Canonical Positions Ubuntu as OpenStack Platform

Up-and-Coming Open Source Projects for the Enterprise

With a major migration to OpenStack and other cloud management frameworks starting to get under way in earnest, it’s now once again almost anybody’s ball game in terms of who winds up dominating the data center.

This week at the OpenStack Summit 2014 conference, Canonical made a convincing case as to why the Ubuntu distribution of Linux that it created is going to be a serious contender in the data center as organizations move to adopt OpenStack.

Canonical this week introduced The Orange Box, a cluster of 10 Intel NUC Microservers connected to shared storage and a gigabit switch, all housed in the same case. To further facilitate the adoption of OpenStack, Canonical also launched a Your Cloud managed service. For $15 per server per day, Canonical will build, manage and scale an OpenStack cloud service.

In addition to these OpenStack offerings, Canonical announced that it is working with IBM to integrate the Juju collaboration framework developed by Canonical with Heat, the OpenStack-specific orchestration framework, while also collaborating with IBM on an OASIS TOSCA initiative to standardize how to describe processes that create or modify web services.

In the same breath, Canonical says it is now working with CloudBase to integrate Juju with Windows and CentOS services, including Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization software.

Finally, Canonical says it is working with China’s National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) to deploy OpenStack on the Tianhe-2 supercomputer and that it has set OpenStack performance records running on servers from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). Those records include creating 75,000 virtual machines in just 6.5 hours; the running of 100,000 virtual machines on 380 hosts in 11 hours; and the ability to run 168,000 virtual machines on 576 physical hosts.

Mark Baker, server and cloud product manager for Ubuntu, says there are now 19 members of the Ubuntu OpenStack Interoperability Lab (OIL) that are building over 3000 clouds per month to test various implementations of OpenStack components. While OpenStack still has a way to go in terms of its overall maturity for production environments in the enterprise, IT organizations with a lot of internal IT engineering talent are clearly moving to embrace it.

Of course, very few of those organizations are throwing out their investments in technologies from VMware or Microsoft in favor of OpenStack. Baker says one of the factors that will lead an IT organization to choose one distribution of OpenStack versus another is how well it can play with other technologies in the proverbial enterprise IT sandbox, especially when it comes to cloud orchestration software. By that measure, Canonical is clearly committed to leveraging OpenStack to become a major player in the data center.