In addition to the launch of Nebula, ex-NASA CTO Chris Kemp’s OpenStack-based startup which we covered yesterday, there have been some other important announcements regarding OpenStack this week.
HP is joining the OpenStack community, Dell is rolling out an OpenStack cloud and OpenStack will soon release a connector for Gluster.
HP Joins OpenStack
This week HP announced that it is joining and supporting the OpenStack. CEO Leo Apotheker has made HP’s cloud ambitions known, but this is the first indication of what stack it would use. However, although HP’s development teams will contribute to OpenStack, there’s still no announcement that HP will offer any product or service based on it.
Dell Rolling Out OpenStack-based Private Cloud Solution
Dell, one of HP’s biggest competitors and a long-time supporter of OpenStack announced the Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution, an end-to-end solution for building private clouds. It consists of the OpenStack cloud operating system, “cloud-optimized” Dell PowerEdge C servers, the Dell’s Crowbar software and service and support from both Dell and Rackspace Cloud Builders.
Gluster Connector for OpenStack
OpenStack announced that it will release a connector for Gluster that will enable users to deploy and migrate virtual machines within the OpenStack environment more quickly and easily. Here’s the feature list from the announcement:
- Instantly boot VMs using a mountable filesystem interface – no more waiting to fetch the entire VM image before booting
- Live migration of VMs with no disruption to users for business continuity and disaster recovery
- Instantly switch from one VM to another
- Migrate the VMs as well as resume the VMs on a different hypervisor, in case the original hypervisor fails.
- After migration, the destination VM comes up with preserved data
- Movement of VMs between clouds
- Easier management of VMs
This will represent a milestone in the advancement of cloud interoperability and portability.
