Aug. 29 — 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 24x7 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.”

Global Partner Support

B1 Systems

“Like SUSE, B1 Systems offers solutions tailored for the needs of today’s fast-paced and ever-changing open source and cloud environments,” said Ralph Dehner, CEO and founder of Germany-based, B1 Systems GmbH.  “Our primary goal is to provide the best support and customization tools available in today’s open source market – a commitment embodied through leading vendors like SUSE -- and look forward to implementing IAAS private cloud solutions using SUSE Cloud for our joint customers.” 

Cloud Cruiser

“Cloud Cruiser is pleased to be working together with SUSE to provide an enterprise chargeback solution, designed for OpenStack, for SUSE Cloud customers requiring granular cost transparency, reporting, and chargeback,” said Dave Zabrowski, founder and CEO of Cloud Cruiser. 

Fairbanks

“Implementing OpenStack-based clouds can be a complex task. SUSE Cloud greatly simplifies this process. In fact, during testing, we were able to deploy them in less than two hours. We expect using SUSE Cloud will dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes us to get our customers up and running,” said Ruud Harmsen, director, Fairbanks NV. “With SUSE Cloud, Fairbanks can more quickly help customers manage and deploy scalable and elastic cloud services.” 

Inktank

“The SUSE team understands that cloud infrastructures require a new way of thinking about storage. Expensive proprietary solutions don’t make sense in an environment in which scalability, reliability and efficiency are critical goals,” said James Duncan, CTO, Inktank. “We are excited to partner with SUSE on SUSE Cloud to support the full integration of Ceph -- the leading open source cloud storage platform that was designed with extreme scalability and distributed computing in mind.”

Intel

“For over two decades, Intel has collaborated with open-source innovators like SUSE to provide customers with the performance, scalability, security and power-efficiency they need in mission-critical and cloud computing environments,” said Billy Cox, director, Intel Cloud Strategy.  “As an early adopter of OpenStack and proponent of open source, we look forward to our continued collaboration with the OpenStack community and SUSE to deliver on the promise of open, trusted clouds.”

Mirantis

“Both Mirantis and SUSE align perfectly in their commitment to the open source vision for OpenStack,” said Boris Renski, co-founder and executive vice president at Mirantis.  “Mirantis’ purpose is to make it both safe and easy for enterprises of all sizes to adopt OpenStack software, unencumbered by proprietary packaging. SUSE’s proven leadership in driving commercial Linux is motivated by much the same approach. Thus, it’s natural for us to partner with a key OpenStack player like SUSE.”

Availability

The product is generally available now. 

Learn More

More information about SUSE Cloud can be found at www.suse.com/susecloud.

About SUSE

SUSE, a pioneer in open source software, provides reliable, interoperable Linux and cloud infrastructure solutions that give enterprises greater control and flexibility. More than 20 years of engineering excellence, exceptional service and an unrivaled partner ecosystem power the products and support that help our customers manage complexity, reduce cost, and confidently deliver mission-critical services. The lasting relationships we build allow us to adapt and deliver the smarter innovation they need to succeed—today and tomorrow. For more information, visit us at www.suse.com.

-----

Source: Suse