SUSE Cloud 4 now available, featuring Ceph distributed storage

SUSE Cloud 4, the newest version of SUSE's OpenStack distribution for building Infrastructure-as-a-Service private clouds, is now available. SUSE Cloud 4 is based on the latest OpenStack release (Icehouse) and features full support for the Ceph distributed storage system. Along with Ceph support, the latest SUSE Cloud platform includes advanced VMware capabilities and enhanced scalability, automation and availability features to ease enterprise adoption of OpenStack and help organisations maximise current IT investments.

“With SUSE Cloud, SUSE has taken the lead in making a standardised OpenStack distribution deployable in today's enterprise data centres,” said Michael Miller, SUSE® vice president of global alliances and marketing. “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.”

SUSE Cloud provides enterprises with the capabilities and support to seamlessly deploy an open-standards private cloud. The SUSE Cloud installation framework makes it easy to install and manage OpenStack clouds, and SUSE Cloud is the first enterprise distribution with automated high availability configuration and deployment of the OpenStack cloud services. This ensures the continuous operation of private cloud deployments and the delivery of enterprise-grade Service Level Agreements. In addition, SUSE Cloud supports a multi-hypervisor cloud environment that gives enterprises increased choice and interoperability in their cloud designs. Supported hypervisors include KVM, Xen, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere.

Laura DuBois, program vice president for storage at IDC, said, “Software-defined storage is an increasingly important component of Infrastructure-as-a-Service clouds. Ceph and OpenStack are highly complementary solutions that are increasingly valued by enterprises seeking to deliver a more flexible and responsive infrastructure to deliver business goals. By integrating the installation of Ceph with SUSE Cloud, SUSE has simplified the deployment process, making it faster for enterprises to scale their storage as part of an OpenStack cloud.”

SUSE Cloud 4 offers the following benefits to enterprise customers:
· 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.
· Maximised VMware investments through enhanced integration between existing VMware vSphere environments and OpenStack. SUSE Cloud now includes advanced VMware capabilities for image management and support for VMware Virtual SAN™, in addition to previous support for VMware vSphere® compute nodes, VMware NSX™ network virtualisation 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 standardisation 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.

Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, said, “The OpenStack project is seeing increasingly wide adoption by enterprises. We've heard from enterprise users that high availability, integration with their preferred tools and platforms, and access to the latest upstream innovation is important, and that's exactly the market SUSE is reaching for with Ceph integration and HA tools.”