Category Archives: Open Source

Akanda, Astara, Liberty, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack

Astara is born to simplify networking for OpenStack Liberty, claims Akanda

opensourceSystems built on OpenStack now have better management options, according to Akanda, which has unveiled its new Astara Liberty system for network orchestration.

Akanda, which contributed to the recently launched OpenStack Project Astara, announced the new Liberty release at OpenStack Summit Tokyo. The new Astara Liberty release is Akanda’s debut contribution to the project. The makers claims it gives OpenStack operators vendor-agnostic network orchestration platform for everything that lies between layers three and seven on the network services stack.

The design criteria for Liberty is to cut complexity and make Neutron implementations more scalable. It achieves this by dispensing with the need for multiple plugins and software defined networking (SDN) controllers. By orchestrating these network functions from different providers on bare metal, virtual machines and containers, it has given cloud developers more options and more stability, claims Akanda.

These ‘scalability, flexibility and stability’ improvements are achieved because Akanda’s Liberty release gives developers more configuration choices, faster provisioning, smoother integration, higher levels of availability and fuller compatibility, claims the vendor. Among the mechanisms for delivering these improvements are a new type of new load balancer driver, more Neutron resources and Cumulus Networks integration and support for Dynamic Lightweight Network Virtualization.

“The goal of Astara is to make Networking and DevOps’ lives easier,” said Akanda CEO Henrik Rosendahl. The culture of traditional and expensive single vendor lock-ins must be replaced by a massively simplified OpenStack networking range, he said.

The Liberty release demonstrates the power of the big tent approach to OpenStack, claimed Simon Anderson, CEO of DreamHost and OpenStack Foundation board member. “It’s fantastic to see new open source projects extend and simplify the platform,” said Anderson.

Ansible, M&A, News & Analysis, Open Source, RedHat

RedHat to buy DevOps specialist Ansible

Cloud in my handOpen source vendor RedHat has announcement an agreement to buy DevOps specialist Ansible, which creates agentless automation systems designed to simplify the automation of pure and across hybrid cloud environments.

The upstream Ansible open source automation projects on GitHub have an active community of 1,200 contributors and Ansible automation is used by Fortune 100 companies to power large and complex private cloud environments. In 2015 it was granted the InfoWorld Bossie Award in recognition of being the best open source datacentre and cloud software on the market.

Ansible removes some of the most significant barriers to automation across IT, according to Joe Fitzgerald vice president of management at Red Hat. Adding Ansible to Red Hat’s hybrid management portfolio means customers can install and manage cloud applications more easily, use DevOps to improve service delivery, streamline OpenStack projects and make container adoption much easer to orchestrate and configure.

Acquiring the top IT automation and DevOps company will take Red Hat significantly closer to frictionless IT, according to Fitzgerald, but innovation has to be 100 per cent open source and built on open management. “Ansible can help us relentlessly focus on reducing cost and complexity through ease of use and automation,” said Fitzgerald.

The addition of Ansible to Red Hat’s portfolio puts it at the forefront of cloud and DevOps, according to venture capitalist Doug Carlisle, MD of Menlo Ventures.

The acquisition, which will close in October if all conditions are met, won’t affect Red Hat’s revenue for the third and fourth quarters of its fiscal year ending on February 29, 2016. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but VentureBeat reckons the price was over $100 million.

Management expects that non-GAAP operating expenses for fiscal 2016 will increase by approximately $2.0 million, or ($0.01) per share, in the third quarter and approximately $4.0 million, or ($0.02) per share, in the fourth quarter as a result of the transaction.

According to researcher IDC’s analysis in July 2015, the global cloud systems management software market achieved total revenue of $2.3 billion in 2014. The market is currently forecast to grow to $8.3 billion in 2019.

containers, Liberty, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpensStack, SDN

OpenStack Liberty release features enhancements for SDN and containers

OpenStack SummitThe twelfth release of OpenStack will tackle the cloud software toolset’s size limitations and will offer new options for software defined networking, says the Openstack Foundation.

