Category Archives: OpenStack

Cisco, Converged Infrastructure, Nebula, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack, Private Cloud, Vendor

Converged OpenStack cloud pioneer Nebula closes its doors

Nebula, an OpenStack pioneer, is closing its doors

Nebula, an OpenStack pioneer, is closing its doors

Converged infrastructure vendor Nebula, one of the first companies to pioneer integrated OpenStack-based private cloud hardware, announced it will close its doors this week.

A notice posted by the Nebula management team on its website says the company had no choice but to cease operations after exhaustively searching for alternative arrangements that would allow the company to keep operating.

“When we started this journey four years ago, we set out to usher in a new era of cloud computing by curating and productizing OpenStack for the enterprise. We are incredibly proud of the role we had in establishing Nebula as the leading enterprise cloud computing platform. At the same time, we are deeply disappointed that the market will likely take another several years to mature. As a venture backed start up, we did not have the resources to wait.”

“Nebula private clouds deployed at customer sites will continue to operate normally, however support will no longer be available. Nebula is based on OpenStack and is compatible with OpenStack products from vendors including Red Hat, IBM, HP and others, providing customers with a number of choices moving forward.”

One of the original players behind the OpenStack codebase, Nebula offered Nebula Cosmos, a fast and secure deployment, management, and monitoring tool for enterprise-grade OpenStack private clouds, and converged infrastructure solutions based on x86 servers running OpenStack- the Nebula One.

Nearly five years after the creation of OpenStack the market is clearly still in its early stages despite loads of vendor hype and a flurry of acquisitions in this space. Indeed, the first challenge for independents like Nebula is their ability to gain critical mass and maintain operations – at least before being acquired by firms like Cisco, Red Hat, HP and other IT vendors that have snapped OpenStack startups in recent years in a bid to grow their portfolios based on the open source platform; the second is, of course, competing with the Ciscos, Red Hats and HPs of the world, which is no small feat.

Alex Freedland, Cloud Foundry, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack, Platform as a service, Sam Ramji

Mirantis joins Cloud Foundry to improve OpenStack PaaS integration

Mirantis has joined Cloud Foundry in a move aimed at improving integration between Cloud Foundry and OpenStack

Mirantis has joined Cloud Foundry in a move aimed at improving integration between Cloud Foundry and OpenStack

Pure-play OpenStack vendor Mirantis is joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation in a bid to help drive integration between the two open source platforms.

OpenStack has gained strong momentum in recent years with vendors like HP and IBM building fully fledged portfolios based on the technology; according to 451 Research OpenStack revenue will hit $3.3bn by 2018.

And as far as open source platform-as-a-service projects go, Cloud Foundry seems to have gained the lion’s share of vendor buy-in.

“As the pure-play OpenStack company, Mirantis is focused on making OpenStack the best way to build a private cloud and enable software development,” said Alex Freedland, Mirantis co-founder and chairman.

“Part of that vision is making it as simple as possible to deploy and manage technologies higher ‘up the stack’ – like Cloud Foundry, which has become a very popular PaaS for developer productivity on top of OpenStack. We believe that OpenStack serves the market best by supporting the most popular PaaS solutions and giving enterprise customers maximum choice, rather than prescribing a specific PaaS.”

Sam Ramji, chief executive officer of Cloud Foundry said: “Mirantis and the OpenStack community are doing important work at the infrastructure level of the stack. We’re looking forward to their contributions to optimise OpenStack and Cloud Foundry and empower developers to build their applications for the cloud – quickly and easily.”

In October last year Mirantis secured $100m in series B investment, which has no doubt put the company in a strong position to double down on industry partnerships.

Adam Johnson, Lauren Sell, Midokura, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenStack

Midokura doubles down on OpenStack

Midokura is joining OpenStack as a sponsor

Midokura is joining OpenStack as a sponsor

Networking startup Midokura has announced it is joining the OpenStack Foundation as a corporate sponsor in a bid to further its agenda within the open source cloud software community.

The company, which focuses on developing network function virtualisation (NFV) capabilities and helped develop the initial OpenStack tools to enable NFV (Quantum / Neutron), said it wanted to join the OpenStack community in a more formal capacity so it could push for a number of initiatives near and dear to its heart.

