theCUBE Live At OpenStack Atlanta 2014

OpenStack has just pushed out its tenth release, adding new elements that should make it a more viable option for telecommunications companies. Called Juno, it adds support for Network Function Virtualization (NFV), as well as new Big Data capabilities and more granular policy controls for Object Storage.

Now four years old, OpenStack has emerged as the software suite of choice for anyone wanting to build a cloud environment outside of Amazon, Microsoft or Google infrastructure. It’s backed by a massive community of developers who contribute code to the project – the latest release saw the participation of some 1,419 developers from more than 400 companies who made 3,200 bug fixes and added 310 new features. Among the largest names contributing to OpenStack are Cisco Systems Inc., Dell Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. and VMware Inc.

OpenStack’s opportunity

But despite this heavy backing, OpenStack has yet to achieve its goal of widespread enterprise adoption outside of the telcom industry, where nearly every major vendor has thrown its weight behind the platform as a way to reduce reliance on expensive proprietary network management technology. As a result, telcos disproportionately influence OpenStack development.

That’s illustrated by the new Network Function Virtualization feature. NFV is described as “a massive shift in [the ways in which] many networking and telco services are developed and deployed,” and adds the ability to programmatically define and execute services running on networks, like firewalls, intrusion detection, load balancing and WAN acceleration.

With this release much of the focus has been on performance, because reliability is the single most important factor for telcos. “If I’m a telco and want to move a hardware system for voice calls to software, I need to know that this vitalization layer won’t start dropping calls,” said OpenStack’s COO Mark Collier.

To make OpenStack even more enticing, Juno adds a new solution for Big Data. It comes with new data processing capabilities to automate the provisioning and management of Hadoop and Spark clusters for Big Data analytics. Initially it was a straight Apache Hadoop service, but the developers have since added support for Spark, as well as Cloudera Inc.’s and Hortonwork’s Hadoop, and plan to add more later.

Juno also upgrades storage policies with new optiuons to store, access, replicate data across back-end systems and geographic locatoons. In addition, OpenStack public clouds will now be able to offer storage service tiers.

OpenStack Juno is available now, the full release notes are available here.