The new version, Liberty, will help cloud software builders to create more manageable and scalable enterprise services with ‘the broadest support for popular data centre technologies’ the foundation says.

The OpenStack Foundation says Liberty was designed in response to user requests for more detailed management controls. OpenStack has also been criticised for its inability to step up to large scale installations. As a result, its operating core has been strengthened and its production environment will include more powerful tools for managing new technologies, such as containers.

Improvements include a new common library adoption, better configuration management and a new role-based access control (RBAC) for the Heat orchestration and Neutron networking projects. These control improvements, which were specifically requested by cloud operators, will allow them to fine tune security settings at all levels of network and orchestration functions and APIs.

OpenStack’s scalability challenges are to be tackled with an updated model to support very large and multi-location systems. The foundation also promised that Liberty users will see better scaling and performance in the Horizon dashboard, Neutron networking Cinder block storage services and during upgrades to Nova’s computing services.

Liberty also marks the first full OpenStack use of the Magnum containers management project. Magnum will support popular container cluster management tools Kubernetes, Mesos and Docker Swarm. Magnum aims to simplify the adoption of container technology by tying into existing OpenStack services such as Nova, Ironic and Neutron. Further improvements are planned with new project, Kuryr, which integrates directly with native container networking components such as libnetwork.

The Heat orchestration project promises ‘dozens’ of new resources for management, automation and orchestration of the expanded capacity of Liberty.

1,933 individuals across more than 164 organizations contributed to OpenStack Liberty through upstream code, reviews, documentation and internationalization efforts. The top code committers to the Liberty release were HP, Red Hat, Mirantis, IBM, Rackspace, Huawei, Intel, Cisco, VMware, and NEC.

Intel, Internet of Things, Linux, M2M, News & Analysis, Open Source, Wind River

Wind River announces upgraded IoT software platform

internet of things farmingEmbedded tech vendor Wind River has announced an upgraded portfolio of IoT software development tools for the internet of things (IoT).

The wholly-owned Intel subsidiary made the announcement at the Embedded Linux Conference in Dublin this week, and claimed to bring added flexibility and interoperability to its open-source platform, Wind River Linux 8. It also says it’s thrown in improved user experience and scalability for addressing IoT, stating that a combination of its virtualization services also allows customers to begin developing apps for IoT platforms within minutes of set-up and installation.

Speaking on the development of the upgraded platform, which will underpin a number of Wind River’s existing technology profiles, general manager of OS platforms Dinyar Dastoor is proud of the work the firm’s doing in driving the development of IoT.

“Wind River Linux allows customers to extract vast amounts of business intelligence and value from their data, and supports devices of all sizes, architectures and industries – from general purpose and high-performing real-time devices to carrier grade, virtualization, and highly secure military applications,” he said. “With the latest version of Wind River Linux and our updated Open Virtualization profile, we are delivering a versatile and robust Linux offering to the market that is ideally suited for the development if IoT devices.”

Wind River’s Linux platform is born out of the Linux Foundation’s Yocto Project, a hardware-agnostic an open-source collaboration project designed to provide templates, tools and methodologies for implementing tailored Linux systems on any embedded product – hypothetically ideal for IoT products, software and infrastructures. Jim Zemlin, the Linux Foundation’s executive director, is looking forward to the company’s continued participation with the project, based on its extensive contribution thus far – Wind River has so far contributed more than one third of the lines of code used by Yocto.

“Wind River continues to do important work with the Linux community, as well as foster open-source innovation,” he said. “We look forward to the company’s ongoing contributions to the Yocto Project, and their market success with products like Wind River Linux.”

Visit Europe’s leading IoT event – Internet of Things World Europe – in Berlin on 5 – 7 October 2015

Cloudera, Hadoop, News & Analysis, Open Source

Cloudera announces tighter security measures for Hadoop

Cloud securityCloudera has announced a new open source project that aims to use real-time analytical applications in Hadoop and an open source security layer for unified access control enforcement.