That agenda includes the adoption of a working group to create the OpenStack Foundation test certification standards and certification for developers.

Efforts are already underway at the Foundation to come to some consensus around what components need to be included in a distribution to be considered “core OpenStack”, but some believe those efforts need to be broadened to appeal to and include ISVs developing for the platform.

“Midokura has been involved with the OpenStack project as an originator of the OpenStack Quantum plug-in, which has since been renamed as Neutron. We have continued code contributions in every release since Bexar,” said Adam Johnson, vice president of business, Midokura. “By doubling down on Midokura’s commitment to OpenStack as a corporate sponsor, we look forward to further promoting the ideals behind the OpenStack Foundation, which align with our own.”

Midokura’s MidoNet NFV technology replaces the default Open vSwitch deployed by OpenStack Neutron with its own.

Lauren Sell, vice president of marketing, OpenStack Foundation: “The OpenStack community wants choices when it comes to scale-out networking. Midokura has demonstrated its commitment to the OpenStack community by delivering an open-source MidoNet option that users can consume in an open, collaborative model. We’re excited about Midokura joining the Foundation as a corporate sponsor, and we look forward to working together to make the project stronger.”

Financial Results, News & Analysis, Open Source, OpenShift, OpenStack, Red Hat

Red Hat says OpenStack, OpenShift deals trebled year-on-year

Red Hat enjoyed a solid fiscal year, with OpenStack and OpenShift

Red Hat enjoyed a solid fiscal year, with OpenStack and OpenShift

Red Hat revealed its fourth quarter 2015 financial this week, reporting revenue of $464m, up 16 per cent year-on-year. The firm also said deals involving OpenStack and OpenShift-based offerings tripled when compared to the fourth quarter 2014.

For the full fiscal year total revenue hit $1.79bn, up 17 per cent on the previous year, and the Linux incumbent reported subscription revenue for the quarter reached $405m, up 15 per cent year-on-year.

“We continued to experience strong demand for our open, hybrid cloud technologies, as evidenced by increased cross-selling in our top 30 deals which were all over $2 million for the first time,” stated Jim Whitehurst, president and chief executive officer of Red Hat. “Customers value the consistency and flexibility as they run their applications using Red Hat solutions across a variety of deployment models, including public and private clouds, to modernize and transform their IT infrastructure.”

In a call with analysts this week Whitehurst also said its OpenStack and OpenShift offerings, as well as Ceph – the storage system provider it acquired last year – are starting to show signs of market acceptance.

“Half of our OpenStack wins are six figure OpenStack wins in the quarter had Ceph as a component. So fully strong affinity between OpenStack and Ceph and our ability to be a credible provider of both, I think helps us do well in both. So we’re seeing a lot of benefit there.”

“The number of times the top 30 deal included OpenStack or OpenShift this quarter tripled from Q4 a year ago. Interestingly, one technology customer expanded their existing OpenShift deal this quarter and we now have our first $10 million plus open shift customer,” he said. “OpenShift has been performing well with customers and momentum is growing.”

OpenShift is currently pitted in a battle for mindshare against Cloud Foundry, another open source platform as a service. Cloud Foundry seems to have gained the lion’s share of vendor buy-in, but Paul Cormier, Red Hat’s executive vice president, products and technology said OpenShift wins over Cloud Foundry when it comes to standards.

“One of the biggest differences is that cloud foundry from the various vendors is it’s very difficult in implementation. So getting applications that are compatible across those different vendors on Cloud Foundry will be challenging for one thing,” he said, adding that OpenShift relies on more tried-and-tested technology standards.

Red Hat enjoyed a solid fourth quarter and fiscal 2015, and it will be interesting to see how the incumbent attempts to keep that positive momentum going. Professional services may be one viable avenue. The company recently created a consulting division that combines technology expertise and consulting resources the firm acquired over the years.

Europe, HP, News & Analysis, OpenStack, Public Sector, Xavier Poisson

HP, EC launch public sector cloud pilots in several European cities

The EC is working with HP to bring cloud to municipal governments in Europe

The EC is working with HP to bring cloud to municipal governments in Europe

HP announced it is working with the European Commission on several pilot cloud implementations in a bid to test how internal and citizen-facing public sector services cloud be moved off legacy platforms into more elastic cloud environments. The move is part of the Commission’s broader efforts to catalyse the use of cloud services in the public sector.

