This article is more than 1 year old

NaaS guys finish ... first: Dell, HP, Mirantis, Tintri in OpenStack brat pack

The Neutron star at Tokyo event

The Tokyo OpenStack summit saw more announcements today as vendors enjoy playing the Open Stack game which, it appears, no one can lose.

Dell, Mirantis and Big Switch Networks have launched an OpenStack Neutron networking reference architecture using a Big Cloud P+V SDN Fabric, Dell Open Networking switches and Mirantis OpenStack. This was tested on an 8-rack, 300 compute-node OpenStack data centre Pod at the Dell Open Networking centre of excellence in Santa Clara, CA. and claimed to be deployed in just two hours.

Neutron is said to provide networking-as-a-service (NaaS) with a modular and plug-in architecture and APIs. Big Switch Networks says its Big Cloud Fabric (BCF) is built as a leaf, spine and virtual switch fabric. The Big Cloud Fabric Controller acts as the centralised facility for provisioning, troubleshooting, visibility and analytics of the physical and virtual network environment.

Hybrid array vendor Tintri stepped up and said it supports OpenStack. It has a Cinder driver that lets users analyse individual Cinder virtual machines and volumes from the Tintri user interface.

Tintri says it has Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform Ecosystem certification and is a corporate sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation.

HP has announced Helion OpenStack 2.0 for OPenStack private clouds. It says this enables customers to create and manage software defined networks (SDN) in a distributed, multi-data centre environment through integration with HP Distributed Cloud Networking (DCN) and Nuage Networks Virtualized Services Platform. Apparently updates to Helion OpenStack include enterprise lifecycle management, security, configuration flexibility and Software Defined Networking.

Helion OpenStack 2.0 is based on OpenStack Kilo. The now-cancelled Helion Public Cloud operated on OpenStack since 2012.

With regard to its OpenStack commitment HP reminds us that it is a grande fromage, with its cheesiness including Liberty work. It claims to be the leading engineering contributor to Liberty in terms of the number of commits, reviews, lines of code, contributing employees, Project Team Leads (PTL) and members of the Technical Committee. It had 210 employees contribute code to Liberty.

We’re informed that HP is a Platinum Founding member of the OpenStack Foundation and a contributor, a key contributor, to many OpenStack projects, including funding, code, reviews, testing and training. It holds an OpenStack board of directors position, eight PTL positions and three Technical Committee membership positions.

RedHat has blogged about its OpenStack work with containers here and here.

Comment

OpenStack appears to be universally admired and supported in our industry. But the level of political correctness around OpenStack is staggering. No supplier has come out and criticised it. In fact, suppliers compete to demonstrate their belief and adherence to OpenStack open source ideals.

In the five years since it was started, more than 500 companies have joined the OpenStack Foundation and are working towards having standard hardware and software products being used to offer cloud computing, by being driven through and used by the open source OpenStack code tree. The neat thing is that suppliers can interface their products to OpenStack through APIs and thus support open source while still selling proprietary gear.

By flooding OpenStack’s admin structures through sponsorship deals at platinum and gold levels, they can enjoy the continuance of this. It all seems very pragmatic and suits everyone concerned. But also, it appears that no one playing the OpenStack game can lose, unless users find an implementation fails for some reason.

There is no opposition for vendors engaged in the game, no one vendor or group of them saying OpenStack is becoming a universal vendor box-tick: Do you support OpenStack? Yes, of course – who doesn’t?

HP Helion OpenStack 2.0 is now available worldwide. Pricing varies by configuration and individual customer requirements. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like