Kudu, an in-memory store for Hadoop, aims to give developers more choice and stop them from having their options limited. Currently developers must choose between fast analytics with HDFS or updating data with HBase. Combining the two, according to Cloudera, can be potentially fatal for any developers that try, since the systems are both highly complex.

Cloudera says Kudu eliminates the complexities involved in processes like time series analysis, machine data analytics and online reporting. It does this by supporting high-performance sequential and random reads and writes, enabling fast analytics on changing data.

Cloudera co-authored Kudu with Intel, which helped it make better use of in-memory hardware and Intel’s 3D XPoint technology. Other contributors included Xiaomi, AtScale, Splice Machine and Zoomdata.

“Our infrastructure team has been working with Cloudera to develop Kudu, taking advantage of its unique ability to support columnar scans and fast inserts and updates to continue to expand our Hadoop ecosystem footprint,” Baoqiu Cui, chief architect at smartphone developer Xiaomi, told CIO magazine. “Using Kudu, alongside interactive SQL tools like Impala, has allowed us to build a next-generation data analytics platform for real-time analytics and online reporting.”

Meanwhile a new core security for Hadoop has been launched. RecordService aims to provide unified access control enforcement for Hadoop by enforcing role based access controls. It acts as a new layer that sits between Hadoop’s storage and computing engines and aims to consistently enforce the role-based access controls defined by Sentry. RecordService also provides dynamic data masking across Hadoop, protecting sensitive data as it is accessed.

“Security is a critical part of Hadoop, but for it to evolve the security needs to become universal across the platform. With RecordService, the Hadoop community fulfils the vision of unified fine-grained access controls for every Hadoop access path,” said Mike Olson, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Cloudera.

EMC, hybrid cloud, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack, Virtualisation, VMware

VMware opens up at VMworld San Francisco

VMWare campus logoVirtualisation pioneer VMware has unveiled a raft of new services tailored for hybrid cloud services and open systems at its annual VMworld conference in San Francisco.

VMware announced the launch of VMware Integrated OpenStack 2.0, the company’s second release of its distribution of the OpenStack open-source cloud software. The new release, based on OpenStack Kilo, will be available on September 30.

“Customers can now upgrade from version one to version two in a more operationally efficient manner and even roll back if anything goes wrong,” said VMware product line manager Arvind Soni.

The move could be seen as a U-turn by VMware, whose revenue streams come from sales of its vSphere virtualization software. The most recent annual VMware report warned that “open source technologies for virtualization, containerization, and cloud platforms such as Xen, KVM, Docker, Rocket, and OpenStack provide significant pricing competition and let competing vendors [use] OpenStack to compete directly with our SDDC initiative.”

However, with OpenStack distributions available from Canonical, HP, Huawei and Oracle – and investment in OpenStack companies from Intel, IBM and other major players, VMware has announced continued support. In October 2014 parent company EMC bought three OpenStack start ups – Cloudscaling, Maginatics and Spanning – to provide a variety of cloud services which adhere to the increasingly popular open standard.

Meanwhile, testing and running disaster recovery plans will be quicker, promises VMWare, now its vCloud Air service has a new cloud-based Site Recovery Manager. The service is now offered on a pay-per-use basis, replacing the more expensive annual subscriptions.

In the event of a disaster recovery event or test, fees will be charged for each virtual machine protected and the storage they consume, said VMware.

Storage could get cheaper as VMware has introduced vCloud Air Object Storage on the Google Cloud Platform. The debut product from VMware’s new Google reseller relationship will be available from September 30th, which will also see an alternative offering launched: vCloud Air Object Storage service, powered by EMC.

The start of the fourth financial quarter should also see VMware release its new vCloud Air SQL database as a service, as the virtualisation vendor looking to match the breadth of features offered the cloud industry’s top service providers.

