Exclusively Available – SUSE OpenStack Cloud 6 to Reduce Private Cloud Complexities

SUSE announces the general availability of SUSEOpenStack Cloud 6, the latest enterprise-ready technology for building Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) private clouds.

Based on the OpenStack release Liberty, SUSE OpenStack Cloud 6 is claimed to deliver high availability enhancements and non-disruptive upgrades, with Docker and IBM z Systems mainframe support in the core, the solution enables customers to move business-critical applications and data to the cloud easily.

To fortify the offering, SUSE is offering new OpenStack training and certification for deployment and operation of OpenStack private clouds.

“The market has started to realize that do-it-yourself approaches to deploying private clouds are too time consuming, too expensive and too prone to failure,” said Nils Brauckmann, CEO of SUSE. “As the first to offer an enterprise OpenStack cloud distribution, SUSE continues to focus on providing the OpenStack solution of choice for businesses. We combine rapid and simple deployment, configuration, management and maintenance with enhanced high availability features and the widest hypervisor support in the industry to give our customers access to the benefits of OpenStack without the complexities that hold some companies back.”

The new solution is tailored for today’s market needs as enterprises are energetic on cloud services to attend their business-critical workloads. At the same time, most respondents were concerned about installation challenges, possible vendor lock-in and a lack of OpenStack skills in the market. SUSE is addressing these concerns by adding non-disruptive upgrade capabilities along with a more business-friendly release cycle and longer support duration. These combine to reduce the load on limited skilled resources by requiring fewer upgrades and minimizing disruption to production environments.

In addition, new OpenStack training and certification from SUSE will help grow the OpenStack skills base and support the growth of OpenStack solutions in the market. SUSE is introducing the SUSE Certified Administrator-OpenStack (SCA-OpenStack) certification along with a new training course on deploying and administering SUSE OpenStack Cloud to complement SUSE’s existing SUSE OpenStack Cloud training. First sessions of the new course will be held at the upcoming OpenStack Summit in Austin, Texas, beginning April 25.

SUSE OpenStack Cloud 6 enhancements to address customer needs include:

• Non-disruptive upgrade capabilities to ease migration to future OpenStack releases.
• Enhanced high availability features to enable customers to move legacy or business-critical applications to their cloud with the same level of availability of more traditional infrastructures.
• Support for IBM z/VM alongside existing support for  Xen, KVM, Hyper-V and VMware, making SUSE first to include all these hypervisor options. This gives SUSE OpenStack Cloud the widest range of hypervisor support available and allows customers to incorporate their mainframe platforms into their OpenStack private cloud.
• Docker support to let customers build and run new and innovative containerized applications.
• Full support for OpenStack Manila to provide direct access to the performance, scalability and management of the open source Manila shared file system service.
• Support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 Support Pack 1 to allow customers to build their OpenStack clouds on the latest version of the top platform for enterprise workloads.

Gary Chen, Research Manager for Software Defined Compute at IDC, said, “OpenStack has rapidly matured to become a viable option for enterprise-grade private clouds. For most businesses, balancing and enhancing in-house skills with support, training and maintenance from an experienced, seasoned partner like SUSE is a key factor in the success of private cloud projects. Initiatives such as new training and certification programs will help accelerate OpenStack adoption, making it easier for more enterprise businesses to gain the full productivity and agility benefits from their private cloud investments.”