SUSE OpenStack Cloud 8 to Accelerate Customer Software-Defined Infrastructure Deployments

In addition to accelerating the deployment of software-defined infrastructure, it delivers better interoperability, scalability and flexibility to enable the IT transformation enterprise customers need to conquer today's competitive market and business challenges.

SUSE OpenStack Cloud 8 joins a portfolio of solutions that are developed in collaboration with customers, partners and open source communities to deliver reliable innovation that helps simplify IT transformation and reduce cost.

Gary Chen, IDC Research Manager, Software Defined Compute, said, "Enterprise IT organizations are under significant deployment pressures as new, modern application and cloud models take hold and grow in adoption. With more organizations moving to a software-defined infrastructure such as OpenStack, streamlining operations through simplified maintenance and upgrades will be key to success by reducing complexity while coping with an expanding skills gap."

To help customers overcome the skills gap and jump-start their SUSE OpenStack Cloud deployment, SUSE Select Services are now available. With the fixed-priced, flexible offering that combines consulting, maintenance services and knowledge transfer, customers are able to more quickly realize a return on their private cloud investment.

Enhancements to SUSE OpenStack Cloud 8 include:
Greater flexibility for customers with full support for OpenStack Ironic which provides the ability to quickly and easily provision bare metal servers for end users who want to deploy a workload image to a physical machine instead of a virtual machine instance on a hypervisor.
Expanded interoperability with new support for VMware NSX-V for software-defined networking.
Enhanced scalability to support large deployments.
Support for OpenStack Freezer to give distributed backup/restore DRaaS platform capabilities to customers who want to automate data backup and restore.
Two lifecycle tool options for deploying, maintaining and upgrading customers' OpenStack environments, including the traditional Crowbar tool and the Cloud Lifecycle Management tool based on Ardana.
Extended three-year lifecycle support to accommodate enterprise customers' longer maintenance and rollout timeframes.
A pre-integrated, fully scalable enterprise-grade monitoring solution that simplifies the monitoring and management of SUSE OpenStack Cloud environments and workloads.

Craig Parker, Head of Integrated Systems Business at Fujitsu in EMEIA, said, "Customers looking to extend their on-premises environments by leveraging rapidly evolving, flexible and secure technologies from Fujitsu and SUSE will find that the new functionality in this latest release of SUSE OpenStack Cloud enables them to build the software-defined infrastructure they need to deliver on their business promises, while maintaining the business agility and flexibility that enterprises need."