With a new Hybrid Cloud Manager, VMware aims to help clients to migrate workloads, extend the range of their data centres and fine tune the process of juggling resources between private and public clouds. The management takes place through the interface of VMware’s vSphere Web Client, and will support the migration of virtual machines.

Alex Freedland, August Capital, Diane Bryant, Ericsson, Funding, Insight Venture Partners, Intel, Mirantis, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack, SAP Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, WestSummit Capital.

Intel, Ericsson bet $100m on Mirantis and OpenStack

OpenStack vendor Mirantis is raking in buy-in from investors

OpenStack vendor Mirantis is raking in buy-in from investors

Pure play OpenStack vendor Mirantis has secured $100m in new funding this week in a round led by Intel Capital, with the companies also announcing deepened collaboration in the cloud arena.

The latest round, which comes less than a year after Mirantis secured $100m in series B funds from investors, also included participation from new investor Goldman Sachs and existing investors August Capital, Insight Venture Partners, Ericsson, Sapphire Ventures (formerly SAP Ventures) and WestSummit Capital.

Mirantis said the cash will be used to bolster its partnerships with vendors and other organisations innovating with OpenStack.

“With Intel as our partner, we’ll show the world that open design, open development and open licensing is the future of cloud infrastructure software. Mirantis’ goal is to make OpenStack the best way to deliver cloud software, surpassing any proprietary solutions,” said Alex Freedland, co-founder and president of Mirantis.

“Every industry is being disrupted by software. Smart enterprises are embracing the cloud to grow top line revenues and get new services to market faster. Mirantis is the only vendor 100 per cent committed to only OpenStack,” Freedland said.

At the same time, Intel and Mirantis announced the two companies would deepen their partnership and work together on Intel’s Clouds for All initiative, a series of partnerships with ISVs announced earlier this summer which are intended to accelerate cloud interoperability and boost deployments.

“Our investment in Mirantis is the next step in bringing open cloud infrastructure to the entire industry as part of Intel’s ‘Cloud for All’ initiative,” said Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager, Data Center Group, Intel.

“As enterprises embrace public, private and hybrid cloud strategies, they need choices in their infrastructure software. OpenStack is an ideal open solution for cloud-native applications and services, and our collaboration with Mirantis is well placed to ensure the delivery of critical new enterprise features helping to create of tens of thousands of clouds,” Bryant said.

Datacentre, Facebook, HP, IBM, Intel, Mike Yang, News & Analysis, Open Compute, Open Source, Quanta, Rackspace, server

Quanta intros Intel RSA Open Compute proof of concept

Quanta is mashing up Intel's RSA and Open Compute designs

Quanta is mashing up Intel’s RSA and Open Compute designs

Taiwanese datacentre vendor Quanta has introduced an Intel Rack Scale Architecture (Intel RSA) proof of concept rack solution based on Open Compute specifications which the company is pitching at hyperscale datacentre operators and cloud providers.

Intel RSA is the chip vendor’s own modular architecture design that disaggregates compute, storage and networking and weaves them together in a fabric it claims makes resources easier to pool and pod.

Now Quanta has developed a proof of concept for a server that blends Intel’s RSA specs and Open Compute designs.

The hardware vendor, which already offers hardware based on Open Compute designs, claims will significantly reduce datacentre energy consumption and costs, reduce vendor lock-in and ease management and maintenance.

“Datacentres face significant challenges to efficiency, flexibility and agility,” said Mike Yang, general manager of QCT. “Working with Intel on the Intel RSA program, we have developed our product lineup based on Open Compute to give customers the utmost in efficiency and performance, supported by open standards.”

“In addition, we provide manageability from the chassis level and rack level, up to pod level, so customers can easily pool resources across these levels to support dynamic workloads,” Yang said.

ODMs like Quanta have gained strong share in the hyperscale datacentre space because of their cost competitiveness, and at the same time the Open Compute project, an open source hardware project founded by Facebook a few years back, seems to be gaining favour among large cloud providers. Facebook, IBM, HP and Rackspace are among some of the larger providers building out Open Compute-based services at reasonable scale.

Alex Polvi, Boris Renski, CoreOS, Docker, Google, Kubernetes, Linux containers, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack, Vendor

Mirantis, CoreOS deliver Kubernetes on OpenStack

Mirantis and CoreOS are partnering on Kubernetes integration with OpenStack

Mirantis and CoreOS are partnering on Kubernetes integration with OpenStack

Pure-play OpenStack vendor Mirantis has teamed with CoreOS to integrate its distribution of the open source cloud software with Tectonic, CoreOS’ commercial Kubernetes distribution.

Tectonic blends Kubernetes, an open source container deployment management service, and the CoreOS software portfolio in an integrated package, including a management console for workflows and dashboards, an integrated registry to build and share Linux containers, and additional tools to automate deployment and customize rolling updates. It runs on-premises or in public and private clouds.

The two companies said the move would improve support and manageability of containers running on OpenStack and bolster their mutual hybrid cloud capabilities.

“Mirantis and CoreOS share a vision of helping DevOps teams create better software faster. Putting Kubernetes on top of OpenStack gives them flexibility in how they build their applications, letting them innovate quickly,” said Mirantis chief marketing officer and co-founder Boris Renski.

“We are thrilled to be working with Google and CoreOS, and look forward to hearing more from them about how enterprises can leverage containers with OpenStack at OpenStack Silicon Valley.”

The move comes nearly half a year after Mirantis announced it would partner with Google to get vanilla Kubernetes integrated with its OpenStack distribution and double down on support for containers more broadly, efforts that have seemingly accelerated since Google announced the official 1.0 launch of Kubernetes last month.

“Now that Kubernetes is production-ready, companies using Tectonic and Mirantis OpenStack can have a Google-like infrastructure at their fingertips,” said Alex Polvi, chief executive of CoreOS. “Mirantis possesses a deep understanding of open source software and their commitment to the open source ecosystem around OpenStack is second to none. It was natural to work with Mirantis to help customers see the benefits of Kubernetes on OpenStack.”

Docker, Markus Flierl, News & Analysis, Open Source, Oracle

Oracle latest legacy firm to support Docker

Oracle is adding support for Docker to Solaris

Oracle is adding support for Docker to Solaris

Oracle said this week that it would bring Docker support to Solaris, becoming the latest legacy software vendor to add support for the open source Linux container technology.

While Solaris has had support for Linux containers in the form of ‘Solaris Zones’ (Oracle’s virtual machine technology) for nearly a decade, the move will see Oracle enable Docker to be deployed within those ‘Zones’ (VMs).

The company also said it plans to make some of its software – Oracle WebLogic Server was the only one specifically mentioned – available for deployment and testing as full Docker images on Solaris.

“Today’s announcement really gives developers the best of both worlds – access to Oracle Solaris’ enterprise class security, resource isolation and superior analytics with the ability to easily create containers in dev/test, production and cloud environments,” said Markus Flierl, vice president, Oracle Solaris Core Technology.

“Integrating Docker into Oracle Solaris will make that even easier and will help customers benefit from highly integrated compute on premises and in the cloud,” Flierl said.

Laurent Lachal, senior analyst, infrastructure solutions at Ovum said the move is a win-win for those planning to move to more cloud-native technologies like OpenStack and Linux containers but still depend heavily on different components of the Oracle stack.

Oracle is the latest legacy software vendor to open up to Docker.

Late last year Windows announced it would support the container technology in Windows Server 2016, around the same time IBM announced it would provide a Docker-based container service through Bluemix, the company’s platform as a service offering.

Given how embedded Oracle is in large organisations the move could see Docker gain more traction in the traditional large enterprise, potentially a big win for the young open source container project.