HP is working with the EC on the organisation’s ironically-named STORM (Surfing Towards the Opportunity of Real Migration) cloud project, which envisions the establishment of a public services cloud that allows services and data to be securely shared between the public and private sector partners.

The project currently includes three HP-led trials in Valladolid, Spain; Águeda, Portugal; and Thessaloniki, Greece. As part of the initiative HP is defining, designing and implementing an OpenStack-based infrastructure-as-a-service platform.

The initial stage of the project will see Valladolid pilot Urbanismo en Red, an application that gives citizens access to municipal development plans online. Thessaloniki will trial Virtual City Marketplace, a portal to buy and sell local services, while Agueda aims to increase public participation by allowing citizens and communities to express their opinion online and submit ideas for urban improvements.

The goal, the company said, is to accelerate the “cloudification” of public services in Europe, and to fine-tune and seed out a cloud platform model that can be replicated in other cities in Europe.

“Europe must ensure that new IT devices, applications, data repositories and services interact seamlessly anywhere – just like the Internet,” says Xavier Poisson Gouyou Beauchamps, vice president, cloud computing EMEA, HP.

“This project aims to make collaboration between public authorities easier and more cost effective through the sharing and re-use of common platforms, components and infrastructures. As a result, municipalities across the EU will take a step closer to becoming truly ‘smart cities’.”

“HP is working closely with the EU across a number of projects tied to accountability, security and compliance in order to accelerate digital growth in Europe,” he added.

Corey Bell, Datacentre, IBM, Ken King, News & Analysis, Open Compute, OpenPower, OpenStack, Power8, Vendor

OpenPower members reveal open source cloud tech mashups

OpenPower members have been busy creating open source server specs based on the Power8 architecture

OpenPower members have been busy creating open source server specs based on the Power8 architecture

OpenPower Foundation members pulled the curtain back on a number of open source cloud datacentre technologies including the first commercially available OpenPower-based server, and the first open server spec that combines OpenStack, Open Compute and OpenPower architectures.

Members of the open source hardware community, which IBM – the community’s founding organisation – said now numbers over 110 organisations, revealed a number of joint hardware initiatives falling under the OpenPower umbrella.

The Foundation announced the first OpenPower-based servers, developed by Chinese ODM Tyan (TYAN TN71-BP012), a variant of those IBM recently said it would add to its SoftLayer datacentres. The servers will be commercially available in the second half of 2015.

IBM and Wistron also revealed an OpenPower-based server using GPU and networking technology from Nvidia and Mellanox, respectively, which is being aimed at high performance compute workloads.

The foundation also announced the first server spec and motherboard mock-up combining the design concepts of the Facebook-led open source hardware project, Open Compute, with OpenStack and OpenPower technologies, an initiative Rackspace – among other service providers with a vested interest all three open source projects – was keen to bring to fruition.

“Collaborating across our open development communities will accelerate and broaden the raw potential of a fully open datacentre. We have a running start together and look forward to technical collaboration and events to engage our broader community,” said Corey Bell, chief executive officer of the Open Compute Project.

In an interview with BCN earlier this month Brad McCredie, IBM fellow and vice president of IBM Power Systems Development and president of the OpenPower Foundation said there is a big opportunity for Power to succeed in the market, and that IBM hopes to claim up to 30 per cent of the scale-out market in a matter of years.

Ken King, general manager OpenPower Alliances at IBM said: “OpenPower started off as an idea that immediately resonated with our technology partners to strengthen their scale out implementations like analytics.  Now, OpenPower is fundamental to every conversation IBM is having with clients — from HPC to scale out computing to cloud service providers.  Choice, freedom and better performance are strategic imperatives guiding customers around the globe, and OpenPOWER is leading the way.

Amazon AWS, Amazon Web Services, Cloud computing, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, OpenStack, Research

Cloud Computing Entering Hypergrowth Phase

Cloud services and cloud platforms are now an undeniable part of the IT landscape. Forrester research indicates the shift has begun from exploration of cloud as a potential option, to rationalization of cloud services within the overall IT portfolio.

