[April 10, 2012] OpenStack Releases Essex Software Tweet Apr 10, 2012 (Close-Up Media via COMTEX) -- OpenStack, an open source cloud operating system, released Essex, the fifth version of its community-driven software, with a focus on quality, usability and extensibility across enterprise, service provider and high performance computing deployments. According to a release, OpenStack Essex allows users to leverage pools of on-demand, self-managed compute, storage and networking resources to build efficient, automated private and public cloud infrastructures. "We have observed the Open Source model and Linux change the IT world by growing a community of individuals and companies building successful businesses on top of Open Source projects. These have facilitated the maturing of the technology and the creation of vibrant ecosystems. OpenStack is now going through this cycle -- just much faster with all the experience on how to run successful Open Source projects and the industry coming aboard much more quickly than with Linux," said Phil Zamani, SVP of the Digital Business Unit Cloud Services at Deutsche Telekom. "Essex is a very important milestone, as it marks a point where OpenStack has become complete and mature enough to be a solid foundation for large-scale projects on top of it. This will grow the momentum of OpenStack in the market. We will base the rollout of our Business Marketplace SaaS Cloud program on Essex." Illustrating the power of community-driven software development, the Essex release was written by over 200 developers from 55 different companies. Essex delivers user-requested features for improved automation, integration across projects, as well as central management and provisioning by leveraging OpenStack's pluggable architecture. The Essex development cycle included an earlier feature freeze and a testing phase before release, and Essex will also be included in the next Ubuntu 12.04 long term support release. "OpenStack Essex sets the pace for open source cloud infrastructure, and we're delighted to include it in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. The combination makes a robust platform for utility computing with tremendous momentum among early adopters and large scale deployments," said Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu Founder and VP, Product Strategy, Canonical. "OpenStack and Ubuntu are the key ingredients in multiple new public clouds. To accelerate the deployment of private and public clouds, we have made significant joint investments in deployment, tooling and automated testing in this release, making it easier to deploy, scale and manage clouds with the latest OpenStack on the latest enterprise release of Ubuntu." "The Essex release represents an exciting time for both OpenStack users and for NetApp as it marks a significant step forward in the flexibility of the platform and our first contribution to the community. With NetApp technology integrated into OpenStack Compute, users will be able to build on a storage platform that delivers a unique array of storage efficiency technologies, data replication features, fault tolerance, and high availability to help reduce costs and enable users to get the most out of their private and public cloud architectures. We're thrilled to take part in the OpenStack maturation process and help build a wave of production deployments combining OpenStack and NetApp," said Jeff O'Neal, Senior Director, Solutions Integration Group, NetApp. The spring 2012 OpenStack Design Summit and Conference is taking place April 16 - 20 at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco. "As a Cloud based Infrastructure and Security Platform for service providers globally, ClearPath Networks requires both very high reliability and resiliency. Our developers and system engineers are delighted with the quality and stability that the new Essex release provides and we will run both our next generation orchestration platform and cloud gateways on OpenStack Essex for our global service provider customers," said Peter Lee, VP Software and Infrastructure Engineering, ClearPath Networks. "Cloudscaling has successfully deployed OpenStack in production multiple times. It is the only open source solution that meets our strict requirements on building large-scale production-grade infrastructure clouds. Our confidence in OpenStack has grown as the developer community has grown and large deployment successes continue to launch. The project's rapid innovation track positions it for future success as the de-facto open cloud solution choice of serious enterprises and service providers alike," said Randy Bias, Co-Founder and CTO, Cloudscaling. "OpenStack fosters the creation of cloud standards, removes proprietary lock-in for customers, and creates a large ecosystem. As a result, we've enabled a number of our customers with the Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution. The new features and increased efficiency in OpenStack Essex allow us to meet even more customer needs, leveraging the support and resulting technology of a global open source community," said Mark Linebaugh, VP of Enterprise Solutions, Dell. "We've been working with OpenStack for about 15 months and we're pleased to see how the AUTHORS file keeps growing with every release. The number of people contributing code is a fine indicator of good health, supported by the excellent management of the elected technical leaders and the best development practices that translate into lots of fixed bugs, improvements and new functionalities. We're confident that we made the right decision committing resources to include OpenStack in our business strategy," said Juan Martinez, Lead OpenStack Developer, Memset. "The diversity of contributors, from the smallest start-ups to the largest companies, is what will keep OpenStack at the forefront of innovation in providing the next generation of computing platforms," said Chris Kemp, Co-Founder of OpenStack and CEO of cloud systems company Nebula. "The Essex and Folsom releases of Quantum deliver the full range of networking capabilities to OpenStack, removing the final barrier to cloud, the network. We are privileged to technically lead, heavily contribute, and collaborate with a vibrant and growing OpenStack community on Quantum," said Dan Wendlandt, Director of Product Management, Nicira, and Project Technical Lead, OpenStack Quantum. OpenStack is open source software for building clouds. ((Comments on this story may be sent to [email protected])) [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]