SuSE enters OpenStack IaaS race

SuSE has released an early development snapshot of its OpenStack-powered cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solution.

SuSE Cloud is a new appliance configured to run Diablo, the latest version of the open source cloud organisation’s operating system (OS).

The Attachmate division also said its IaaS was hypervisor agnostic and OS neutral, so customers and partners can build, deploy and manage both private and public cloud infrastructure quickly and easily when it made available sometime next year.

In announcing the product, Nils Brauckmann, SuSE president and general manager, talked up the company’s 20-year track record of commercialising enterprise open source software and set its sights on consolidating its current Linux customer base in the cloud.

"Today we help more than 13,000 customers run their business more efficiently and cost effectively on SUSE Linux Enterprise,” he said. “What we have done with SUSE Linux Enterprise, we will now do for OpenStack-powered cloud infrastructure."

Based on OpenStack's interrelated cloud computing platform components, SuSE's cloud infrastructure solution runs on SuSE Linux Enterprise Server using existing tools, including SuSE Studio and SuSE Manager.

The company is aiming its integration of the SuSE tools and platform with OpenStack at organisations already comfortable with its technologies that want to avoid complexity, high costs and risks when deploying cloud environments.

"Building a cloud solution today with OpenStack components is not a trivial task," said Gary Chen, IDC cloud and virtualisation system software research manager. "SuSE has made building open source private clouds easier with its new Diablo image and it's encouraging to see SuSE as an OpenStack member working to make OpenStack simpler to deploy and consume."

Jonathan Bryce, Rackspace Cloud founder and chairman of the OpenStack Project Policy Board stated that the entry of SuSE Cloud demonstrated how OpenStack was continuing to gain momentum as a viable, open source cloud standard.

He said: “We welcome SuSE's participation in the OpenStack community and look forward to its contributions toward hardening its components and delivering enterprise-quality solutions.”

SUSE is not the only new OpenStack contributor working on an IaaS appliance. Nebula, founded by former NASA chief technology officer Chris Kemp, is currently testing its OpenStack cloud infrastructure appliance, which is designed to manage deployment of commodity servers in private cloud environments and will be available next year.