At the Linux Foundation's CloudOpen conference in San Diego this week, SUSE unveiled an infrastructure management platform based on OpenStack. Named SUSE Cloud, the offering aims to help enterprise users improve their workflows in private and public infrastructure environments. According to an official statement, the Linux distributor says their platform will assist with workload management and provisioning while keeping operations secure and compliant.

Given the open source nature of SUSE and the CloudOpen conference, it seemed fitting a place as any for the company to announce a platform based on OpenStack. Over 3,300 developers from 180 companies, including SUSE, contribute to the project. The decision to utilize OpenStack for SUSE Cloud came as a result of high demand from their customer base.

SUSE Cloud combines the latest OpenStack release from April 2012, "Essex," along with SUSE Studio and SUSE Manager, the company's virtualization and server management utilities. With these tools, SUSE says their platform allows the creation of hybrid computing environments. SUSE Cloud also integrates Dell's Crowbar framework for infrastructure management.

Jonathan Bryce, chairman of OpenStack's project policy board, seemed pleased with the new offering, saying:

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.

While SUSE Cloud was officially announced at the CloudOpen conference, the Linux distributor provided a use case out of Africa. Business Conexion is a datacenter services vendor based in southern Africa. The company is running SUSE Cloud as a foundation to create new features for its clients.

Frans Labuschangne, senior services manager, datacenter services division, Business Conexion, explained his company's take on SUSE cloud and open source offerings:

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.

SUSE is not the first Linux vendor to build a cloud operation with OpenStack. Canonical uses OpenStack for its Ubuntu Cloud foundation technology and Red Hat announced a preview version of its OpenStack distro for enterprise environments earlier this month. All three are "Platinum-level" OpenStack supporters.