp (NTAP) announced the contribution of Data ONTAP 8 Clustering Drivers to OpenStack Block Storage, giving developers, service providers and enterprises improved resources to build private and public clouds on OpenStack. The addition of drivers for Data ONTAP 8 Clustering in the OpenStack Folsom release enables organizations to automate management of NetApp storage pools, or clusters, to scale the cloud infrastructure while maintaining performance and nondisruptive operations. “As a charter member of the foundation and an active contributor, NetApp is committed to the OpenStack community,” said Jeffrey O'Neal, senior director, Solutions Incubation, NetApp. “Our goal is to help organizations of all sizes use cloud-proven data management with their OpenStack cloud. NetApp will continue to provide resources to expand the capabilities of public and private clouds built on OpenStack, driving efficiency and reducing risk.”

Nimbula joins OpenStack.  Nimbula announced it has joined the OpenStack community.  As an active member of the community, Nimbula will collaborate on a range of improvements to the OpenStack codebase, and will incorporate OpenStack services in future Nimbula Director releases.

In more cloud news showing a move toward maturity in the marketplace, Rackspace rolled out private cloud partner programs that include product certification. The Web Host Industry Review had the story, Cloud Host Rackspace Launches Two OpenStack Private Cloud Partner Programs. The two programs include one for hardware and platform vendors and one for software vendors. "Rackspace says the programs help provide expertise on building hardware, applications and other platforms that run on private clouds based on OpenStack," says the WHIR story.

Cloudscaling, a cloud infrastructure provider, announced the availability of a new compute API set for OpenStack that is compatible with Google Compute Engine (GCE). Co-founder and CTO of Cloudscaling Randy Bias blogged that there is hope the OpenStack community will support this move, but Cloudscaling will proceed regardless. He termed GCE as a "game changer."

SolidFire Delivers Production-Ready Deployment of OpenStack Compute “Nova” and OpenStack Block Storage “Cinder” with Canonical - On the storage front, SolidFire, a provider of all-solid-state (SSD) storage systems for cloud service providers, announced, in conjunction with Canonical, a production-ready reference architecture for deploying OpenStack Compute (Nova) and OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder). SolidFire will be demonstrating the deployment of 1,000 production- ready VMs with predictable performance and fine-grain quality of service (QoS) via Canonical, OpenStack Compute and Block Storage at the conference.

Writer Colleen Miller also contributed to this article.