Cloud platforms, most notably Amazon Web Services, were only collectively $4.7 billion last year but are maturing quickly thanks to stronger recent solutions from traditional IT partners IBM, HP and Microsoft. The growth in use, maturity, and financial viability of public cloud platforms are proving their longstanding value as legitimate deployment options for enterprise applications. While not a one-for-one replacement for on-premise, hosting, or colocation, cloud platforms fit well as ideal deployment options for elastic and transient workloads built in modern application architectures.

For applications and services built in an agile mode with modern architectures, discrete cloud services, such as database, storage, integration and other standalone cloud middleware components, will empower developers by freeing them from the management and maintenance of these components and reduce overall deployment footprint and cost. They are also managed and enhanced by vendors as often as daily delivering new capabilities that can help a company maintain pace with the changing desires of an empowered customer base

As the largest clouds continue to invest in efficiencies that can only be achieved at their massive scales, the gulf between the cost efficiencies that can be had from the cloud and what is possible on-premise or through other outsourcing and hosting options will widen dramatically.

How Forrester came to these conclusions.

Amazon Web Services, Guest Post, Open Source, OpenStack, Rackspace

OpenStack’s Third Birthday – a Recap with a Look into the Future

Guest Post By Nati Shalom, CTO and Founder of GigaSpaces

OpenStack was first announced three years ago at the OSCON conference in Portland. I remember the first time I heard about the announcement and how it immediately caught my attention. Ever since that day, I have become a strong advocate of the technology. Looking back, I thought that it would be interesting to analyze why.

Is it the fact that it’s an open source cloud? Well partially, but that couldn’t be the main reason. OpenStack was not the first open source cloud initiative; we had Eucalyptus, then later Cloud.com and other open source cloud initiatives before OpenStack emerged.

There were two main elements missing from these previous open source cloud initiatives: the companies behind the initiatives and the commitment to a true open movement. It was clear to me that a true open source cloud movement could not turn into an industry movement, and thus meet its true potential if it was led by startups. In addition, the fact that companies whose businesses run cloud services, such as Rackspace, brought its own experience in the field and a large scale consumer of such infrastructure such as NASA, gave OpenStack a much better starting point. Also, knowing some of the main individuals behind the initiatives and their commitment to the Open Cloud made me feel much more confident that the OpenStack project would have a much higher chance for success than its predecessors. Indeed, after three years, it is now clear that the game is essentially over and it is apparent who is going to win the open source cloud war. I’m happy to say that I also had my own little share in spreading the word by advocating the OpenStack movement in our own local community which also grew extremely quickly over the past two years.

OpenStack as an Open Movement

Paul Holland, an Executive Program Manager for Cloud at HP, gave an excellent talk during the last OpenStack Summit, comparing the founding of the OpenStack Foundation to the establishment of the United States. Paul drew interesting parallelization between the factors that brought a group of thirteen individual states to unite and become the empire of today, with that of OpenStack.

OpenStack1

Paul also drew an interesting comparison between the role of the common currency that fostered the open market and trade between the different states with its OpenStack equivalent: APIs, common language, processes, etc. Today, we take those things for granted, but the reality is that common currency isn’t yet trivial in many countries even today, yet we cannot imagine what our global economy would look like without the Dollar as a common currency or English as a common language, even if they have not been explicitly chosen as such by all countries.

OpenStack2

As individuals, we often tend to gloss over the details of the Foundation and its governing body, but it is those details that make OpenStack an industry movement that has brought many large companies, such as Red Hat, HP, IBM, Rackspace and many others (57 in total as of today), to collaborate and contribute to a common project as noted in this report. Also, the fact that the number of individual developers has been growing steadily year after year is another strong indication of the real movement that this project has created.

OpenStack3

Thinking Beyond Amazon AWS

OpenStack essentially started as the open source alternative to Amazon AWS. Many of the sub-projects often began as Amazon equivalents. Today, we are starting to see projects with a new level of innovation that do not have any AWS equivalent. The most notable one IMHO is the Neutron (network) and BareMetal projects. Both have huge potential to disrupt how we think about cloud infrastructure.

Only on OpenStack

We often tend to compare OpenStack with other clouds on a feature-to-feature basis.

