Advanced Computing in the Age of AI | Tuesday, March 19, 2024

OpenStack Gets Bare-Metal, Storage Support 

The OpenStack Summit in Vancouver kicking off this week will showcase a host a growing list of initiatives aimed at extending cloud services capabilities based on the open-source cloud operating system platform.

First out of the box is the Internet infrastructure services provider Internap Corp., which on Monday (May 18) unveiled a new bare-metal service running on the OpenStack platform said to deliver high-end Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) options. The cloud infrastructure vendor also said it would leverage OpenStack interoperability to securely move workloads across private and public clouds.

The goal is to help DevOps teams deploy and manage cloud-native and enterprise applications in hybrid cloud environments, Internap stressed.

Bare-metal cloud infrastructure is touted as giving DevOps teams an on-demand IaaS option for OpenStack, an option that is geared to high-end big data workloads. Internap said its offering also can be combined with Internap’s OpenStack-based public cloud instances to deploy hybrid infrastructure.

The initiatives "are designed to help enterprises and DevOps teams deploy and manage cloud-native and enterprise applications in a hybrid environment," the company said in a statement released at the start of the OpenStack Summit.

Internap also announced the beta release of its bare-metal servers on OpenStack designed to allow provisioning and management of bare-metal instances. Integration with the OpenStack Horizon dashboard would enable servers to be "hybridized" via the company's public cloud instances.

Internap's AgileServers based on OpenStack are available now to customers who register for its beta program.

The company also said its hybrid cloud and server portfolio would support OpenStack Kilo by the end of this year. The OpenStack Foundation released Kilo on April 30, which includes a batch of compute, storage, networking and provisioning features intended to extend the platform to fit workloads with bare metal and application containers.

Kilo's "federated identity" enhancements "broadens hybrid and multi-cloud use case opportunities," Internap said, since they use the same identification data to access OpenStack-based clouds from different providers. The result is workload portability, Internap said.

Among the new features in the recent Kilo release were Cinder Block storage updates. The OpenStack development team said in a blog post last week that it is finalizing volume drivers for the next release of Cinder Block. It is targeting June 19 as the deadline for merging volume drivers into the release. Drivers can be contributed here.

Meanwhile, storage vendors are starting to rollout updated platforms with broader support for OpenStack. For example, San Jose-based Load Dynamix unveiled a performance-testing platform this week that targets OpenStack and software-defined storage.

Along with OpenStack Swift object storage and Cinder Block, Load Dynamix said its performance validation platform supports Ceph, Amazon Web Services Simple Storage System along with storage infrastructure based on Fibre Channel over Ethernet.

The company said its testing suites target distributed and virtualized environments deployed with file, block or object-based cloud storage. The twin goal is to simplify the workload modeling process and expand that capability to OpenStack, Ceph and other software-defined storage technologies.

The latest release of the Load Dynamix appliance will be available for download on the company's support web site beginning on May 30, the company said.

About the author: George Leopold

George Leopold has written about science and technology for more than 30 years, focusing on electronics and aerospace technology. He previously served as executive editor of Electronic Engineering Times. Leopold is the author of "Calculated Risk: The Supersonic Life and Times of Gus Grissom" (Purdue University Press, 2016).

EnterpriseAI