SUSE brings high availability to private clouds

SUSE has announced the addition of high availability to SUSE Cloud, its OpenStack distribution for building Infrastructure-as-a-Service private clouds. SUSE Cloud 3 is the first enterprise OpenStack distribution with automated high availability configuration and deployment, ensuring the rapid startup and continuous operation of private cloud deployments.

“A highly available infrastructure gives customers confidence in their private clouds, whether for development and testing, high-priority batch processing, or rapid roll-out of a new promotional campaign,” said Michael Miller, SUSE vice president of global alliances and marketing. “Administrators can deliver enterprise-grade Service Level Agreements through their private clouds, and less unplanned downtime means businesses have access to the resources they need, when they need them.”

Al Sadowski, research director for Internet Infrastructure Services at 451 Research, said, “Simplifying deployment is one of the desired values of an OpenStack distribution. There is clear enterprise market appeal for products that address the automation of complex deployment tasks, like configuring a highly available OpenStack control plane.”

SUSE Cloud includes components of SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension, the most complete open source clustering solution. Proven in data centers around the world, SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension helps enterprises protect mission-critical workloads running on x86 servers. With SUSE Cloud, administrators can eliminate service failures due to downtime of the private cloud's control plane and ensure continuous access to the resources the line of business needs to maintain agility. Deployment and configuration is automated through integration in the SUSE Cloud Administration Server, which provides a Crowbar project-based framework for installing and managing the physical cloud infrastructure.

“The implementation of a private cloud is one of our ongoing strategic priorities,” said Matthias Braun, head of department SAP delivery at FIS-ASP, a full-service provider of SAP applications. “After a proof of concept for an implementation of SUSE Cloud to deliver SAP services from the cloud, we are impressed with the capabilities of SUSE Cloud to meet our need for an easy-to-set-up, flexible and secure hosting platform. High availability is one of the key expectations of our customers. The addition of these capabilities to SUSE Cloud only enhances our view of the product.”

Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation, said, “High availability is an important capability for enterprises that are making OpenStack a core component of their IT infrastructures, and the OpenStack ecosystem offers multiple ways to get there. The addition of highly available configurations to SUSE's distribution of OpenStack delivers another strong alternative for production OpenStack deployments supporting mission-critical workloads.”

SUSE Cloud 3 is based on the OpenStack Havana release and includes full support for Orchestration (Heat) and Telemetry (Ceilometer). SUSE Cloud offers full support for mixed hypervisor environments running KVM, Xen, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere through integration with VMware vCenter Server.

Cameron McNaught, executive vice president of Global Solutions at Fujitsu, said, “Fujitsu and SUSE have worked together to develop and support the enterprise implementation of open source solutions for years. SUSE Cloud offers our customers an enterprise OpenStack-based private cloud solution that is easy to implement, continuously available and fits in their current IT environment.”

Kathleen Kovatch, director of marketing for Intel's Open Source Technology Center in the Software and Services Group, said, “Intel and SUSE have a long history of collaborating on open source and driving innovation. This partnership has extended to the private cloud through the integration of key technologies that make running OpenStack easier for the enterprise. The ability to deploy continuously available private clouds will further drive enterprise use of OpenStack in production environments.”