The open source and community adoption nature of OpenStack enables us to do things that are unique to OpenStack and cannot be matched by other clouds. Here are a few examples:

  • Run the same infrastructure on private and public clouds.
  • Work with multiple cloud providers; have more than one OpenStack-compatible cloud provider with which to work.
  • Plug in different HW as cloud platforms for private clouds from different vendors, such as HP, IBM, Dell, Cisco, or use pre-packaged OpenStack distributions, such as the one from Ubuntu, Red Hat, Piston etc.
  • Choose your infrastructure of choice for storage, network etc, assuming that many of the devices come with OpenStack-supported plug-ins.

All this can be done only on OpenStack; not just because it is open source, but primarily because of the level of adoption of OpenStack that has made it the de-facto industry standard.

Re-think the Cloud Layers

When cloud first came into the world, it was common to look at the stack from a three-layer approach: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.

Typically, when we designed each of the layers, we looked at the other layers as *black-boxes* and often had to create parallel stacks within each layer to manage security, metering, high availability etc.

The fact that OpenStack is an open source infrastructure allows us to break the wall between those layers and re-think where we draw the line. For example, when we design our PaaS on OpenStack, there is no reason why we wouldn’t reuse the same security, metering, messaging and provisioning that is used to manage our infrastructure. The result is a much thinner and potentially more efficient foundation across all the layers that is easier to maintain. The new Heat project and Ceilometer in OpenStack are already starting to take steps in this direction and are, therefore, becoming some of the most active projects in the upcoming Havana release of OpenStack.

Looking Into the Future

Personally, I think that the world with OpenStack is by far healthier and brighter for the entire industry, as opposed to a world in which we are dependent on one or two major cloud providers, regardless of how good of a job they may or may not do. There are still many challenges ahead in turning all this into a reality and we are still at the beginning. The good news, though, is that there is a lot of room for contribution and, as I’ve witnessed myself, everyone can help shape this new world that we are creating.

OpenStack Birthday Events

To mark OpenStack’s 3rd Birthday, there will be a variety of birthday celebrations taking place around the world. At the upcoming OSCON event in Portland from July 22-26, OpenStack will host their official birthday party on July 24th. There will also be a celebration in Israel on the 21st, marking the occasion in Tel Aviv.

For more information about the Foundation’s birthday celebrations, visit their website at www.openstack.org.

Nati-GigaSpaces

Nati Shalom is the CTO and founder of GigaSpaces and founder of the Israeli cloud.org consortium.

 

Hewlett-Packard, HP Cloud Services, Information technology management, OpenStack, Partnerships, PZFlex, Saas, Tools, Weidlinger Associates

Weidlinger Launches PZFlexCloud 3D Virtual-Prototyping SaaS Using CliQr Technologies CloudCenter, HP Cloud

Weidlinger Associates, Inc., the developer of PZFlex, a 3D virtual-prototyping and wave-propagation analysis software, and CliQr Technologies announced the launch of PZFlexCloud on CliQr’s CloudCenter platform. PZFlexCloud extends the market reach and performance of PZFlex’s engineering software by exploiting the power, elasticity, and ubiquity of the cloud. Running on HP Cloud Services, HP’s public cloud, PZFlexCloud is offered as a professional service as well as an additional feature of the full PZFlex solution suite.

“Cloud computing’s almost infinite on-demand resources, with its utility billing model, combined with our PZFlex finite element analysis [FEA] software as a service, is a game changer for the scientific and engineering communities,” said Dr. Robert Banks, PZFlex director and senior associate at the Mountain View, California, office of global engineering firm Weidlinger Associates. “PZFlexCloud represents a step change in the way high-fidelity FEA solutions can be accessed by a broad set of users, from large enterprises to innovative departments and individuals.”

By taking advantage of the power and elasticity of cloud computing, PZFlexCloud will permit experienced users to realize unprecedented performance and flexibility of use. An accurate multi-run 3D simulation for piezoelectric and wave propagation analysis that traditionally took 32 days was recently completed with the CliQr platform and PZFlexCloud in just 14 hours, allowing for more test iterations and shorter analysis times. PZFlexCloud also makes advanced FEA available to a broader market. With CliQr and PZFlexCloud, new users who have had to compromise on functionality can now use the PZFlex suite on a pay-as-you-go basis without the costs and complexities of building and maintaining capital-intensive physical computing resources.

Dr. Banks added, “PZFlexCloud eliminates the longstanding trade-offs between advanced speed, functionality, and approachable economics. Customers can get simplified access and high-performance use of the PZFlex solution without having to design, build, or maintain their own information-technology infrastructure.”

Contributing to PZFlexCloud’s success, the CliQr Technologies CloudCenter platform simplifies the migration and runtime management of the PZFlex software suite without requiring any modification of the leading FEA software. With CliQr’s CloudCenter, PZFlex was able to benchmark the price and performance of their application across all possible cloud environments and determine where their offering could deliver the best value for their customers. Running on HP Cloud Services, PZFlexCloud makes it easy, powerful, and secure to perform complex FEA on the cloud.

“CliQr shares Weidlinger’s value and vision to make the most sophisticated cloud solutions approachable and manageable by the broadest user base,” said Gaurav Manglik, CEO and co-founder of CliQr Technologies. “CliQr understands that software vendors want to take advantage of the cloud while protecting the time and investments they have already made in their core offerings. CliQr provides a complete platform for businesses like Weidlinger and their PZFlex offering, looking for an integrated approach to commercially use the cloud and maintain the ability to flexibly adapt to future changes in the cloud-computing landscape.”

“Scientific and engineering communities are looking for ways to access 3D virtual-prototyping solutions without having to build and maintain their own physical infrastructure,” said Dan Baigent, senior director, Business Development, Cloud Services, HP. “Running on HP Cloud Services, PZFlexCloud provides users with the ability to access PZFlex in the cloud in one click, which leads to much shorter analysis time at much lower cost.”

GigaSpace, HP Cloud Services, Open Source, OpenStack

GigaSpaces Launches Cloudify Player Service on HP OpenStack

GigaSpaces Technologies announced today the launch of the Cloudify Player, a new patent-based service that makes testing and deploying  complex, multi-tier big data applications like playing a video on YouTube. The new service currently supports OpenStack-based clouds and is available as a free online service from HP Cloud Services and GigaSpaces’ Cloudify. The source code for the service is also available as an open source project on Github. The Player was developed in collaboration with HP Cloud Services, GigaSpaces’ cloud partner and leading provider of OpenStack-based public cloud services.

Unlike many of the current online deployment tools, the Cloudify Player was designed as a lightweight widget that can be easily embedded in any external website using JavaScript embed code, similar to the way one would embed a YouTube video.

The lightweight design makes the Cloudify Player a classic tool for open source projects and ISV’s such as NoSQL database providers, (e.g. Couchbase, ElasticSearch, MongoDB and Cassandra), as well as web framework owners such as the Play Framework, NodeJS, or even complete web platforms like Redmine or Drupal. These providers can use the Player as a tool for launching their product on the cloud from within their own website, personalizing the Player with their own logo and brand. The Player allows vendors to offer a single-click, hassle-free deployment experience for users who want to test drive their product. As the widget is based on Cloudify and Chef, users will have a streamlined experience from a simple trial to a full production environment on a public or private cloud of their choice, all using the same tool.

“With the Cloudify player, Couchbase users can instantly launch a full-blown Couchbase instance on the cloud and give it a test drive, without going through the usual download-configure-install cycle”, said Dipti Borkar, Couchbase Director of Product Management. “This can lower the barrier for new users as they evaluate our technology, and can help existing users to evaluate new Couchbase releases without needing to upgrade their already existing installation”.

Prior to the joint development of the Player, GigaSpaces worked with HP using Cloudify to enable on-boarding of enterprise applications to HPCS.

Cloudify users can also use the new Player to easily experiment with and test new tools online without downloading or installing Cloudify.

“One of the biggest challenges in managing applications in the cloud is keeping the right balance between control and convenience,” said Uri Cohen, VP Product Management at GigaSpaces.  “We have focused on making Cloudify the most open framework for deploying any application on any cloud, while also keeping the user in control over the environment, the stack and the cloud of choice. With the new Cloudify Player we provide both full control and convenience at a level that was previously unattainable, through a streamlined experience from a simple trial to full production deployment.”