SUSE says their SUSE Cloud will be the first fully configured OpenStack-powered appliance. But, SUSE is being clear that the free download offered today is a development release, and not an enterprise ready solution.

“We didn’t just want to say this is what we want to do, we wanted to show our customers and our partners that we have been doing some work in this area and we’re serious about it. [This version] is a proof of concept demonstration to prove that the technologies are viable,” said Kerry Kim, the director of solutions marketing at SUSE, in an interview last week.

A final version of SUSE Cloud is expected sometime in the next nine to 12 months, Kim said.

“We’ve been looking at the cloud computing space for a while, and evaluating and exploring different alternatives and technologies. As we saw increased momentum around the OpenStack project, and the group opening up the project to a community-based approach, we felt the combination of momentum and openness was in line with our philosophy around leveraging the open source development community,” Kim added.

All the support around OpenStack obviously bodes well for the cloud computing project’s stability and longevity. However, there will be at least one notable holdout among prominent open source companies. Red Hat, which could become the first $1 billon open source company, has decided to head in its own direction, instead rolling out its own Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a service offering in CloudForms and OpenShift.

The company’s decision to turn away from OpenStack has caused some head scratching, and maybe a little animosity from some open source supporters, though Red Hat has said its own efforts are more “open” than OpenStack.

Kim didn’t go into detail about how SUSE Cloud would be technologically different from Red Hat’s products, but he didn’t miss his opportunity to tout OpenStack’s support within the open source community, and rail on the competition.

“Red Hat is actually an interesting example. They’ve chosen not to support OpenStack,” Kim said. “That’s sort of puzzling to us. Maybe they have their own stakeholder pressures and they have to make money. I have a biased view, but maybe as their share has increased they feel like they are now synonymous with open source, or something, and they can dictate what the open source community should be doing. I actually don’t think they’re getting a whole lot of support for their virtualization and cloud platform. I think the rest of the world is like, ‘I don’t know why those Red Hat cats want to do it all by themselves, other than maybe they want to make all the money for themselves.’ Our strategy is very different. We want to make money too, but we want to do it in concert with our partners.”

What do you think? Will companies like SUSE ride the OpenStack bandwagon to success, or will Red Hat be able to distinguish its brand with a unique cloud offering?

I talked to Nebula’s co-founder and VP of Engineering, Devin Carlen, who explained that the cloud controller appliance will reduce capital expenditures for companies that may not have the expertise or money to launch their own private cloud using OpenStack. This opens up the potential of cloud computing to small companies that otherwise would need expensive hardware or software and in-house expertise to go to the cloud.

Because all of this was announced at an open source conference, I had to ask the question that the top-of-mind question: Would the cloud controller be opened to the community? The answer: No.

“What’s in the box is not as interesting as what you can do with the box, and how fast,” said Carlen. Emphasizing that speed of deployment was the biggest benefit of the cloud controller, he explained that Nebula customers would be able to order the controller and quickly deploy their own private cloud. Of course, all of the hardware that is inside the box that is open source will continue to be open source and any improvements made to it by Nebula will be shared back with the community. But the box will remain closed.

More secret sauce has been added to the software side of the appliance, which is built on the same APIs and runtime as OpenStack, including security, management, and platform enhancements. Some of these will be kept proprietary as well.

The Nebula debut was the biggest cloud news at OSCON, but OpenStack made other news as well. There was Dell’s OpenStack offering, Gluster’s connector for OpenStack, and HP’s announcement that it was joining OpenStack.

As one enthusiastic Racker tweeted: “What do you call it when a project takes over a conference? I call it a mandate. #OSCON #OpenStack”

Check out more Linux news at SearchEnterpriseLinux.com, and follow us on Twitter @LinuxTT.

The Crowbar software framework manages the OpenStack deployment from the initial server boot to the configuration of the primary OpenStack components, allowing users to complete bare-metal deployment of multi-node OpenStack clouds in a matter of hours. Once the initial deployment is complete, Crowbar can be used to maintain, expand, and architect the complete solution, including BIOS configuration, network discovery, status monitoring, performance data gathering, and alerting. Crowbar has been released to the community as open source code and Dell is working with the community to submit Crowbar as a core project in the OpenStack initiative.

“In order to efficiently serve over 300,000 customers, DreamHost has built intelligent service automation into all our Web hosting solutions,” said Simon Anderson, CEO of DreamHost. His company has used Dell’s OpenStack Cloud solution in their expansion of cloud solutions based on Ceph, an open source distributed storage system. They are also contributing to the OpenStack project.

Check out more Linux news and tips on SearchEnterpriseLinux.com.

This question was pondered by a panel of experts at Structure 2011 on Wednesday. Lew Moorman, president of Rackspace led the discussion around OpenStack, Open Compute and Cloud Foundry projects, why they exist and how they can be monetized by their sponsor companies.

As for the “why open source?” question, the panel agreed that the model has proven successful, as demonstrated by the success of Linux over the last 20 years.

VMware CTO, Derek Collison posited that for cloud computing to advance technologically, use of open source is a must.

“The open source movement is required for the cloud,” he said, explaining that the transparency and no vendor lock-in desire is helped by open source. When people find out it’s open source, they relax about committing to a vendor. And really, cloud computing is too big a problem—and opportunity– for a company or small set of companies to handle. Cloud requires the industry to collaborate.

The shift from making money on intellectual property to a model where some core components are freely available isn’t a huge hurdle for companies, they just need to focus on adding value in order to make money.

