Cisco unveiled a new batch of accelerator packs at the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong earlier today, designed to help organizations deploy their OpenStack cloud infrastructures on Cisco’s UCS more easily, giving them all of the benefits of Cisco server and networking technology with virtualisation and storage capabilities from partners like EMC and VMware.

The company says that its UCS Solution Accelerator Paks for OpenStack will be compatible with distributions from leading vendors, including Canonical, Red Hat and SUSE. Meanwhile, in a second announcement, Cisco unveiled new services that’ll make it easier to deploy OpenStack clouds running Cisco’s Nexus and UCS switches.

Easing Deployments

Cisco’s vice president and chief technology officer for cloud computing Lew Tucker said in a blog post that the new accelerator packs were all about ease of deployment:

“As OpenStack evolves, even more infrastructure services and virtualised network functions (NFV) are moving into this infrastructure-as-a-service cloud platform layer. Cisco, along with others in the community, is helping to drive these new networking capabilities such as VPN/Firewall/Load Balancing-as-a-service into the core services of OpenStack, making it easier to develop and deploy large-scale cloud applications.”

Tucker notes that Cisco joined the OpenStack initiative more than two years ago, and pointed to the high level of participation in its continued development, with 910 partners said to have contributed to the latest Havana release.

“While there’s still more work to do, most of us feel OpenStack has reached the level of maturity and deployment success that’s needed for production deployment by organizations of just about any size,” wrote Tucker.

Cisco’s new accelerator packs have been designed to aid in this deplotment, with officals hoping that they’ll help convince enterprises to use its UCS as the foundation for their Canonical, Red Hat and SUSE cloud deployments. Cisco says that its UCS Solution Accelerator Paks will be available in several configurations, suitable for mixed deployments, compute-intensive environments and storage-intensive workloads.

OpenStack Havana

Cisco has also been working to assist Red Hat’s new Havana distribution of OpenStack, developing a plug-in for its Nexus networking equipment, said Tucker. In addition, the two firms have developed a Cisco Validated Design, which details how rapidly Red Hat’s Hava distribution can be deployed on Cisco’s UCS.

Tucker also spoke of the trend towards physical infrastructures supporting cloud deployments becoming more “application-aware,” – something that’s necessary to deliver the improved availability and greater performance necessary to run dozens of cloud applications at once. To facilitate this, Tucker says that Cisco is working closely with OpenStack community members to leverage its Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) fabric for OpenStack, and to create a more policy-driven approach for deploying apps. Cisco says that if it can integrate its ACI controllers into OpenStack, it’ll simplify the whole applications deployment process.

“This will simplify and accelerate application deployment and operations through centralised configuration, testing, monitoring of network connectivity, security and other L4-7 services,” writes Tucker. “Cisco will also collaborate with major OpenStack distro vendors to support higher-level ACI integrations so that OpenStack can intelligently instantiate infrastructure to support application performance, security and availability requirements.”

OpenStack is expected to see massive growth over the next few years, with analysts at 451 Research forecasting revenues to exceed $1 billion by the end of 2015.