SUSE Cloud 2.0 now available to deploy and manage private clouds

SUSE has announced the general availability of SUSE Cloud 2.0, the next version of the original enterprise-ready OpenStack distribution for building Infrastructure-as-a-Service private clouds. Based on OpenStack Grizzly, SUSE Cloud 2.0 provides the capabilities for setting up a mixed hypervisor private cloud environment that can be rapidly deployed and easily managed, helping enterprises increase business agility and reduce IT costs.
Designed to make it easy for enterprises to harness the power of OpenStack for private cloud deployments, SUSE Cloud 2.0 helps reduce administrator time and streamline the setup of private clouds based on OpenStack. SUSE Cloud 2.0 incorporates an improved installation framework, which facilitates concurrent implementation of KVM, Xen, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESXi hypervisor environments, giving customers increased flexibility in building their clouds. In addition, SUSE provides proven 24x7 enterprise support for SUSE Cloud 2.0, backed by the engineering excellence of SUSE and its 20-year history of delivering award-winning support to organisations worldwide.

“SUSE Cloud gives enterprise customers the ability to innovate faster and improve resource utilisation, all while mitigating risk,” said Michael Miller, vice president of global alliances and marketing for SUSE. “Enterprises enjoy greater choice as they benefit from open source development reinforced with stability and security.”

Michael Coté, research director of infrastructure software for 451 Research, said, “There's a great deal of interest in OpenStack right now with companies hungry to start using the platform in their cloud initiatives. The nature of OpenStack encourages a modular approach, among other things, maximising choice and agility for each customer. In order to support diverse customer requirements for the applications running in OpenStack clouds, the platform needs to support a wide range of hypervisors, so it's great to see SUSE pushing this forward.”

SUSE Cloud 2.0 builds on the open source development and broad ecosystem of OpenStack to expand the enterprise capabilities of the cloud platform, while enabling customers to maintain investments they have previously made in traditional data center environments. SUSE Cloud 2.0's advanced cloud technology and broad solution choice will help ensure a smooth deployment into enterprise data centers by offering:
· Support for mixed hypervisor cloud environments so organisations can maintain the flexibility of their multi-hypervisor environments to optimise workload performance and licensing costs. SUSE Cloud 2.0 supports KVM and Xen hypervisor environments and is the first OpenStack distribution to add full support for Microsoft Hyper-V (see separate announcement today, “SUSE Support for Microsoft Hyper-V Expands Options for Mixed Hypervisor Clouds in Enterprise Data Centers”). VMware ESXi integration is also included as a technical preview.
· A more robust installation process. Integration between SUSE Cloud 2.0 and the latest release of the open source deployment framework Crowbar provides even greater scalability and an updated user interface.
· The latest features and fixes of OpenStack Grizzly. SUSE Cloud 2.0 includes full support for OpenStack Block Storage and OpenStack Networking.

OpenStack Block Storage provides increased choice by letting organisations provide persistent block storage at the virtual machine level. OpenStack Networking augments SUSE Cloud's network features by delivering networking-as-a-service to enable scalable network management, an API (application programming interface) to build rich network topologies, and the ability to create advanced network services.

· Improved integration with SUSE Studio and SUSE Manager, tools for easily building and managing cloud-based applications. With SUSE Studio, the award-winning image-building solution, enterprises can rapidly adapt and deploy applications for use within both private and public clouds. In addition, by managing workloads across public or private clouds with SUSE Manager, enterprises can efficiently maintain and monitor their Linux environment, inside or outside the cloud.
· A broader ecosystem of partner solutions to configure private clouds based on unique IT infrastructure requirements. SUSE Cloud 2.0 offers a technical preview of Ceph and the Ceph Rados Gateway, providing compatible Swift and Amazon S3 (Simplified Storage Service) APIs for fully redundant object storage. SUSE is also working with partners such as Coraid, EMC®, Inktank and NetApp to give SUSE Cloud users a broad choice of persistent VM storage solutions. SUSE Cloud Networking includes partner solutions, providing customers the extended capabilities offered by Cisco, Midokura, Open Vswitch and VLAN bridging solutions.

“SUSE and Cisco are both focused on making the data center more flexible to provide increased agility to our customers,” said Lew Tucker, vice president and chief technology officer of cloud computing at Cisco. “With integrated support for UCS Manager and the Cisco drivers for OpenStack networking in SUSE Cloud 2.0, our joint customers can rapidly deploy on-demand IT services with OpenStack, including full enterprise support.”
Jayraj Nair, senior director of technology alliances for EMC Corporation, said, “Joint customers have expressed interest in enterprise solutions that will enable them to use OpenStack. The inclusion of OpenStack drivers for EMC into SUSE Cloud 2.0 can enable customers to take advantage of industry-leading EMC® VNX® series storage to use OpenStack to meet their needs.”

Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, said, “From its inception, the OpenStack project has been focused on delivering unparalleled flexibility to organisations as they deploy clouds. By supporting all major hypervisors in its OpenStack distribution, SUSE is helping enterprises take full advantage of their existing infrastructures.”