UPDATED 16:30 EDT / MAY 12 2014

OpenStack Summit 2014 marked by series of ecosystem product milestones

OpenStack Summit 2014 logoThe opening day of this week’s OpenStack Summit in Atlanta has brought with it the usual slew of product updates from around the industry. It was  Red Hat that opened the floodgates with the announcement of two new strategic partnerships underscoring its aggressive focus on operationalizing the open source cloud platform atop Linux.

First, the company revealed that it has teamed up with EMC contender NetApp to build a reference architecture based on the latest Icehouse release of OpenStack that will hook up to  the public cloud for workload interoperability across on- and off-premise environments. The architecture is several steps ahead of the two pilot implementation blueprints Red Hat recently introduced as part of its partnership with Dell and marks a significant milestone in its collaboration with NetApp, which also encompasses the continued development of their jointly-created Manilla file system management service for OpenStack.

The other company Red Hat has joined forces with is eNovance, a European developer of open computing solutions that, like the Linux distributor, splits its strategic focus between the private and  the public cloud.  The two firms will work to bring advanced software-defined networking capabilities to OpenStack in an effort to drive adoption of the platform – and their solutions – among telecommunications providers.

Enterprises constitute one of the core audiences high-performance Internet infrastructure provider Internap is targeting with AgileCLOUD. The newly unveiled infrastructure-as-a-service platform is built on OpenStack and exposes the native API to let users move workloads to and from their private environments with minimal development effort, according to the company.

Facilitating  seamless migration across data centers has been a top priority for several other high-profile contributors as well, including Brocade, which this morning proposed a new service that it says can be used to enable multi-tenancy in geographically distributed deployments. The technology was jointly developed with Huawei and automates the task of maintaining connectivity and policy context for virtual machines as the travel between disparate sites to simplify management for OpenStack cloud providers. Falling into that category is Blue Box, a managed hosting startup that just revealed it had tapped Matthew Schiltz, who headed Tier 3 until its acquisition by CenturyLink last November, as CEO.

The move not seem as significant as some of the other developments to have emerged from the conference so far, but the addition of an industry veteran such as Schiltz comes as a welcome boost not just for the firm but for the OpenStack movement as a whole. His appointment was announced in conjunction with the launch of the firm’s managed private cloud offering.

Blue Box is among  several industry up-and-comers demonstrating new solutions at the summit today. It’s joined by Gazzang, which  is turn rolling out what it pegs as the industry’s first commercially supported data encryption and key management solution for the Swift object storage component of OpenStack. The offering, a repurposed version of its zNcrypt centralized security console, aims to make the platform more viable for storing sensitive workloads requiring an extra layer of protection against hackers.

Mirantis, meanwhile, is launching its own OpenStack dashboard. The web-based visual database, dubbed Stackanlytics, collects and displays  up-to-date information on compatible solutions from the DriverLog project, which tracks supported drivers and plugins.

In a different corner of the database space, Percona announced that its XtraDB Cluster high-availability solution for MySQL has been certified for use in environments running on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. That should give both firms some much-needed uplift: the certification makes XtraDB more accessible for Red Hat customers while providing a valuable addition to the open source stalwart’s technology ecosystem.


A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU