The top executives leading Cisco's OpenStack efforts today said customers can run the open source cloud computing platform with its Unified Computing System (UCS) and Nexus hardware devices, and that the company will provide advanced support to help customers deploy OpenStack clouds.
UCS already has support for running on a variety of cloud platforms, including VMware's vCloud Director and Automation Center, Microsoft Systems Center and Citrix's CloudStack. Now, Cisco has expanded support for a variety of OpenStack distributions from Linux companies to run on UCS as well. Red Hat, Canonical and SUSE versions of the OpenStack code are all now certified to run on top of UCS gear. UCS's combination of compute, networking and storage functions in a unified system provides customers with the underlying infrastructure building blocks to base their OpenStack clouds on, says Lew Tucker, who leads Cisco's OpenStack strategy and serves as vice chair of the project's board of directors.
[MORE OPENSTACK CONVERGENCE:VCE kicking the tires on OpenStack]
In addition to certifying OpenStack on UCS and Nexus gear, Cisco also rolled out advanced support for OpenStack clouds and accelerator Paks, which are pre-configured OpenStack architectures. Members of Cisco's Advanced Services team can now help customers plan a strategy and assessment for OpenStack clouds, and Cisco will add support for design and deployment services and optimization of OpenStack clouds by the end of the year.
The accelerator Paks come in three flavors: A compute intensive version with six UCS c220 M3 Servers, each wither 128GB of memory and two 900GB 10K SAS HDDs; a storage intensive option with eight UCS C240 M3 servers with 258GB of memory and 12 900GB 10K SAS HDDs; and finally a mixed compute and storage option.
Senior Writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing for Network World and NetworkWorld.com. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW. Read his Cloud Chronicles here.
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