SUSE LLC has released Cloud 4, Â the latest version of its OpenStack distribution for building Infrastructure as a Service private clouds.
Based on the Icehouse OpenStack release, it includes full support for the Ceph distributed storage system, advanced scalability, automation and availability features.
“With SUSE Cloud, SUSE has taken the lead in making a standardized OpenStack distribution deployable in today’s enterprise data centers,” Michael Miller, the company’s vice president of global alliances and marketing, said in a release. “SUSE Cloud makes it easy and cost effective to implement a highly available, mixed-hypervisor private cloud infrastructure. And the addition of Ceph distributed storage capabilities increases the value and flexibility of SUSE Cloud in almost any enterprise.”
The company said Cloud 4 offers a number of benefits including
–Reduced costs by deploying a software-defined storage solution based on the Ceph distributed storage system. SUSE Cloud’s installation framework enables enterprises to automatically configure and deploy Ceph clusters. With a single solution using commodity hardware, Ceph enables provisioning of persistent block storage at the virtual machine level for quick retrieval and fast processing along with the construction of a resilient image and object storage cloud that is massively scalable;
–Maximized VMware investments through enhanced integration between vSphere environments and OpenStack. SUSE Cloud now includes advanced VMware capabilities for image management and support for VMware Virtual SAN. It already supported vSphere compute nodes, VMware NSX network virtualization and the vSphere driver for block storage;
–Simplified workload deployment, while providing increased levels of scalability and automation. SUSE Cloud delivers database, load balancing and firewall-as-a-service, the company says. It said the standardization of these services makes it faster to deploy workloads by eliminating the need for users to manage and configure these services themselves. In addition, SUSE Cloud improves application scalability through tighter integration between the orchestration service that automates control and coordination of multiple virtual machines based on a set of predefined templates and the rest of the cloud services, such as compute, storage and networking.
