OpenStack Summit: Focus on Hadoop Support, File-Sharing

As the Portland OpenStack Summit draws to a close this week,  Hortonworks, VMware, and NetApp all had announcements.

Hortonworks, Mirantis and Red Hat boost Project Savanna.  Leading Hadoop contributor Hortonworks announced that it was working with OpenStack systems integrator Mirantis, and large OpenStack contributor RedHat (RHT) to contribute significantly to Project Savanna under the OpenStack community guidelines to deliver Apache Hadoop on OpenStack. This collaboration aims to provide many benefits including providing open source APIs and simpler transitions when moving Hadoop workloads between public and private clouds. Getting its start as an OpenStack project by Mirantis, project Savanna enables users to easily provision and manage elastic Hadoop clusters to speed the development and deployment of cost-effective Hadoop on OpenStack. “With its efficient use of hardware and unparalleled agility, the cloud is a logical deployment platform for Apache Hadoop and one that we see many of our customers preferring,” said Bob Page, vice president, products, Hortonworks. “Coupled with the fact that Hadoop is a net new workload for many organizations, deployment on OpenStack is a logical fit. By committing efforts to simplify the deployment and management of Hadoop on OpenStack through linkage with Ambari, we believe we can meaningfully accelerate the time to production for organizations building out new Hadoop projects.”

Cananical and VMware Collaborate for OpenStack clouds. Canonical and VMware (VMW) announced a collaboration that will enable organizations to deploy VMware technologies, including VMware vSphere and Nicira NVP, with Canonical’s OpenStack distribution. The Canonical Ubuntu Cloud Infrastructure will now include the plugins required to use OpenStack with vSphere and NVP. VMware reaffirms its support of Ubuntu as a fully supported guest operating system (OS) on vSphere. “By fulfilling our promise to deliver VMware vSphere support in OpenStack, and teaming with Canonical to serve our collective customers, we’re delivering customer choice by providing a powerful platform for those interested in OpenStack clouds,” Joshua Goodman, vice president, Product Management, vSphere, VMware. “Canonical’s Ubuntu technology is widely used by those deploying OpenStack, and joint customers will be able leverage the familiar and proven capabilities of the vSphere infrastructure in which they’ve already invested.”

NetApp Proposes FileShare service for OpenStack. NetApp (NTAP) announced it has submitted a prototype and proposal for a file share service capability for consideration by the OpenStack Foundation Technical Committee and community at large. The proposal will be a topic for discussion for inclusion in the Havana release. Native management support for file-based storage systems is not a part of OpenStack, and NetApp is proposing adding a "file share service" that is broad enough to address a range of file system types, either as an extension to the existing Cinder project or implemented as a separate project. "NetApp is eager to work with the OpenStack community to establish the optimal path for bringing critical shared file services capabilities into the core of OpenStack," said Jeffrey O’Neal, senior director, Solutions Integration Group, NetApp. "We have received good feedback to our blueprint through the Grizzly development cycle and look forward to identifying the best path for adoption in the Havana release. Our proposal is constructed to be broadly applicable, with the file system type abstracted to address any number of shared or distributed file system types, from CIFS and NFS/pNFS to something such as Gluster or Ceph."