Canonical, AMD, team up with OpenStack-in-a-rack

AMD and Canonical have announced a new hardware partnership that will see the pair prepare an OpenStack-in-a-rack product.

Canonical is clearly quite keen on this stuff, having earlier this year revealed the Orange Box portable cluster. That unit packs ten micro-servers into a portable luggable unit intended to offer a cluster of Ubuntu-powered Hadoop, OpenStack or CloudFoundry goodness.

The new rig is based on AMD's SeaMicro SM15000 server, a product takes uses either AMD's Opteron, Ivy Bridge or Haswell Xeons, packs them into a 10U box with up to 512 cores, 5PB of storage and 160 gigabits of total I/O.

Buyers will also get Ubuntu LTS 14.04 and OpenStack, assembled to provide the following:

• 3 Cloud Controllers
• 57 Nova nodes
• 3 Cinder nodes
• 64 TB Object Storage
• 128 GbE NICs (Max. 512 possible)
• Integrated Layer 2 Switching
• 80 Gbps I/O

On the software side, users will find Ubuntu LTS 14.04, Ubuntu Server, OpenStack, MAAS and Juju ready to roll.

There's also “a graphical user interface to dynamically deploy new services on demand.”

That inclusion means this effort can probably be filed under “hyperconverged infrastructure,” a market in which AMD and Canonical will find stern competition. Nutanix is already there, VMware – plus partners - has just arrived and the likes of Simplivity are making waves. Scale Computing has a couple of years' success to point to, while newbie NIMBOXX last week told The Reg it is struggling to meet demand from US clients and hopes to ramp up to offshore sales real soon now.

Throw in the fact that Gartner recently included hyperconverged kit on its list of things that might give the data centre market a shake and it is clear that there's probably room for more players. And probably some new offerings: we're yet to see a Hyper-V based entrant but Microsoft is seeking a patent for a server design. If Redmond joins in, things will become Hyperinteresting. ®