Dell and SUSE: refining the art and science of OpenStack cloud deployments

The Dell OpenStack cloud solutions team is excited to unveil our newly enhanced Dell SUSE Cloud Solution,  powered by OpenStack. This newly enhanced cloud infrastructure solution makes multi-hypervisor clouds a reality. It is now possible to operate data center cloud environments with nodes running KVM, Xen, and Hyper-V hypervisors.

So, what is so new here?

These enhancement to the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution are delivered via Dell solution integration with SUSE Cloud 2.0 – an enterprise-ready OpenStack distribution for building private clouds now with the ability to support Hyper-V nodes installed by Crowbar.

We continue to listen to our customers, and understand their desire for choice. Through this solution we are providing customers a Microsoft hypervisor choice in addition to KVM. With support for multiple hypervisors, SUSE Cloud 2.0  provides extended flexibility so you can optimize cloud workloads on whatever hypervisor delivers the ideal operational and performance benefits in your environment. This flexibility is a key to efficiency in today’s hyper-heterogeneous data centers. After all, isn’t  this what cloud computing is all about?

What exactly is the Dell SUSE Cloud Solution?

Simply put, this solution is an end-to-end private cloud solution, with the following core components:

  • SUSE Cloud 2.0: SUSE’s enterprise-ready OpenStack distribution, with an integrated installation framework based on the Dell-initiated Crowbar open source project, enabling organizations to rapidly deploy OpenStack private clouds. This OpenStack distribution delivers all the integrated OpenStack projects including Nova, Swift, Cinder, Neutron, Keystone, Glance, and Dashboard.
  • SUSE Studio: The award-winning SUSE image building solution enables enterprises to rapidly adapt and deploy applications into the SUSE Cloud image repository or public clouds.
  • SUSE Manager: Manages Linux workloads and enables the efficient management, maintenance and monitoring of Linux workloads across physical, virtual, and public or private cloud environments.
  • Dell platforms and reference architecture: The Dell SUSE Cloud Solution includes a validated and certified reference architecture with Dell PowerEdge C6220 and R720/R720XD server systems and Dell networking infrastructure.
  • Dell and SUSE Professional services, support and training: Enterprise services for complete assessment, design, deployment and ongoing support, provided through a cooperative support model leveraging the combined capabilities of Dell and SUSE.

In addition to enhancing the core cloud software platform, the Dell and SUSE teams have delivered enhancements to the Dell Crowbar Operations Platform to rapidly instantiate hardware and deploy these multi-hypervisor environments.

Dell Crowbar is the robust open-source installation framework that simplifies, standardizes and automates the setup of OpenStack multi-hypervisor clouds. Dell and SUSE are actively developing and refining Crowbar, so you can fully configure your environment, automatically discover and configure new hardware platforms, and simply deploy the complete cloud software stack — all in a repeatable manner, in a fraction of the time required of manual efforts.

SUSE Studio and SUSE Manager are also available from SUSE, so you can quickly assemble applications into your image repository and easily monitor and maintain your deployed applications across your cloud resources.

Why consider open source solutions for your cloud?

Open source clouds allow you to innovate on open platforms and frameworks to accelerate your time-to-market and time-to-value. By leveraging community building and collaboration with the OpenStack project, you can gain direct control over your cloud infrastructure and the software you use to manage it – this is why OpenStack is the fastest growing open source project on the planet. Further, with OpenStack you have the opportunity to develop and refine our own features rather than wait for commercial vendors, who may or may not release the features you want when you want them.

Bottom line: OpenStack is faster, flexible, more cost efficient, and can be tuned for your environment.

How does OpenStack fit into Dell’s Cloud strategy?

Dell’s Cloud strategy is focused on three areas: enabling private cloud, deploying multi-cloud management and supplying cloud builders. OpenStack is key to our first pillar of enabling private clouds and allows us to provide customers with flexible, open cloud solutions so they can eliminate vendor lock-in and build solutions that best suit their needs.

Four Weeks, Four Webinars: A Deep Dive into the Dell SUSE Cloud Solution, Powered by OpenStack

Starting on September 26th, Dell and SUSE are hosting a webinar series for system administrators, DevOps engineers and solution architects. Please join us to get a step-by-step walkthrough of the joint Dell and SUSE OpenStack-based private cloud solution.

Shout out for OpenStack Summit 

To learn more and Dell and SUSE solutions for OpenStack Clouds live Come and visit Dell at OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong. It’s coming fast – See you there!

About the Author: Joseph B. George