UPDATED 00:01 EDT / MAY 12 2015

NEWS

DreamHost’s NFV spin-off unveils a network orchestration service for OpenStack

Akanda Inc., the startup that spun out of DreamHost last year to monetize the network virtualization technology powering its public cloud, has released the first stable version of the software with the promise of helping organizations decouple operations from the underlying infrastructure. It has a high bar to meet from the outset.

While not packing nearly as much competitive punch as Amazon and the other giants of the infrastructure-as-a-service world, DreamHost boasts an outsized influence in the OpenStack ecosystem, having been one of the first providers to base its platform on the open-source cloud framework. That early investment had previously spawned another spin-off called Inktank Inc. that helped elevate its likewise homegrown storage component for the project, Ceph, to prominence.

The startup went on to be acquired by Red Hat Inc. in a landmark $175 million deal that closed last May, only a few months before Akanda hit the scene. Its namesake technology, which is available under an open-source license, aims to bring the same kind of simplicity that Ceph provides on the storage side to the network.

The platform handles the routing of data among virtual machines and offers higher level services to help organizations manage the flow of those packets, including secure tunneling, a firewall and a load balancer to spread out the work. All of that functionality is packaged into a Linux-based software appliance that is itself deployed as a virtual machine attached to each subnet, which are in turn served by a complementary orchestration component called Rug that provides configuration and health tracking capabilities.

The technology offers a simpler alternative to using the native Neutron networking component of OpenStack for those services, mainly thanks to a centralized architecture that provides administrators with unified control over all the different features not available otherwise. That takes some of the manual work out of the notoriously tough task of implementing the platform at scale, a value proposition that has already earned Akanda a powerful ally in the upstream ecosystem.

Cumulus Networks Inc. revealed a partnership with the startup against the backdrop of its routing software hitting version 1.0 that will see their respective technologies integrated to enable so-called Lightweight Network Virtualization, a model that removes the need to use a controller to handle connections. While it’s a still an emerging player, the outfit’s Linux-based switch platform is resold by both Dell and HP, which together account for a substantial portion of the commodity equipment that organizations are buying to power their next-generation networks.
Image by Yoel via MorgueFile


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