SUSE today announced the general availability of SUSE® Cloud, its first commercially supported private cloud solution, at CloudOpen 2012. Powered by OpenStack™, SUSE Cloud is an automated cloud management platform that enables the rapid deployment and easy ongoing management of an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) private cloud. Backed by SUSE’s 20 years of experience commercializing open source projects and delivering global, enterprise-class support, SUSE Cloud enables enterprises to improve resource utilization and speed the delivery of services by seamlessly managing and provisioning workloads across a secure, compliant and fully supported cloud environment. SUSE Cloud also integrates with SUSE Studio™ and SUSE Manager, allowing enterprises to rapidly deploy, adapt and manage applications and workloads across private and public clouds.
Business Connexion, the largest provider of data center services in Southern Africa, is leveraging SUSE Cloud as the foundational infrastructure on which it will build a range of cloud offerings to better serve customers in the future. “We view open cloud technologies as critical for rolling out new services to our customers. The ease with which we can deploy and manage cloud-based workloads with SUSE Cloud simplifies our installation processes, enabling us to set up clouds in our data center quickly and reducing the tasks needed to add capacity as we grow,” said Frans Labuschagne, senior services manager, Data Center Services, Business Connexion. “We aim to grow and enhance this platform and will do so in partnership with SUSE as the developer of the technology solution.”
SUSE Cloud is based on the OpenStack project, which has contributions from more than 3,300 developers at 180 companies. As a key member of OpenStack, SUSE chose to base SUSE Cloud on the OpenStack project in response to customer demand and as a result of OpenStack’s broad industry support and vibrant community.
“Open source technologies such as KVM, Xen and Linux have already found great success in the cloud, and OpenStack stands to be another piece of the puzzle,” said Gary Chen, research manager, Cloud and Virtualization System Software, IDC. “The latest release from OpenStack is a solution enterprise organizations are actively evaluating. SUSE is well timed to help enterprise organizations build private clouds.”
“SUSE Cloud is a positive result of SUSE’s participation in the community that will help deliver enterprise-quality OpenStack solutions to its strong customer base as well as make the open source cloud more accessible to a broader set of users,” said Jonathan Bryce, chairman of the OpenStack Project Policy Board.
Making the move to cloud computing can often require enterprises to purchase and deploy new hardware and software. SUSE Cloud allows organizations to leverage their existing infrastructure while optimizing current licensing costs. Enterprises using SUSE Cloud benefit from the largest portfolio of certified third-party applications running on Linux as well as certifications on most industry-standard hardware. As a result, SUSE customers have assurance that the software and infrastructure solutions they use today will move to the cloud with them.
With SUSE Cloud, enterprises can:
- Improve the speed and accuracy of delivering services to the line of business: SUSE Cloud delivers a dynamic and flexible private cloud infrastructure. Using SUSE Cloud’s automation, self-service and workload standardization capabilities allows the line of business and IT staff to work more closely together. By automating time-consuming processes that are necessary for provisioning new business services with SUSE Cloud, IT can respond rapidly and more accurately to new requirements.
- Drive the agility they want, with the support they need: With SUSE Cloud, enterprises can achieve a more flexible infrastructure and accelerate time to value for new projects, while ensuring stability and security. SUSE Cloud includes 24×7 worldwide technical support and is fully integrated into SUSE update processes, so enterprises can easily maintain and patch their cloud deployments. This includes both the components of SUSE Cloud and the underlying SUSE Linux Enterprise Server systems that make up the cloud.
- Benefit from community innovation: SUSE Cloud includes support for all components of the OpenStack Essex Release, which has contributions from 200 developers in 55 companies. Future versions of SUSE Cloud will continue to track to the six-month cycle of OpenStack upstream releases.
- Prepare for hybrid cloud computing by easily building and managing cloud-based applications using SUSE Studio and SUSE Manager: Integration with SUSE Studio, SUSE’s award-winning image building platform, allows enterprises to rapidly deploy and adapt applications for use within a private or public cloud. By managing workloads across public or private clouds with SUSE Manager, enterprises can efficiently maintain and monitor their Linux environment, inside or outside of the cloud.
- Scale infrastructure and IT staff efficiently: By tracking usage of computing resources and automating service delivery, SUSE Cloud improves server utilization and allows enterprises to scale their infrastructure without adding staff. By integrating the Crowbar software framework, an open source project sponsored by Dell, SUSE Cloud simplifies deployment and ongoing administration of the physical cloud infrastructure. Automating deployment and management tasks improves IT staff productivity, while providing enterprises with maximum flexibility to configure their clouds to meet specific needs. “We are pleased that SUSE has chosen to actively contribute to Crowbar, an open source software framework developed by Dell, and leveraged by Dell OpenStack and Hadoop solutions, to deliver a simple to use but robust provisioning framework. Crowbar is a fresh approach to cloud tooling, and its practical and accessible model is attracting a great cross-industry community,” said John Igoe, executive director of cloud and big data solutions, Dell. “We’re excited that SUSE has worked with us to extend the capabilities of Crowbar to support SUSE Cloud.”
“Over the past twenty years, we’ve accumulated the strength, capabilities and resources to build a solid foundation our customers can rely on in order to succeed in the next twenty years and beyond in three strategic areas: enterprise Linux, cloud, and integrated systems,” said Nils Brauckmann, president and general manager, SUSE. “SUSE Cloud is driven by our customers’ desire and need to increase business agility and reduce costs through a cloud solution. We are delivering on our cloud strategy by combining the advantages of an open cloud platform with our history of world-class support and our reputation for working with a broad, diverse ecosystem of partners.”
Availability
The product is generally available now.