“Customers will pay for the innovation from the product or service – there are many different ways to add value,” said Forrest Norrod, VP and GM of server platforms at Dell. “This will disrupt some of the models. [But] the industry will find ways to monetize and add value.”

Collison said that while everyone wants to be in a public cloud, “very few people are willing to walk to the deep end of the pool.” The difficulty in setting up and maintaining distributed systems is something VMware is looking to capitalize on with their cloud services packages, alleviating the IT teams from getting caught up in all of that work.

Adapting to fill these needs is necessary, or the open model could threaten the long-term economics of companies such as VMware and Dell which derive most of their revenue through software sales tied to intellectual property said Norrod.

“If we don’t offer value above and beyond what’s completely commoditized in the standard, then we’re in trouble,” he said. “It can be product value based on IP, it could be service value or just support services. We have to adapt and continue to seek out value-add or we will become irrelevant.”

And building an open source project isn’t cheap. Moorman, whose company sponsors OpenStack, said “it’s a lot of work to run a community – it’s a big investment. We’re spending a lot of money to get input and contributors.”

The experts agreed that their involvement and sponsorship of the open source cloud projects has been costly, but worth it, to their companies, and to the industry as a whole.

Leah Rosin is Site Editor at SearchEnterpriseLinux.com. Follow us on Twitter!

However, Canonical’s decision to move away from Eucalyptus in favor of OpenStack could be risky. OpenStack is less than a year old and still very much in its infancy. Given all the publicity OpenStack has received, it might be fair to wonder whether Canonical was more concerned about being left behind than it was about the technology’s current efficacy.

“A lot of folks figured it was a no brainer just because of the buzz. To be honest, that was not the only reason why we switched. If you switch to something just because it gets buzz, you’d be changing all the time,” said Robbie Williamson, the engineering manager for the Ubuntu server team at Canonical.

Instead, Williamson said, Canonical sees clear technical advantages to OpenStack, specifically when focusing on ARM-based servers.

“We want to be sure Ubuntu can be in the forefront among server operating systems for ARM. We feel like we have an advantage there versus any of the established markets,” he said. “ARM’s Java support isn’t that solid yet, and Eucalyptus is written in Java. So that would have presented a problem for us. We’re also very focused on cloud deployment. For ARM, the virtualization technologies aren’t as mature there. With OpenStack, and the open development model, anyone can participate and contribute as they want, and really drive that functionality in their own self-interest. That is something we will contribute to and drive for our own self-interest. With Eucalyptus, there are some hurdles if we wanted to do that.”

Canonical has done this before, in the case of its support for KVM over Xen. In that case, the company took a risk in deciding to support what it believed was a superior virtualization hypervisor. That decision turned out OK, and there’s no reason to believe – as of yet – that its choice of OpenStack will hurt business.

Even so, Williamson admitted that he, and other Canonical executives, are nervous about whether OpenStack will be enterprise-ready in time for an expected September beta release of Ubuntu 11.10. Like any good gambler, Canonical is hedging its bet, planning to keep support for Eucalyptus through April 2015, and not ruling out a delay in its plan to make OpenStack the default.

“You never know. Come August, maybe we do need to switch it around. Both products are anticipated around the August, September timeline – there is some wiggle room there. … Talking to some of the other engineers, even Mark [Shuttleworth] himself, they were just as nervous, even more so, about this [decision],” Williamson said, comparing the OpenStack decision to the company’s choice of KVM.

Have you tried OpenStack and Eucalyptus? What are your impressions of the two technologies? Do you think this risk will pay off for Ubuntu?

]]> http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/enterprise-linux/ubuntu-betting-on-openstack-for-cloud/feed/ 0 http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/enterprise-linux/ubuntu-1104-release-improves-cloud-functionality-and-servers/ http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/enterprise-linux/ubuntu-1104-release-improves-cloud-functionality-and-servers/#comments Wed, 27 Apr 2011 17:01:26 +0000 Leah Rosin http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/enterprise-linux/?p=992 Tomorrow, Canonical’s Ubuntu 11.04 will be available for the Enterprise. The latest release of the Linux operating system (OS) boasts improved cloud features, including the addition of OpenStack ‘Cactus’ as a technology preview available for download through Ubuntu software repositories. A one hour free trial of Ubuntu 11.04 is available on Amazon EC2 on April 28, 2011 (accessed through Ubuntu.com).

Ubuntu 11.04 server changes

• Server provisioning using Cobbler and mcollective
• PowerNap 2.0 enables 14% reduction in power use
• New Linux Kernel, 2.6.30, which includes:
  – AppArmor support in Kernel
  – Intel’s Intelligent Power Sharing (IPS) support
  – filesystem improvements to btrfs, Ext4 and XFS
  – driver updates and hardware support updates
• Updated libvirt API with bug fixes and feature updates
• Default dhcpd server updated from dhcp3 to isc-dhcp (version 4)
• OW2 certified J2EE stack in Ubuntu based on Jonas + Oracle JDK + Postgres.

Ubuntu 11.04 enterprise desktop changes
Ubuntu 11.04 offers users a choice of the new Unity interface or the option to retain the “classic” Ubuntu interface. Unity will be the interface of Ubuntu for all users in the next long term support (LTS) release in April 2012, but beta users gave Unity mixed reviews.

If you’re planning to implement the new Ubuntu in your Linux data center, let us know. We’d love to hear about your experience.