Cloud Computing: OpenStack Grizzly Has SDN Teeth

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

The OpenStack Foundation issued its Grizzly release Thursday with 230 new features for running production-level cloud computing, but the most important additions dealt with the new area of software-defined networking. The OpenStack compute component can now support multiple hypervisors, including VMware ESX Server, open source KVM and Xen and Microsoft’s Hyper-V. "With Grizzly, there’s no advantage of one hypervisor over another," said John Engates, CTO of Rackspace, the cloud services supplier that first got the OpenStack project going in collaboration with NASA. OpenStack has been known up until the Grizzly release for primarily supporting KVM, the open source hypervisor that’s found inside the Linux kernel and often favored by open source developers.

The compute orchestration capability has been given the ability to provision bare metal servers as well as virtual servers. But the key area of development is adding virtual networking to the OpenStack arsenal of capabilities. Networking has lagged servers when it comes to being managed as a virtual resource and in most enterprises, is still tied to a set of hardware resources that are hard to modify…

By implementing software defined networking in OpenStack, the project’s leaders are on the one hand charging forward into territory on which established network vendors, such as Cisco and Juniper, have approached carefully. If OpenStack succeeds in making virtualized networks both flexible and manageable, it will have made a major argument for itself as a future architecture inside the enterprise data center as well as among service providers, such as Rackspace and HP…

Read more from the source @ http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/openstack-grizzly-has-sdn-teeth/240152311