On April 4th, Openstack 2013.1 was released – better known as “Grizzly”, and is the 7th Openstack release. The best place to get a quick glance (haha – glance is the image service in Openstack) at what I’m talking about is here.
Openstack is maturing as a very interesting stack to integrate and automate all the elements that go into creating a cloud computing model. Obviously, in a material sense, it competes with parts of VMware – most specifically vCloud Director and other elements of the vCloud management stack (vCloud Automation Center). Parts of Openstack also competes in a sense with EMC (Swift vs. Atmos) But hey – innovation, dynamism, and vigorous co-opetition is the nature of the high-tech industry (and something I think is fun and cool :-)
BTW – while if there are only two conferences to hit this year, it would have to be EMC World and VMworld :-) the OpenStack summit is close – April 15th-18th in Oregon (register here)
So – what’s the scoop? Grizzly is a big new release (release notes here). Behind the scenes, I think that a big “story behind the story” is that the community got a lot bigger.
- Over 517 contributors to Grizzly; a 56% increase from Folsom release
- 5 new Networking plugins and 10 total Block Storage Plugins & Drivers drivers..
As an example, VMware worked to enhance the plugin for ESX in Nova (the compute part of Openstack) to make sure people using Openstack on top of ESX would get the most out of it. Nicira was already in the Folsom release, but there are enhancements in the Grizzly release that add things like QoS. You can see how VMware is embracing here (interestingly, there is also a Nova plugin for Hyper-V)
On the EMC side, EMC is contributing also. There is an EMC Cinder driver for our customers choosing to deploy OpenStack on top of VNX and VMAX (thank you!).
It’s notable that it’s iSCSI only (most Openstack deployments don’t use FC for now, FC support is in itself a new thing in Grizzly)
Supported (and EMC does provide level 2 and 3 support) Functions are:
• Create/Delete Block Volume
• Create/Delete Snapshot
• Create Volume from Snapshot
• Create Export, et al
• Create cloned volume
• Get Volume Stats
• Copy volume to/from image
Our friends at Rackspace have posted an article about getting the Cinder plugin and EMC driver working together – click on the below:
It’s interesting to see how this is evolving. I still don’t see a ton of Openstack in mainstream use within enterprises (a ton in SPs and the education vertical), but I see more and more people playing with it even in “classic” enterprises. I stick with my #1 prediction for 2013: “VMware and Openstack will be “frenemies” that “coopete” furiously while Hyper-V watches” (read the link to understand more).
What should you expect next from EMC and Openstack? Well – we’re embracing, and contributing, and aren’t going to stop. Expect to see big things re: object stores and policy abstraction (EMC World is coming up!!!). Expect to see us partner with other members of the Openstack community.
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